Department of Pathobiological Sciences, School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
Biol Lett. 2022 Sep;18(9):20220298. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2022.0298. Epub 2022 Sep 7.
Rabies virus (RABV) transmitted by the common vampire bat () poses a threat to agricultural development and public health throughout the Neotropics. The ecology and evolution of rabies host-pathogen dynamics are influenced by two infection-induced behavioural changes. RABV-infected hosts often exhibit increased aggression which facilitates transmission, and rabies also leads to reduced activity and paralysis prior to death. Although several studies document rabies-induced behavioural changes in rodents and other dead-end hosts, surprisingly few studies have measured these changes in vampire bats, the key natural reservoir throughout Latin America. Taking advantage of an experiment designed to test an oral rabies vaccine in captive male vampire bats, we quantify for the first time, to our knowledge, how rabies affects allogrooming and aggressive behaviours in this species. Compared to non-rabid vampire bats, rabid individuals reduced their allogrooming prior to death, but we did not detect increases in aggression among bats. To put our results in context, we review what is known and what remains unclear about behavioural changes of rabid vampire bats (resumen en español, electronic supplementary material, S1).
通过普通吸血蝙蝠传播的狂犬病病毒 (RABV) 对整个新热带地区的农业发展和公共卫生构成威胁。狂犬病宿主-病原体动态的生态学和进化受到两种感染诱导的行为变化的影响。感染狂犬病的宿主通常表现出更高的攻击性，从而促进了传播，而狂犬病还会导致宿主在死亡前活动减少和瘫痪。尽管有几项研究记录了啮齿动物和其他死胡同宿主的狂犬病诱导的行为变化，但令人惊讶的是，很少有研究测量过这种变化在吸血蝙蝠中的情况，吸血蝙蝠是拉丁美洲整个地区的关键自然宿主。利用一项旨在测试狂犬病口服疫苗在圈养雄性吸血蝙蝠中的效果的实验，我们首次量化了狂犬病如何影响该物种的同种梳理和攻击行为。与非狂犬病吸血蝙蝠相比，患病个体在死亡前减少了同种梳理行为，但我们没有发现蝙蝠攻击行为的增加。为了使我们的结果具有背景意义，我们回顾了关于狂犬病吸血蝙蝠行为变化的已知和未知内容（西班牙语摘要，电子补充材料，S1）。
