rkailas
Indian Flying Fox
From a large colony in Chennai's Theosophical Society - an oasis of green in our rapidly concretising city - on their daily forays at dusk, in search of fruiting trees in the city's gardens. Bats perform essential ecosystem services - seed dispersal, plant pollination and insect control among them. However they are much vilified, a sentiment magnified during the current pandemic, as a source of viruses that spread from wildlife to humans. As always, dig below the surface though and human induced stress on bat colonies (through deforestation for example), make bat colonies more susceptible to these pathogens than otherwise. The solution, hence, is not to eliminate colonies of this diverse group of animals, but to modify our own behaviour to live in harmony with nature that provides us so much for free, that we often ignore the significance of these services until we have to pay for them out of our own pockets and sometimes even with (not just quality of) our lives.
Indian Flying Fox
From a large colony in Chennai's Theosophical Society - an oasis of green in our rapidly concretising city - on their daily forays at dusk, in search of fruiting trees in the city's gardens. Bats perform essential ecosystem services - seed dispersal, plant pollination and insect control among them. However they are much vilified, a sentiment magnified during the current pandemic, as a source of viruses that spread from wildlife to humans. As always, dig below the surface though and human induced stress on bat colonies (through deforestation for example), make bat colonies more susceptible to these pathogens than otherwise. The solution, hence, is not to eliminate colonies of this diverse group of animals, but to modify our own behaviour to live in harmony with nature that provides us so much for free, that we often ignore the significance of these services until we have to pay for them out of our own pockets and sometimes even with (not just quality of) our lives.