science.org SCIENCEA half-dozen men, who also donned rub-
ber boots and mining headlamps, left the
lab and went down an adjacent road to the
water pipe, home to a few hundred R. acu-
minatus. The group scuttled down a lad-
der to the pipe’s opening. Butterfly nets in
hand, they hunched into the tunnel, where
the stench of bat feces, urine, and wet fur
parked in the nose. A mesh placed over the
pipe’s opening caught any bats trying to
leave the roost.
Emerging from the pipe, the men un-
tangled the mouse-size bats from their nets,
a delicate process given the tangle of spiny
wings in the mesh and the animals’ ice pick
teeth. Each bat went into its own cloth bag.
Supaporn did not take part in the proce-
dure. “I’m not good at it,” she says, noting
that she has been bitten several times.
The next day, the team trapped another
50 Rhinolophus from the water pipe. The
group also captured 50 bats of another
species, Hipposideros, from beneath a bo-
tanical museum at the wildlife sanctuary,
so they could be tested to see whether any
coronaviruses had jumped from the Rhino-
lophus roosting nearby. After each trapping,
Supaporn’s team took the animals back to
the field station for measurements and tissue
samples, aiming to free the bats as quickly as
possible to minimize trauma and harm.
“They’re one of the more efficient teams
I’ve worked with,” says Kevin Olival, an
ecologist at EcoHealth. “In many other
countries, it would take 5, 6, 7 days to get
that many bats.”
The field station resembled a produc-
tion line. At the first cluster of tables, team
members weighed each bat, measured
head and ear size with a caliper, shone
a light through the wing to estimate age
from bone joint size, measured wingspan,
and tweezed off parasites, saving them in
tiny tubes for a separate study. Station
two swabbed the anus and mouth, hole
punched tissue from a wing, aspirated
blood from a capillary, and then brushed
red nail polish on toes so no released bat
would be sampled twice.
The swabs were later tested for viral ge-
netic material and the wing tissue for DNA
confirmation of the species. Supaporn and
her collaborators in other countries will
test the blood for antibodies against a wide
range of paramyxoviruses, influenza vi-
ruses, filoviruses, and coronaviruses.
Supaporn worked at a third station, cen-
trifuging bat blood to separate the plasma.She took an occasional breather to pluck a
cloth bag from the end of the production
line, smiling broadly each time she nudged
out a bat with red nail polish and watched
it fly off toward home.
Data from the January trapping, to
Supaporn’s surprise, indicated coronaviruses
unrelated to the SARS family in the Hippo-
sideros but none in the Rhinolophus. Anti-
body analyses are still underway, and she
suspects many Rhinolophus will test positive
for past infections with SARS-related viruses.
Another foray, a March 2021 expedition
to a cave west of Bangkok, yielded two new
SARS-CoV-2–related coronaviruses in a
species of Rhinolophus called R. pusillus.
Supaporn analyzed them with Linfa Wang,
a specialist in emerging infectious diseases0 200 400 600 8001000120014001600
Predicted number of viruses with pandemic potential CREDITS: (PHOTO LAUREN DECICCA; (GRAPHIC K. FRANKLIN/SCIENCE; (DATA ECOHEALTH ALLIANCE; AFTER OLIVALET AL., NATURE2017Hot zones
Researchers proposing a Global Virome Project have mapped regions where unknown viruses in wild mammals
are most likely to spark human pandemics. Their predictions draw on data on known viruses, traits that
predispose viruses to infecting humans, and human populations. Although Southeast Asia has been a hot
spot of outbreaks driven by bat viruses, the Amazon region’s pandemic potential may be much higher.238 15 APRIL 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6590