Chimpanzees in a protected forest in Uganda are being forced to eat disease-carrying bat guano due to over-farming, which experts fear could trigger the next pandemic.
Scientists observed chimpanzees, monkeys and antelopes consuming guano over a two-year period – the first time this has been observed in the wild.
Deforestation caused by tobacco farming has eliminated one of the animals’ normal food sources – the raffia palm.
Experts suspect they are now turning to bat guano because it is rich in calcium, magnesium, iron and other essential nutrients they used to get from palm trees.
But bats are notorious for carrying diseases.A team of researchers from the US, UK and Uganda analyzed guano and found that it contained27 different viruses, including a previously unknown coronavirus.
The photos, taken with a motion-sensitive trail camera, capture the following: A) A pile of guano at the entrance to a tree cavity where a bat roosts; B) A chimpanzee eating guano; C) A black and white colobus monkey eating guano; D) A Redbuck, an antelope, eats bird droppings.
It is not uncommon for chimpanzees to supplement their diet with clay, as shown here. But the amount of viruses contained in the clay was nowhere near the amount contained in bat feces.
Researchers now worry that all animals may carry bat-borne diseases, which may have contributed to devastating outbreaks such as Ebola and SARS-CoV-2 that jumped from mammals to humans.
In a news study published in the journal Communications Biology, scientists show that chimpanzees in Uganda’s Budongo Forest Reserve regularly eat bat guano.
From 2017 to 2019, the great apes ate guano at least 92 times on 71 different days, cementing the first report of wild primates eating bat guano.
Black and white colobus monkeys also ate guano 65 times, while red antelopes licked it 682 times.
When the research team first saw chimpanzees eating bat guano, they were shocked and worried.
“Other than the nausea factor, we all have the exact same idea,” lead researcher Tony Goldberg, a veterinary epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Science .
“They must have been exposed to terrible bat-borne viruses.”
Scientists say this could be a big problem.
This fear is based on the real history of infectious diseases such as Ebola, SARS-CoV-2, and anthrax, all of which are thought to have originated in bats.
Scientists suspect the diseases may have infected chimpanzees or monkeys and then infected humans who came into contact with their corpses.
Until then, it was unclear how bats could infect any intervening animals and spread the disease to humans.
But new observations of chimpanzees eating bat guano draw a straight line between the two animals.
Pascal Gagneux, an evolutionary biologist who was not involved in the study, said that by documenting this habit, the team showed the world a “completely underestimated way” that new viruses can spread from bats to other animals, and possibly even spread to humans.
“These authors are documenting an extremely horrific ‘ecological earthquake,'” he said.
Guano is not a chimpanzee’s first choice of delicacies.
Instead, they are driven by human activity in and around their home.
Tobacco cultivation in Uganda is a disaster for the chimpanzees’ daily diet of raffia palm trees.
This feathery palm was once a major source of essential minerals for many animals: calcium, iron, potassium, magnesium, manganese, sodium and phosphorus.
Apes obtain these nutrients by eating the insides of decaying raffia palm trunks. They also use clay and termite mounds to do this.
But local tobacco farmers used raffia palm leaves to bind their crops, and by 2012 the tree had all but disappeared from the Budongo forest.
Clay is rich in essential micronutrients that chimpanzees need to survive, and scientists have long known that animals in Uganda eat clay.
Bat guano has long been used as fertilizer due to its high nutrient content. But chimpanzees now also use it to supplement their diets.
Soon after, researchers like Goldberg and his colleagues began seeing chimpanzees experimenting with bat guano, which they found accumulated at the entrances of hollow trees where the bats roosted.
In the 60 years that scientists have documented apes’ behavior, no one has reported them doing this.
Goldberg and his team tested guano samples and found that it was rich in the same essential nutrients as clay and raffia palm.
“Concentrations of potassium, magnesium, sodium, and phosphorus in guano are equal to or exceed those from other dietary sources,” the team wrote in the study.
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