COMPARING SEASONALITY OF BATS' FEEDING BEHAVIOR TO SEASONALITY OF NIPAH VIRUS TRANSMISSION TO HUMANS IN BANGLADESH
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Intro: A few communities collect date palm sap throughout the year to ferment and consume. This study's objective was to characterize Pteropus bats’ sap feeding behavior around the year to identify the potential for sap contamination with bat excreta. Methods: We used infrared cameras to observe bats' feeding behavior for 28 tree-nights per month for 22 months from March 2013 to December 2014. We placed the cameras at 4 sap-producing date palm trees focused on the sap- producing surface and collection pot from 5:00 PM to 6:00 AM for seven consecutive nights. We extracted the number and duration of bat visits and duration of contact with date palm sap from the images. Findings: We recorded a total of 26,870 bat visits (5% Pteropus, 90% non- Pteropus and 5% unidentified) from 616 observation tree-nights. Median duration of each visit was higher for Pteropus bats than non-Pteropus bats (8 versus 0.03 minutes, P< 0.001). Median duration of contact with date palm sap was higher for Pteropus bats (0.67 versus 0.03 minutes, P<0.001) for each visit. The average number of Pteropus bat visits per night was the highest during spring (17) followed by winter (14), post-monsoon (6), and monsoon (3). Conclusion: Even when date palm sap is harvested year-round, Pteropus bats visit the date palm trees more frequently during the spring and winter, perhaps due to lack of other available food. Feeding behavior could be one reason why the risk of Nipah infection to people has been concentrated in the winter season, even when fermented sap is consumed year-round. Sap harvesters should regularly use skirts to prevent bats from contaminating the date palm sap to prevent Nipah virus and other bat associated zoonoses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".