Ryan McNeil from Over at Reuters. He's been thinking about bats for three years. Specifically,

he's been thinking about bats and pandemics. Back in 2020, like everyone else, Ryan was

following news coverage about the origins of COVID-19. Speculation that bats were the source

of the virus. She is very confident, about 90 percent confident, and her colleagues are

as well, that this came from bats. That there was a transmission from bats to humans that

took place at eight. But when Ryan heard all this, he thought the explanations he was getting,

they generated more questions than answers. There was news coverage about the role of bats and the role

of habitat disruption, you know, at the time. But from my perspective, it was, it always sort of lacked

specificity about, well, where exactly is it happening? And who is responsible for it happening?

Ryan couldn't let these questions go. So he started learning everything he could about viruses and about bats too.

You know, one of the things that's amazing about bats is, you know, they have this enormous diversity.

There's a ton of different bats species. Bats make up something like a quarter of all of the

mammalian species on Earth. Whoa! Really? Yes, yes. All these different bats species, Ryan learned.

They were like flying petri dishes for disease. Viruses could incubate inside them and wait for

a chance to hop to humans. And over the last two decades, us humans, we've been moving closer

and closer to what Ryan calls the batlands. He knows this because he's been mapping out these regions,

mapping places that might end up as the cradle of the next pandemic.

These high-risk areas that we identified, 1.8 billion people live in those areas. It's about one

and five, depending on who's counting of every man, woman, and child on Earth.

You know, it's not the bats that are at home. It is us encroaching where they are and where they've

been since, you know, forever. I feel like you've become a bat nerd. You don't really have a choice

when you spend this long on something. Did what you found over the last three years reassure you

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