Abstract
The common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) is a hematophagous species responsible for paralytic rabies and bite damage that affects livestock, humans and wildlife from Mexico to Argentina. Current measures to control vampires, based upon coumarin-derived poisons, are not used extensively due in part to the high cost of application, risks for bats that share roosts with vampires and residual environmental contamination. Observations that vampire bat bites may induce resistance in livestock against vampire bat salivary anticoagulants encourage research into novel vaccine-based alternatives particularly focused upon increasing livestock resistance to vampire salivary components. We evaluated the action of vampire bat saliva-Freund’s incomplete adjuvant administered to sheep with anticoagulant responses induced by repeated vampire bites in a control group and examined characteristics of vampire bat salivary secretion. We observed that injections induced a response against vampire bat salivary anticoagulants stronger than by repeated vampire bat bites. Based upon these preliminary findings, we hypothesize the utility of developing a control technique based on induction of an immunologically mediated resistance against vampire bat anticoagulants and rabies virus via dual delivery of appropriate host and pathogen antigens. Fundamental characteristics of host biology favor alternative strategies than simple culling by poisons for practical, economical, and ecologically relevant management of vampire populations within a One Health context.
Highlights
Accepted: 12 March 2021The common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) is a strict hematophagous species that ranges from northern Mexico to Uruguay and to central Chile and Argentina [1,2].Today, vampires abound, feeding mainly on the blood of livestock, poultry, wildlife and humans [3,4,5,6]
CT: clotting time; VSA: vampire salivary anticoagulants; mix 1: a sample of sheep blood mixed with vampire saliva in a 29:1 ratio, used to observe its CT when evaluating the resistance of sheep against VSA; mix 2: a sheep serum sample mixed with vampire saliva, and blood from the reference sheep in a 6:1:20 ratio, used to observe its CT when evaluating the neutralizing capacity of sera before and after sheep were injected with vampire saliva-Freund’s incomplete adjuvant
We observed a significant decrease in the CT average of mix 1 from 37.7 to 21 min (t = 8.1, p = 0.000006) in group A sheep, after the injections of bat saliva–incomplete Freund’s adjuvant, and from 38.6 to 28.3 min (t = 5.3, p = 0.00004) in group B sheep, after exposure to vampire bat bites (Table 2), indicating that both saliva injections and vampire bat bites induce immunologically mediated resistance against VSA
Summary
Accepted: 12 March 2021The common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) is a strict hematophagous species that ranges from northern Mexico to Uruguay and to central Chile and Argentina [1,2].Today, vampires abound, feeding mainly on the blood of livestock, poultry, wildlife and humans [3,4,5,6]. Vampire bat hematophagy is unique among mammals. This adaptation is inherent to anatomical and physiological characteristics of the bat’s digestive system. Vampire bats have specialized canine and incisor teeth that allow removal of a piece of skin from prey in a single bite (Figure 1), exposing the subcutaneous tissue (sometimes deep within the muscle) from which they lick the flowing blood of the host [1,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. Vampire bat salivary glands secrete saliva containing anticoagulants and fibrinolytic enzymes that prevent blood clotting, both during ingestion as well as inside the gastrointestinal tract during the processes of digestion and elimination of excess water [13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21]
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