Diverse hosts, diverse immune systems: evolutionary variation in bat immunology

The ability of multiple bat species to host zoonotic pathogens without often showing disease has fostered growing interest in bat immunology, indicating ways immune systems may differ between bats and other vertebrates. However, interspecific variation in immunological diversity among bats has only begun to be recognized. The order Chiroptera accounts for over 20% of all mammal species and shows extreme diversity in a suite of correlated ecological traits, such that bats should not be expected to be immunologically homogenous. Here, we review the ecological and evolutionary diversity of chiropteran hosts and highlight case studies emphasizing the range of immune strategies thus far observed across bat species, including responses to SARS-CoV-2. Next, we synthesize and propose hypotheses to explain this immunological diversity, focused on pathogen exposure, biogeography, host energetics, and environmental stability. We then analyze immunology-related citations per species across bats to ..., , # Diverse hosts, diverse immune systems: evolutionary variation in bat immunology

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.ksn02v7gj](10.5061/dryad.ksn02v7gj)

## Description of the data and file structure

The data CSV contains species-level data across bats from the COMBINE, PanTHERIA, and VIRION databases, standardized to the mammalian taxonomy of Upham et al. 2019. The R script contains code for downloading VIRION data, matching to the bat taxonomy above, and aggregating bat–virus interactions to viral family richness. The R script also aggregates total and immunology-related citation counts per bat species.

### Files and variables

#### File: Becker\_et\_al\_2025\_ANYAS\_R\_script.R

**Description:** 

#### File: Becker\_et\_al\_2025\_ANYAS\_data.csv

**Description:** Blank cells are coded as NA

##### Variables

* tip: bat species name
* clade: bat clade label from Upham et al. 2019
* fam: bat family from Upham et al. 2019
* gen: bat genus  from Upham et al. 2019
* vfams: number of viral fam...,