AVA Conference Perth 2019

Typically, flying foxes are nomadic nectar feeders and pollinators of native forests. Natural cyclical transitions from El Niño to La Niña periods impact Eucalypt phenology, causing intermittent acute food shortages for flying foxes and temporary fissioning of flying fox roosts. More recently, these ‘fission’ roosts are persisting outside of acute food shortages, manifesting as an exponential increase in flying fox roosts in urban areas. Immediately pre-dating these recent changes in flying fox ecology, the mid-1990’s saw a peak in destruction of their key habitats and the emergence of four novel zoonotic viruses from flying foxes. One of these, Hendra virus, stands out as an excellent model system for understanding bat virus transmission and spillover globally. Hendra virus spillover to horses tends to be associated with seasonal ‘pulses’ of viral excretion within bat populations, but the interactions between proposed broad-scale and roost-level drivers of Hendra virus transmission are complex and have not been fully elucidated. Our results indicate that landscape-scale processes driving flying fox roost fissioning are linked to processes driving Hendra virus excretion and spillover to horses. By gaining insights into the interactions between environmental change, bat ecology, viral dynamics and spillover, we hope to identify the root causes of viral spillover from wildlife hosts and develop of new ecological interventions to prevent bat virus spillover in Australia and globally.