Blood-thirsty vampire bats will soon begin migrating into other countries, bringing rabies to a ton of livestock

From alien attacks to zombie epidemics, the United States is somehow always the bumbling centre for all sorts of fictional catastrophes to naturally gravitate towards. But in a weird twist of Hollywood-like fate, a new nuisance has actually begun slowly but surely inching towards the land of the free: blood-thirsty vampires! Or vampire bats, rather.

Of the over 1,000 odd species of bats you find worldwide, only three have evolved to exclusively gobble on blood for sustenance. Contrary to what you might have thought, these bats were named after the vampires, and not the other way around.

While their bloody diet and connections with the fictional undead might have gained them widespread notoriety in the West, there is another reason people of the Americas fear these animals: they're quite an ardent carrier of rabies.

All three species of the vampire bat subfamily are currently found in the caves, trees and buildings of Mexico, Central and South America. Estimates have shown that quite many of these flying rodents are infected with rabies, which they eventually pass onto livestock as they feed on the unsuspecting animal's blood. US-based studies have shown that these infections annually cause a massive $47 million in losses to Mexican livestock producers.

While vampire bats prefer warmer, more tropical climates typically found near the equator, rising temperatures are causing them to creep northwards. Quite worryingly for the US, officials spotted the species within just 56 kilometres of the US-Mexico border. And now, new research has predicted that it will only take 27 years for these aliens to properly evade border patrol and immigrate over.

Climate change is making everything get hotter, while diminishing the temperature difference between our coldest and warmest seasons. This is why winters barely feel like winters anymore, and why bats are more comfortable in expanding their habitats, since conditions are so much more stable throughout the year.

To snip the problem at the root, the research team plans to travel to Colombia — a mega-diverse tropical haven for bats — where they will investigate how the common vampire bats (Desmondus rotundus) are responding to habitat and biodiversity changes, as well as how ongoing mutations to the rabies virus could enable it to spill over to humans in the future.

Bat-borne pathogens are a massive threat to global health. Alongside rabies, bats are also recognised transmitters of Nipah virus encephalitis and the SARS virus. But the severity of rabies cannot be understated either. Human infection with the deadly disease almost always results in death, claiming 50,000 lives every year despite vaccination efforts. Many of these cases occur among at-risk populations.

The new trove of data will hopefully identify the drivers of rabies spread in Latin America, which could be weaponised by policy-makers to manage the deadly disease better.

The findings of this research have been published in Ecography and can be accessed here.