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"Specifically, the researchers found that clusters of #Hendra virus spillovers occur following years in which the bats experience food stress. And these food shortages typically follow years with a strong El Niño, a climatic phenomenon in the tropical Pacific Ocean that is often associated with drought along eastern Australia. But if the trees the bats rely on for food during the winter have a large flowering event the year after there’s been a food shortage, there are no spillovers. Unfortunately, the problem is “there’s hardly any winter habitat left,” says Raina Plowright, a disease ecologist and study co-author at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York."
