date bait

A baiting practice first employed by virologists in the late 1950s, in which they used the fruit of date palm tree to attract and capture fruit bats for testing. Virologists had long suspected that fruit bats could be the carriers of certain types of viruses that were being spread in North Africa. Capturing the fruit bats initially proved difficult, until a local Egyptian herder suggested using dates laid on fine netting spread on the ground. Date baiting traps continued to prove to be an effective method of capturing fruit bats. Recent study of captured fruit bats revealed that they were indeed a carrier of the ebola virus.