Hidden behind a waterfall in Mount Elgon National Park, the Kitum Cave is one of five named \u201celephant caves,\u201d so-called because they are visited by pachyderms who \u201cmine\u201d the rock for its sodium-rich salts.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, entire families visit, scraping the walls with their tusks and then eating the bits they dislodge. If this sounds like a scene from the Jungle Book<\/a>, think again, because elephants<\/a> aren\u2019t the only animals in the Kitum Cave.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n There are bats. Tens of thousands cling to the walls and ceiling of the cave, which stretches more than 200 metres into the mountain. Their droppings fall to the floor, creating a thick layer of pungent, ammonia-rich guano. That\u2019s not the only danger, however.<\/p>\n In the 1980s, two visitors to the cave died after catching a virus carried by the cave\u2019s Egyptian fruit bats. The virus doesn\u2019t hurt the bats, but it causes internal bleeding when it infects people. This is known as Marburg virus disease, and it has a fatality rate of up to\u00a088<\/a>%. <\/p>\n There are currently no vaccines or antiviral treatments, so the cave is best left its elephant explorers, who are immune.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hidden behind a waterfall in Mount Elgon National Park, the Kitum Cave is one of five named \u201celephant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":478010,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":{"0":"post-478009","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-unitedkingdom","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478009\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/478010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}