Here, the authors use a very nice dataset to investigate dynamics and mechanisms of sex-biased infections of an important pathogen. They showed convincingly that female-biased infection was present with important consequences across bat species studied. I found this manuscript very enjoyable to read and a robust & thoughtful study. The authors did a very nice job in the introduction and discussion framing the key elements of the study in the context of the field. I appreciate the transparency of the code and supplemental material as well. I detail some minor comments below but feel they are all addressable with very minor revisions and that this study is well-suited to Proceedings B.

Minor comments:

Lines 171-173 – It was clear to me here why site was not included in this model given it was by default in (I think!) all other models?

Lines 202-204 – From a recheck of the methods I didn’t see the testing of early hibernation temperatures or body mass described in the model information. It is a small point as the figures in the Supp give more detail but it just made the model testing process slightly unclear to me. Similarly, would suggest explicitly mentioning the ‘base’ model tested in the methods against which other models were compared, because when delta AIC was first mentioned (line191) I was unsure what this was an improvement over, and models within in the code seemed to be the best-supported ones.