Boston Globe: Bats still dying, feds trying to organize a protection strategy
Several recent spurts of news on the disappearing bats of the eastern US have managed to get past The Tracker. However today I happened to note a roundup in the Boston Globe by Beth Daly, which includes a deft summary of the situation and moves the ball forward a bit on strategies to help the bats recover. As has been the case for years, the prime suspect is a fungal infection that gives afflicted animals a tell-tale white nose.
- Charlie Petit
September 28th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
This is actually a really important story, as the collapse of bat populations across the east (it’s already happened in the middle Atlantic) may be immenent, some species (like the Indiana bat) may go extinct, and the ecological/economic consequences are likely to be large, since bats are one of the main preditory controls for night-flying insects (esp. moths) whose populations may boom and cause damage. The researchers looking into this have been painfully slow to come to the conclusion that Occam’s razor should have pointed them at to begin with — the bat deaths are caused by a new, invasive fungus (a geomyces – funguses that are known for cold settings) that attacks them when they are cold and hibernating, making them wake and starve. There is strong evidence that this is a European fungus (bats in Europe have something very similar but don’t die from it, hinting that they have had time to develop resistance), with the obvious inference that humans have introduced it. The parallels with the chytrid fungus that is wiping out frogs are eerie. Researchers are looking at caver’s boots as a way the fungus moves around, but a more logical source might be something agricultural. A wild guess –artisan cheesemaking? (since cave microflora are involved)