Many of us have read so many bleak stories on bats and white nose syndrome over the last five years or so that, first, we’re sick of reading how little researchers are able to do other than count corpses in wintering-over caves and, second, we think that until something new develops there is not much point in reading another one.

After nearly deciding not to subject myself to yet another such tale, I read in Science News’s current issue the cover story by Janet Raloff. It has a headline of standard not-much-to-report-yet-form: Helping Bats Hold On: Scientists seek a savior as a deadly fungal pandemic explosed through vulnerable colonies. But it’s a welcome surprise. No, not because it relates some hopeful new avenue, but because I get for the first time a deep sense of how horrid this ailment is for the bats themselves, and of the scope of the research into whether or how bat populations might recover. It doesn’t break the mold but it’s considerably deeper and more engrossing than most. (Usual declaration of potential bias: I am a regular, contract contributor to Science News).

An unanswered set of questions revolve around whether, in the longer term, there is any reason to think North America is likely to be deprived of some kinds of bats – particularly the hard-hit little brown bat, for a very long time. Is there good chance their niches will go unfilled for, say, centuries? While Raloff touches on the potential rise of resistance due to natural selection, that merits a deeper look. Ditto for replacement of vulnerable species with closely related bats of similar habits. What are chances for natural in-migration by other species, and has any one started thinking about hybridizing the local bats with their apparently resistant European cousins, or even introducing the latter? Or is this perhaps going to be like the decline of amphibians – affecting whole classes of creature with mass extinction a possibility? One suspects there are a few professors out there entertaining such thoughts – even experiments. What do such experts say?

Minor Puzzle – Raloff reports Nova Scotia as the northern frontier for the syndrome. That map to right, at the Fish and Wildlife Service site noted in Grist below and credited to the PA Game Commission, has a site in Quebec that is farther north. (Hi res).

Other White Nose Syndrome News:

• MASSlive.com – Kathryn Roy: Residents can help Mass Wildlife monitor bats ; They also can help, it says here, by not demandingor or even desiring that bats in their belfries be extirminated. They’re hardly pets, but they do make for decent co-lodgers that stay quiet and mind their own business.
• CapeCodder – Rich Eldred: Decline of bagts worries scientists; Another on the appeal to the public in Massachusetts to report bat colonies – not to eliminate them but to map their distribution and populations. Eldred has little new to report on white nose, and that’s not his fault. But he does let readers know that bat echolocation studies have roots on the cape.
• York Daily Record (PA) – Stephanie Reighart: Bat populations declining as ‘white noses’ fungus spreads ;
• Hants Journal (Nova Scotia) Ashley Thompson: Researchers batty over Central Rawdon ; At Sci News Raloff notes that Nova Scotia’s outbreak is the northernmost one yet seen. Seems odd that Thompson’s sources didn’t tell her, or that for some other reason, she didn’t report the province’s unwelcome distinction.

Grist for the Mill; US Fish and Wildlife Service White Nose Syndrome resources page.

- Charlie Petit

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