Day 95: New call to arms against white-nose syndrome in bats
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Little brown bats in NY hibernation cave. Most of the bats exhibit fungal growth on their muzzles. Credit: Nancy Heaslip, NY DEC
Even though I’ll blog after the end of “100 Days of Science,” I’m sweating this last push of my daily effort, wanting to make sure I tackle some of the most pressing science stories I haven’t blogged about yet. A case in point: White-nose syndrome in bats.
The disease got a slow start in 2006, but has cropped up in the news several times in the past year. Last fall, a paper in the journal Science first traced the previously mysterious ailment to a fungus.
Then, in February, wildlife officials went public with their shock after encountering gruesome disease-killed colonies in abandoned Pennsylvania mines.
In March, Justin Boyles, a graduate student in biology at Indiana State University, and his colleagues, published a paper in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment proposing the use of heated bat boxes to create roosts where the fungus can’t live.
By now the disease has killed well over 100,000 bats, wiping out up to 90 percent of bats in infected caves.
Last week, the Interior Department allocated nearly $1 million for a multi-state effort to stem the spread of the disease, as part of $9 million that went to 12 state wildlife agencies to help imperiled fish and wildlife.
But today, the Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson, Arizona-based conservation group, decried inadequate funding and slow action on the issue, and beseeched the public and the government to do more.
Pennsylvania Game Commission Biologist Greg Turner checks dead bats outside an abandoned coal mine. Credit: Kevin Wenner/PGC
White-nose syndrome was first detected in 2006 in New York state. Since then, populations of cave-hibernating bats have been drastically declining in Connecticut, Maine, New York, Pennsylvania and Vermont. Affected species include little brown bats, northern bats, tricolored bats, Indiana bats, small-footed myotis and big brown bats.
The fungus –- a white, powdery-looking organism –- is commonly found on the muzzles, ears and wings of afflicted dead and dying bats, though researchers have not yet determined that it is the only factor causing bats to die. Most of the bats are also emaciated, and some of them leave their winter caves in mid-hibernation, to seek food that they won’t find in winter.
U.S. Geological Survey microbiologist David Blehert, who was lead author on the Science paper, isolated the fungus in April 2008 and identified it as a member of the group Geomyces. Other members of the group live in soil, water and air and can grow and reproduce at refrigerator-level temperatures.
Researchers don’t know yet if white-nose syndrome emerged because this newly identified fungus was introduced into caves — presumably by human or animal visitors — or whether the fungus already existed in caves and began infecting bats after they were weakened from some other cause.
Before white-nose syndrome, mass mortality in bats as a result of disease was rare.
Fungus-caused damage to an infected bat wing. Credit: Kim Miller, USGS
The Science authors noted that worldwide, bats play critical ecological roles in insect control, plant pollination and seed dissemination, and the decline of North American bat populations would likely have far-reaching ecological consequences. They also pointed out parallels between the threat posed by white-nose syndrome and chytridiomycosis, a lethal fungal skin infection that has recently caused precipitous global amphibian declines.
In their call to action today, the Center for Biological Diversity warns of heightened spread of the disease if drastic measures aren’t taken to contain it.
“It’s likely that this fatal, fast-spreading sickness will soon be killing bats in the Midwest and the South, home to some of the most significant bat hibernation sites in the world,” the group said in a statement. “Left unchecked, white-nose syndrome could spread even further to populations in the western United States and to bats in other countries.”
For more information:
USGS National Wildlife Health Center
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Bat Conservation International
Center for Biological Diversity
