Lil’ Drac, the orphaned short-tailed fruit bat, is growing up quickly! He now eats solid foods and knows how to fly. You can follow Lil’ Drac’s progress here, or you can adopt a bat from the Bat World Sanctuary.
Image: Little brown bat with white-nose syndrome
A fungus is threatening to wipe out certain species of North American bats. According to Mylea Bayless of Bat Conservation International, “‘We’re watching a potential extinction event on the order of what we experienced with bison and passenger pigeons for this group of mammals.‘” The problem is severe, because “U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists and
[their] partners estimate that at least 5.7 million to 6.7 million bats have now died from white-nose syndrome.” Apparently, the fungus kills the bats by aggravating colonies, which should be hibernating, during the winter months, and the aggravation causes these colonies to burn up too much energy. Bats can’t normally feed during the cold winter months, so they perish after burning up all their energy stores.
Bats provide an important ecosystem service by consuming insects “that feed on agricultural crops and forests. For example, “a reproductive female consumes her weight in bugs each night[, and] in a single summer, a colony of 150 brown bats can eat enough adult cucumber beetles to prevent the laying of eggs that result in 33 million rootworm larvae … .” The fungus, which causes the disease, Geomyces destructans, “originated in Europe, where some bats acquired immunity, and was somehow transmitted to bats in North America which lack any immunity to the disease[, so] … some officials … argue that humans may also transmit WNS from infected sites to clean sites, probably on clothing and equipment.” More via Scientific American:
[E]xperiments show that bats are quite effective at spreading the destructive fungal disease to their neighbors. “Bats are very good agents of transmission of the disease,” Chaturvedi says. And that—plus the European analysis—may suggest that G. destructans is an invasive species, according to Blehert, which possibly traveled to the U.S. on a European who visited a public cavern in New York State. WNS was first observed in a wild cave connected to that commercial cave complex near Albany, N.Y. Chaturvedi’s work has shown that G. destructans in North America is genetically similar wherever it is found.
Video: Economic effects of White Nose Syndrome
Video: Declining Bat Population (from September 7, 2009)
On the Net:
Here’s an adorable video of an orphaned short-tailed fruit bat, affectionately named Lil’ Drac, that’s being hand-raised at the Bat World Sanctuary:
Why was Lil’ Drac abandoned by his mother?
Lil’ Drac is an orphaned short tailed fruit bat (Carollia perspicillata). His mother was yet another casualty from zoo closures which are occurring across the US. Sheis a young mother who was stressed from the conditions in which she was kept, combined with the additional trauma of being captured and transferred to a new and unfamiliar environment. Consequently, she abandoned Lil’ Drac after he was born. He was found on the padded floor of the indoor flight enclosure at Bat World Sanctuary, curled up in a little ball.
You can keep up with Lil’ Drac’s progress here, and you can sponsor a bat in need here.
Hat tip to Kevin.
These images, via the Daily Mail and photographer Michael Raimondo, illustrate the extremes that conservationists must take in order to save wildlife from extinction. According to the Daily Mail, these “images show exactly how conservationists used a military helicopter to carry the herd of 1,400-kilo rhinos to their new home, away from poachers.”
According to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, several species of rhinoceros continue to hurdle towards extinction as poaching and habitat degradation, loss, and fragmentation continue to expand. The group also warns that “a quarter of all mammal species assessed are at risk of extinction.” The story of extinction is a story of human expansion. In order to stop extinction, governments must seriously implement policies that address overconsumption, alleviate imprudent development, and consider conservation. Without prudent conservation policies that work, more remarkable species will continue to go extinct. More via the AFP:
All told, a quarter of all mammal species assessed are at risk of extinction, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which compiles the list, said on Thursday.
About a third of the 61,900 species now catalogued by the IUCN are classified as “vulnerable,” “endangered,” “critically endangered,” or extinct, with some groups, such as amphibians and reptiles, in particularly rapid decline.
Rhinoceros have been hit especially hard in recent years. Their fearsome horns — prized for dagger handles in the Middle East and traditional medicine in east Asia — can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars on the black market.
The new assessment shows that a subspecies of the western black rhino (Diceros bicornis longipes) native to western Africa is now extinct, joining a long list of creatures — from the Tasmanian tiger to the Arabian gazelle — that no longer stride the planet.
Central Africa’s northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is listed as “possibly extinct in the wild”, while the Javan rhino (Rhinoceros sondaicus) is making a last stand after the remaining specimen of its Vietnamese counterpart was killed by poachers last year.
“Human beings are stewards of the earth and we are responsible for protecting the species that share our environment,” Simon Stuart, head of the IUCN Species Survival Commission, said in a statement.
“In the case of both the western black and the northern white rhinos the situation could have had very different results if suggested conservation measures had been implemented.”
There were a few slivers of good news showing that species can be prevented from slipping into oblivion.
The southern white rhino subspecies (Ceratotherium simum simum) is back from the brink, its numbers up from 100 at the end of the 19th century to some 20,000 today.
Certainly, zoological parks will continue to play an important role in preventing species from vanishing from the Earth forever. Via McClatchy:
The eastern black rhinoceros is a critically endangered species, but the Kansas City Zoo just keeps churning them out.
Or, rather, it is Luyisa who has been doing the work, having just produced her third healthy calf in 10 years.
“Everybody was very thrilled about it,” said General Curator Liz Harmon, referring to the reaction of the zoo world and conservation experts to this birth, which occurred Oct. 18. “When it was born — and it was a girl — everybody was ecstatic.”
First, any birth in a species that only has a few hundred left in the wild is a good thing. Second, there are more males than females in the captive population, so girls are celebrated. Third, the father in this case had never sired a calf before, so his genes are not overrepresented.
And fourth, Luyisa, the mom, was born in the wild, so her genes are a welcome infusion into the captive gene pool.
The latest addition in Kansas City has been named Layla. The zoo has not made a splash about her because she won’t be on public display until the African section of the animal park reopens April 1, but The Kansas City Star got a sneak peak on Friday.
The Kansas City Zoo went to Africa to acquire Luyisa in 1997 in a trip chronicled by The Star. At the same time, the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo brought back a female of its own. She produced her fourth calf in August this year.
As a bonus, all seven offspring of those two animals have been female.
“It was good trip,” Harmon said of that 1997 expedition. “It helped the population a lot.”
The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.
— From William Beebe’s The Bird (1906)
Image: Walton Ford’s Falling Bough, which depicts the now-extinct passenger pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, (click the image to enlarge it)
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