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:
An unusual species of frog, Paedophryne amauensis, was discovered in Papua New Guinea during biodiversity surveys. In the video below, Chris Austin gives an interesting account of how the diminutive frog was discovered. More via National Geographic:
At an average of 7.7 millimeters long, the newfound Paedophryne amauensis is a hair smaller than the previous record holder, the Southeast Asian fish species Paedocypris progenetica, whose females measure about 7.9 millimeters.
During recent field surveys in southern Papua New Guinea, scientists found P. amauensis and another new species of tiny frog, Paedophryne swiftorum, which measures about 8.6 millimeters.
“I think it’s amazing that they’re continuing to find smaller and smaller frogs,” said Robin Moore, an amphibian expert with Conservation International, who was not involved in the study.
A black-marble jawfish (Stalix histrio) camouflages itself against a mimic octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus). According to LiveScience, the behavior of these jawfishes is unique:
“All jawfish are really specialized for living in burrows,” said researcher Luiz Rocha, an ichthyologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. “They’re almost never found outside their burrows.”
If it is difficult to find the fish in the image above, then perhaps it is easier to find in this video:
See more animal camouflage here on The Conservation Report.
Image via B. Randrianambinina
A new species of mouse lemur — Microcebus gerpi or the Gerp’s mouse lemur — has been described from Madagascar. Researchers discovered the new species during biodiversity surveys in the Sahafina Forest. The discovery highlights the importance of surveying unprotected and unexplored forests. Also, the discovery underscores the need to conserve Madagascar’s remaining forests, which are threatened by slash-and-burn agriculture (or tavy in Malagasy) and illegal logging. More via Science Daily:
A Malagasy-German research team has discovered a new primate species in the Sahafina Forest in eastern Madagascar, a forest that has not been studied before.
. . .
The Sahafina Forest is only 50km away from the Mantadia National Park in eastern Madagascar, which contains a different and much smaller species, the Goodman’s mouse lemur,” commented Prof. Radespiel. In contrast, the Gerp’s mouse lemur belongs to the group of larger mouse lemurs, i.e. has a body mass of about 68g, and is therefore almost “a giant” compared to the Goodman’s mouse lemur (ca. 44g body mass).
The distribution of the Gerp’s mouse lemur is probably restricted to the remaining fragments of lowland evergreen rain forest of this region in eastern Madagascar. Continuing deforestation poses a serious threat for these animals. The researchers from Hanover/Germany, and Madagascar published their discovery together in the journal Primates.
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