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)
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