It is also unclear whether the fungus is killing the bats or is a contributing factor in their deaths. Most of the victims were also rail-thin and some were found outside of their caves, indicating they may have starved to death after an apparently futile attempt to find food (insects, primarily) in the winter.
"Fungi are opportunistic pathogens," Blehert says, "they don't usually attack and kill otherwise healthy animals."
One thing is certain, Blehert says, "Before the identification of white-nose syndrome, mass mortality events in bats as a result of disease were very rare."
Blehert and his colleagues are now attempting to determine whether the dead bats went into hibernation emaciated or filled with enough food to sustain them throughout the winter. "If they're entering with less than a full tank of gas," he notes, "we have to consider whether the insect populations that they feed on are down." Bats are meant to remain in a torpid state throughout the hibernation period, rousing only every two weeks or so to groom or drink water.
Another possibility, he says, is that the fungus killed them indirectly by causing so much skin irritation it prevented them from getting enough sleep. The longer they are awake during hibernation, the more fat they burn, which gives them less time to sustain their bodies without refueling.
Thomas Kunz, a biology professor and director Boston University's Center for Ecology and Conservation Biology, is also studying the mysterious bat deaths. "The mortality is unprecedented in my experience," he says, "and I've been working with bats for 40 years."
Blehert's work is groundbreaking, Kunz says, in that it has provided researchers with an understanding of the fungus, although the syndrome is most likely a secondary effect of some other underlying cause for the deaths. "This is serious in the sense that we're dealing with an unknown," he says, but he does not believe that the fungus itself is the pathogen.
Kunz and his team are approaching the mystery from three different angles: The first is to study the body weights of hibernating bats in different geographic areas by collecting samples of the creatures from three caves in the affected areas and from three caves in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where white-nose syndrome does not appear to have struck. Similar to Blehert's approach, this will inform Kunz and his team of whether the bats in the areas hit by the syndrome are beginning hibernation with the right amount of stored fat. If not, this might signal that pesticides are diminishing local insect populations, possibly choking off a primary food source for the bats.
The second angle is to determine whether the animals are storing the right type of fat (unsaturated fatty acids obtained by eating insects) for their dormancy, Kunz says. A lack of unsaturated fatty acids could again lead the scientists back to suspect declining local insect populations from insecticide use. A third area to investigate is whether the bats' immune systems are being suppressed for some reason, making them more susceptible to fungal infection. "There's no smoking gun at this point," Kunz says, but he and his colleagues are collecting bat samples at this time and hope to have some results by December.
In addition to the role bats play in vampire lore, these creatures of the night are indispensable to insect control, plant pollination and seed dissemination. White-nose syndrome's impact on the bat community is difficult to determine, Blehert says, because of the difficulty of keeping accurate population counts. (They tend to spend a good portion of their lives tucked away in caves inaccessible to people.)
Researchers have been able to count as many as 500,000 hibernating bats throughout the states were white-nose syndrome has been found, but Blehert says there are probably more than that. He likens the demise of the bats to the disappearance of amphibians worldwide over the past three decades that was ultimately traced to a lethal fungal skin infection—chytridiomycosis—which has wiped out entire populations
One possible bright spot is that some of the lesions on dead bats that Blehert and his colleagues examined had begun to heal before the bats died, which indicates that the bats are capable of fighting the infection to some extent. The researchers plan to spend this winter studying the effect of this fungus on healthy bats in the lab. Blehert says he will be surprised if the fungus alone was the sole culprit behind the plummeting bat population. "I'm not sure a fungus," he says, "can kill an otherwise healthy animal."
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5 Comments
Add CommentOH MY! The bats are high! Please help teach bats to just say no!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHope the researchers will be able to find out the real causes behind the mass mortality in bats. All creatures matter to the environment.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI beleive that the white noise syndrome for the bat epidemic is a misnomer. Researchers should look at the correlational effects of cellular phone use and how it may dampen the sonar capabilites of bats to find food. If their "radar" is interrupted by some sort of man-made device, then it would be credible that they would become weakend enough to be succeptible to the fungi.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFeel free to explain to us how radio can interfere with sound waves.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thismgaribay6785, it isn't "noise" it is "nose" for the color of the fungus on the nose. If cell phones had anything to do with this the problem would not be confined to a tiny area but would be wide spread like the sonar use/whale beaching issue.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSpeaking of sonar, it isn't radio waves that bats use, it is sound waves so "radar" is an incorrect term and should be replaced with "sonar".