BAT CRISIS: THE WHITE-NOSE SYNDROME
BAT CRISIS: THE WHITE-NOSE SYNDROME
Every night in the summer, bats provide an essential service: they
eat bugs by the millions. A single bat can eat thousands of insects
in one night. While most people seldom see bats and sometimes fear
them, bats are truly the “birds of the night” and play a role as
essential to healthy ecosystems as the insect-eating songbirds we
see during the day.
But in the Northeast United States, something terrible is happening
to them.
In the winter of 2007, scientists in New York documented a
mysterious ailment in bats hibernating in caves and abandoned mines
near Albany. The obvious physical manifestation of the illness was
a fuzzy white ring around the dying bats’ noses. Biologists thus
dubbed the unknown affliction “white-nose syndrome.”
The white fuzz is a type of mold, called fusarium, that normally
affects plants, not animals. Anyone who grows tomatoes knows about
fusarium mold, but scientists aren’t sure that the mold is the
primary cause of death. The bats appear to be starving. Before they
die, the animals behave oddly, in ways not seen before.
Bats have been seen in Vermont and western Massachusetts — in the
dead of winter and in broad daylight — outside of the protective
warmth of the caves. The bats appear to be looking for food and
have been observed trying to drink the snow. Mortality rates where
white-nose syndrome has been documented can range as high as 90
percent.
What was a localized observation by scientists in upstate New York
in 2007 is now recognized as an unprecedented threat to bats,
occurring in caves and abandoned mines in three states: New York,
Vermont, and Massachusetts. Bat species known to be affected by
white-nose syndrome, thus far, are little brown bats, northern
long-eared bats, eastern pipistrelles, small-footed bats, and
federally listed endangered Indiana bats.
It is not known whether the syndrome is an infectious disease, the
result of a toxin in the environment, or due to some other cause.
What seems clear is that hundreds of thousands of bats in the
Northeast are dead or soon will be, and without action, certain
populations — and perhaps even certain bat species — may be
extirpated from the region for many decades or forever.
OUR CAMPAIGN
The Center wrote a letter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on
January 29, 2008, when news of white-nose syndrome was first
getting out to the public. The letter asked the agency to close all
caves and abandoned mines to recreational use where the four
federally listed endangered bat species in the eastern United
States are found. If white-nose syndrome is a contagion
transmittable from one cave to another by people, on clothing and
equipment — a theory still being considered by scientists — then
spread of this affliction could be devastating to bats already
endangered.
For example, the global population of the endangered Virginia
big-eared bat is less than 10,000. This species cannot afford to
lose one individual. White-nose syndrome could spell the end for
the Virginia big-eared bat if it were to hit one or more of the
species’ hibernating caves in West Virginia.
According to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s records, 10 percent of
the total population of Indiana bats winter in New York caves. In
the most recent recovery plan for this bat, the Service emphasizes
the past decade’s population increase in the northern region of the
Indiana bat’s range, including New York, Vermont, and Pennsylvania.
It’s now quite possible that nearly the entire population of
Indiana bats in these states is gone. The bats are in a more
precarious position than ever before.
In February of 2008, the Center petitioned the Fish and Wildlife
Service, the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the
Secretary of the Army, the Corps of Engineers, the Tennessee Valley
Authority, and the Federal Highway Administration to re-evaluate
federal projects where any endangered bat in the East might be
harmed in light of the threat of white-nose syndrome. These federal
agencies oversee highways, dams, and logging in bat habitat. In
April, as bats continued to die with no new protections on the
horizon, we filed a notice of intent to sue the agencies.
We're working to ensure that the federal agencies who manage the
habitat where these endangered bats live proceed with caution in
light of this threat we know so little about. We're also making
sure we inform Congress that the Fish and Wildlife Service needs a
sufficient amount of funding to study the causes of this
syndrome.
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Press releases
Photo courtesy of New York Department of Environmental
Conservation
