For this morning’s story about white-nose syndrome in bats, as usual, I had far more information than would fit into the limited space.

In case anyone wonders how journalists work, I wrote the story just as I thought it should be, then checked the length and found out it was about twice as long as this kind of newspaper story “should” be. So I spent hours going over the story line by line, deleting paragraphs, nipping and tucking a word here, a line there, rewriting ten lines so the same thought would fit into five lines. Ugh.

But Internet space isn’t as constrained as the physical newspaper. So here are some of the things for people who are interested beyond the story that appeared this morning, plus links for even more information:

A pesticide connection?

As far as the pesticide and declining ecosystem argument, science journalist Sonia Shah wrote compellingly about it in the online journal, Yale 360.

“Today, drips and puffs of pesticides surround us everywhere, contaminating 90 percent of the nation’s major rivers and streams, more than 80 percent of sampled fish, and one-third of the nation’s aquifers. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, fish and birds that unsuspectingly expose themselves to this chemical soup die by the millions every year,” Shah writes.

“In the past dozen years, no fewer than three never-before-seen diseases have decimated populations of amphibians, bees, and — most recently — bats. A growing body of evidence indicates that pesticide exposure may be playing an important role in the decline of the first two species, and scientists are investigating whether such exposures may be involved in the deaths of more than 1 million bats in the northeastern United States over the past several years.”

The full story is here.

I talked to several researchers about the idea of pesticides potentially playing a role. Some said the evidence is pretty slim, as far as being able to draw a direct correlation, even harder to establish cause and effect.

But Doug Inkley, senior scientist with the National Wildlife Federation, says its possible these species — the frogs, bees and bats — have simply passed a tipping point. He compared it to “someone in poor health who gets the flu. The death report will say he died of flu. But what was really the cause?”

“The solution is to keep the ecosystems as healthy as possible so species are able to withstand stresses,” he said.

Amazing bats

As DeeAnn Reeder was processing the bats in the cave, she paused to tell me how wonderful bats are, as creatures of the ecosystem. I mourned the loss of this section of the story, so here it is:

She talked about how body fat is central to a bat’s survival. But their food supply of insects exists for only part of the year. They are unique in how they parse their energy-depleting activities.

In the fall, they arrive at their hibernating sites fattened from a summer of bug-eating. They swarm and mate, but the females don’t get pregnant right away. Instead, they store the sperm in their reproductive tracts. Come spring, they emerge from the cave and within 24 to 48 hours, ovulate and become pregnant. They then migrate to what’s called their maternity site — researchers think each bat has fidelity to both its winter cave and its summer maternity site — and give birth in June.

What’s problematic for little brown bats is that each female only has one pup a year. Even though the bats can live 20-30 years, that’s not a high replenishment rate for the population. “This mortality rate is going to take hundreds of years for the bats to recover from, if at all,” Turner said. “To get even with where we are now.”
 

More on the possible human spread

Finally, I should make a note about human spread of white-nose fungus. Often, after I write a story about research being done on wildlife in decline, I get comments from readers wondering about the ill effects of the research itself. It’s always a trade-off.

In this case, the researchers knew their movements and voice might rouse the bats. More than that, humans have been implicated in the spread of the disease by — knowingly or unknowingly — going into one cave where the fungus exists, and then using the same equipment in another cave where it may not exist.

The researchers at the Mifflin County cave disinfect all their gear and clothing after each visit to a cave.

The clothing is the link to the ray of hope researchers feel after discovering the fungus in a cave in France. They think it’s possible that the fungus was inadvertently brought to this country — possibly on the gear of traveling cavers. And here, the bats have no immunity to it. The fungus is an invasive species just like the kudzu weed and emerald ash borers and Asian carp. But if it’s the case that bats in Europe developed an immunity, perhaps bats here can, too.
 

Links for more information:

The Pennsylvania Game Commission's white-nose syndrome site

New Jersey DEP's WNS site

US Fish and Wildlife WNS site

The US Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center page on WNS

A Nature Conservancy article

Bat Conservation International

The National Speleological Society (Don't miss the topper with the guy wading through water underground. Yikes.)