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On April 2, 2015, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced that it would be listing the northern long-eared bat as threatened, rather than endangered, as it had originally proposed in October of 2013. The listing gives the bat new protections but does not impose all of the requirements that would have been applicable had the bat been listed as endangered. A “threatened” species is likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future, whereas an “endangered” species is currently in danger of extinction. On the very same day, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief before the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Civ. No. 1:15-cv-00477 requesting tha the court, (1) declare that the Service’s failure to engage in a public process and prepare either an environmental assessment or environmental impact statement analyzing the potential environmental impacts of, and alternatives to, the interim 4(d) rule, prior to adopting it, violated NEPA and is unlawful; (2) vacate the interim 4(d) rule and remand it to the Service; (3) award Plaintiff fees and costs; and (4) grant such other relief as the Court deems just and proper.
Many of the articles also include generic statements about how many insects an individual bat eats, and that bats eat insects that damage garden, farm, and forest crops, but it's hard to see how much impact 18 individuals, or even 1706, spread over multiple states, have on bugs and crops.Numbers dropped from 911 to only 18 individuals counted among 36 hibernacula sites repeatedly surveyed from 2007-2012 (NYSDEC 2012)
PYoungbaer wrote:To wit, in a research paper published in "Bat Research News, Summer 2011, Vol. 52 No. 2, studying the evolution and spread of WNS through 42 hibernacula in NY, VT, PA, WV and VA, the total number of Northern Long-Eared bats pre-WNS was documented as 1,706, and five years later, the total number was 31, or a 98% decline. That's obviously awful, but the numbers are very small, arguing for a targeted approach. For context, the most populous bat species, the Little Brown bat, totaled 348,277 pre-WNS vs. 30,260, a 91% loss, but the remaining bats still totaled more than all other hibernating bat species combined (only hibernating bats are affected by WNS). The numbers of total losses due to WNS, often stated as at least 5.5 million or up to 7 million bats, are estimates, based on projections of range and estimated numbers of hibernacula and scientific literature over time, not any actual counts. What we do know from actual documentation is that, for the Northern Long-eared bat, it's a very small number pre and post WNS.
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