LA Times on WNS

[PYoungbaer]

LA Times' Pulitzer Prize Winner Louis Sahagun does a good job with this story. BLM says it needs cavers to help monitor caves on vast expanses of land:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-bat-plague-20110403,0,1619878.story

[Teresa]

As good a job in the plus direction as the Photographer's Journal story based on the same trip is a crappy one.
Still not very pro-caver, though. We're sort of ignored.

Teresa

[nathanroser]

I looked through the comments and someone proposed the rather ridiculous idea of killing all bats in infected caves and then spraying fungicides everywhere. Definitely would not work to prevent the spread since there are so many caves out there, plus whatever government or private agency that would do such an extermination would have too few people, and no cavers would actually be willing to carry out a crazy plan like that.

[LukeM]

I looked through the comments and someone proposed the rather ridiculous idea of killing all bats in infected caves and then spraying fungicides everywhere. Definitely would not work to prevent the spread since there are so many caves out there, plus whatever government or private agency that would do such an extermination would have too few people, and no cavers would actually be willing to carry out a crazy plan like that.

The idea of culling the bat population (but not necessarily using fungicides) did have some proponents early on in the WNS epidemic. Obviously it's too late now to even consider the idea.

[nathanroser]

I would say the best bet for treating or curing the disease is searching for some sort of virus that preys on G. destructans. A similar method has been used to try and treat chestnut trees with the blight, but it requires injecting the virus into every infected knob and does not protect the whole tree. If a virus that attacks the fungus can be found or created, it should be tested to make sure it is not harmful to the bats, and if it works then it could be introduced to both infected and non-infected populations at the then current frontier of the disease so as the fungus spreads, the virus would as well.

[wyandottecaver]

depends on where you are Luke. For IN yea it's too late. For OK? maybe not, but I agree the odds of success have gone way way down.

As far as finding a "good" virus or fungus,that approach has been used widely in the natural resources field and is now widely discouraged. It has had some great success and many many great failures. Too many cases of unintended effects.

[self-deleted_user]

Yeah...introducing yet something else to the mix is not often a good idea. It's nature, been around for a couple of years and all, it'll sort itself out. I hear nature is good at taking care of itself given time :)

And at least the NM person stated basically "uh, weren't not massive closing, we need caver's help!" so that was a nice thing that at least someone recognizes that cavers are an asset not a detriment.