wyandottecaver wrote:".....Writing in Conservation Biology, they add that a cull would not work because the source of the fungal pathogen is believed to occur in the environment...."
Be nice to know where they got that. Per John Lovaas the original researcher who did the lab studies on environmental transmission says the results were contaminated and that NO ONE can yet get GD to grow in soil.
I was thinking about that quote in the article- and they would be correct, if, by 'environment', they are talking about the surfaces where the bats roost. The WI-NY/VT bat transfers, and research from Fort Drum, suggest that the fungus(I'll say spores) persist on the surfaces where the bats roosted. There would likely be less competition with, degradation by, other viruses/bacteria/fungi/mites than what the cave soil environment would offer.
Would a mite eat a spore? I don't know. It would be a tiny morsel, even for a mite.
You are right about the environmental transmission- researchers are currently batting 0 for 2 in infecting bats via aerosol means. The work to inoculate cave soils with spores in the lab- and to get mycelial growth- is just starting.
I'm starting to think about just how few places in the 'environment' there are for bats to come in contact with Gd mycelia or spores. One fact David Blehert mentioned at the December WI NRB meeting was that Gd spores survive for 60-90 days at 80F. Which would be a cold summer in TAG ;-) I'm waiting for the audio transcript of the meeting to find out where that info came from.
But that got me thinking about how well the spores(or mycelial fragments) can survive as a bat goes into 'summer mode'- but I do not know how much time cave bats spend in caves in the summer. Enough for a bat to carry spores into another hibernaculum, I suppose. How many of those spores would survive on the bat through the summer- especially in a bat house?
As to culling. When would you do it? The minute you detect a bat carrying Gd? with WNS? The next hibernation season after it is detected?
I can live with the idea of ensuring that infected bats do not exit an infected hibernaculum during the winter (possibly travelling to an adjacent uninfected hibernaculum). I still can't live with the idea of culling an entire colony.
My emotional, unscientific corollary would be the explanation I was given by a WIDNR attorney as their defense for excluding bats from a cave- you would have a cave that is WNS-free. He would be technically correct. It would also be a bat-free cave.
If you cull an infected colony, you would have a cave that is free of infected bats- but there will still be a cave that is capable of infecting bats.