why white nose came when it did?

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why white nose came when it did?

Postby hewhocaves » Oct 10, 2011 8:09 am

Hi all,

For the longest time I've been working on why WNS showed up in 2005-06 when people have been moving between Europe and the USA since the eleventh century. The working hypothesis I've come up with (which you may have heard before) goes like this:

WNS was transported through overnight shipping which proliferated in the 1990s. Bats, trapped in containers and transported via air could only escape once they reached regional destinations such as Albany, NY. Transport via fast shipping is possible (as little as 7 days), but less likely.

This is all very good, but a small doubt remained... why did it take fifteen years for WNS to catch on?

It turns out the period may be much less. In the years immediately following 9/11 virtually all pest inspection was halted at the border. Basically, if it wasn't a bomb, it wasn't acted on or reported. As a result, it took only four years for WNS to take hold - a time line more consistent with the spread of invasive species.


http://m.yahoo.com/w/news_america/ap-im ... lang=en-us
Last edited by hewhocaves on Oct 10, 2011 3:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: why white nose came when it did?

Postby BrianC » Oct 10, 2011 8:36 am

I thought that it was well understood that only bats spread WNS? So that fact is what it is! Many can understand this, and most don't want to because it doesn't help the strategy lurking behind the scenes creating a healthy pot of gold for ecological bank accounts! Believe me, I am an avid naturalist that spends as much time out in nature as possible, but I don't profit from it. Others only profit from it!
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Re: why white nose came when it did?

Postby John Lovaas » Oct 10, 2011 9:09 am

John- Thanks for the weblink; I sent it out far and wide this AM.

It sure would be interesting to document the changes in inspection protocols at the Albany NY Seaport. I've alway thought interviewing port workers there would be interesting as well- "have you ever come across a bat?"
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Re: why white nose came when it did?

Postby hewhocaves » Oct 10, 2011 2:56 pm

@ Brian - I'm completely confused by how your post relates to the OP. Can you explain?

@ John - the evidence is circumstantial, of course - and likely will remain so. As you read through the article, it becomes apparent that monitoring decreased rapidly over the succeeding months and years after 9/11 as DoA monitors were forced out or resigned. *shrug* I actually don't blame Homeland Security for this one. We were all scared shitless back then - especially in the northeast. So maybe they were less likely to look and report than other parts of the country (or maybe this is the most convenient port of call for wherever the first bats came from).

I don't think you'd be able to backtrack to find the initial point (though looking through logs from 2004-05 would be a good place to start). Its almost ten years now and I doubt records were kept of that, regardless. But if someone had the time it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to check.
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Re: why white nose came when it did?

Postby DeanWiseman » Oct 10, 2011 3:30 pm

I think it has been under-appreciated as to just how much overnight and express cargo shipping has grown in the past 10-15 years. Ever more so with conventional shipping and cargo.


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Re: why white nose came when it did?

Postby John Lovaas » Oct 10, 2011 3:50 pm

hewhocaves wrote:@ John - the evidence is circumstantial, of course - and likely will remain so. As you read through the article, it becomes apparent that monitoring decreased rapidly over the succeeding months and years after 9/11 as DoA monitors were forced out or resigned. *shrug* I actually don't blame Homeland Security for this one. We were all scared shitless back then - especially in the northeast. So maybe they were less likely to look and report than other parts of the country (or maybe this is the most convenient port of call for wherever the first bats came from).

I don't think you'd be able to backtrack to find the initial point (though looking through logs from 2004-05 would be a good place to start). Its almost ten years now and I doubt records were kept of that, regardless. But if someone had the time it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to check.


I agree with you on all counts.

Post 9/11 records would likely show nothing- literally, since it appears they weren't doing any inspections. After I wrote the post, I wondered if/how inspection is actually documented under the best of times- as in "we found a bat today". I don't how many agencies do the inspection work, either.
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Re: why white nose came when it did?

Postby DeanWiseman » Oct 11, 2011 2:39 am

hewhocaves wrote:So maybe they were less likely to look and report than other parts of the country (or maybe this is the most convenient port of call for wherever the first bats came from).


Some other pieces of data I would like to hear more about... and these sort of tie into the epidemiology of the initial outbreak: Firstly, I haven't seen any information in the literature, personally, regarding the life cycle (in terms of time) of G. destructans. How long does it take to go through it's complete reproductive cycle? My impression is, the longer the time of the cycle, the wider the dispersion can be prior to the disease appearing in bats. And it also means the further the original vector could have traveled from the point of entry. So say it was more than a few months. Imagine how far and wide a bat travels in such a time, much less years or more if the bat is an asymptomatic carrier.

Secondly, how long does it take for an infected bat to establish contamination at a new site? Days, weeks, months? Or does just a single, transient visit suffice? So... in other words, what is the 'virulence'?

These, at least for me, remain important unaddressed questions.

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Re: why white nose came when it did?

Postby PYoungbaer » Oct 11, 2011 9:54 am

Dean,

We don't know a lot about the life cycle of the fungus, or even whether the fungus is sexual or asexual.We also don't know the virulence or Multiplicity Of Infection (MOI), that is, how much of the fungus it takes for infection to take hold. To my knowledge, no current research is underway to answer either of these questions.
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Re: why white nose came when it did?

Postby hewhocaves » Oct 11, 2011 10:08 am

Ya beat me to it Peter!

(truthfully, i was going to defer to you on that one anyway - I don't keep that close of tabs on the topic to categorically state what the current research was up to. Thanks for jumping in!)

Dean,

Yes, adding that information would either break or strengthen my hypothesis. As I said before, all I've done is describe a possible mechanism for its introduction to N. America. To this point, i haven't seen anything that would definitively dismiss it. I would love to get that information to see how well it fits into the larger picture.
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Re: why white nose came when it did?

Postby BrianC » Oct 11, 2011 12:43 pm

PYoungbaer wrote: To my knowledge, no current research is underway to answer either of these questions.


Can you now see where I have been coming from? Do you also see what I said about looking for a reason to keep caves open? Why do you think that the few questions that really can clear up all this WNS BS have been pushed to the side? C'mon now, I know that some of you are not on the take?

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