adleedy wrote:FIRST OF ALL RON, . . .
Well, I must not have understood you before, but since you basically re-iterated THE SAME THING IN ALL CAPS, now I have a much better understanding!
Regardless of your continuing and quite un-moderator-like breach of basic netiquette, this is really an important topic that you're certainly not alone in being frustrated about. In the interests of moving beyond this issue, I'll try to address each of what I think are your two points. If I mis-state your position, please correct me, though I would appreciate being addressed in a calm, rational, and "sentence-case" tone.
adleedy point #1 - The number of dead bats actually reported is far fewer than the "thousands" of dead bats being claimed as killed.
Response: You're absolutely right, but this misses the point that scientists are inferring the larger number using a combination of clues. With one important exception, the data that I've seen to date have reported finding carcasses in the hundreds, not thousands. The notable exception is Hailes Cave, where
"Bat carcasses and parts of carcasses were estimated to number in the thousands" (Hicks and others, 2007a).
At the risk of putting myself in the brain of a bat biologist, here's a likely chain of reasoning by which they arrive at the higher number.
- Hundreds
(Hicks and others, 2007b) to thousands (e.g.Hailes,
Hicks and others, 2007a) of dead bat carcasses found in cave hibernacula.
- Evidence of previously unreported scavenging of bat carcasses from affected caves.
"An abundance of raccoon droppings filled with bat bones, and the presence of mink droppings, indicate that substantial numbers of bats were consumed within Hailes Cave. There has never been evidence of predation in the 30 years we have been surveying the site, nor anything this year that would make live animals more vulnerable to predators. We believe that they were scavenged." (Hicks and others, 2007b)- The affected hibernacula exhibited dramatic reductions of bats wintering year over year. The reduced populations in just two NY caves totaled 9,700
(Hicks and others, 2007b).
- Bats often die outside of caves, so the number found in the caves very likely represents a small fraction of the total deaths.
"Although these mortalities do not involve particularly large numbers of bats, they do represent significant portions of the wintering populations. This is especially true given that many bats leave the hibernacula before dying, or the carcasses are scavenged." (Hicks and others, 2007b)- Dramatic increases in the numbers of dead bats being reported outside of caves supports the hypothesis that the increased mortality is occurring both in the hibernacula and outside.
"Winter submissions from the Albany County region to the NYS Health Department (DOH) of Myotis spp. were 10 times higher than mean submission rates over the last decade." (Hicks and others, 2007a)To summarize, the scientists are seeing hundreds to thousands of dead bats in hibernacula, evidence that bat carcasses are being scavenged, and a tenfold increase in the number of dead bats (which presumably died outside the hibernacula) being submitted to DEC from the public in the affected area. The bat populations in the affected hibernacula have declined by many thousands (and presumably have not gone elsewhere). Bats often die outside hibernacula. Maybe others will disagree, but it seems to me to be a reasonable inference from these observations that the "missing bats" probably died of the same causes as the ones found inside the cave.
Regardless, who cares whether the number of bats dead from WNS is 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000? It doesn't change the underlying issue, that bats are dieing in unexpected numbers for unknown reasons in a geographically confined area, the lateral extent of which is increasing.
adleedy point #2. There is no evidence to suggest that cavers are contributing to the spread of the problem (or, as adleedy so elegantly put it himself: "I DONT NOT BELIEVE CAVERS ARE SPREADING IT."Response - You may be absolutely right on this as well! If you read my post, and if you have indeed read the references as you claim to have done, you will note that neither I nor anyone who is studying this issue state that there is any evidence that cavers are contributing to the problem. All of this hullabaloo is based on the following hypothetical:
- If whatever is causing WNS is present on cave surfaces, there is the potential that cavers could transport it from one cave to another, thus spreading the source to previous unaffected areas.
What's the likelihood of this being true? In the absence of any data, that question could be argued forever, but I would just state that, in my opinion, the upside of erring on the side of caution on this one, for however long it takes for the scientists to come back with some answers, far outweighs the downside of having some caves closed temporarily and being asked to take some extra precautions to avoid even the possibility of inadvertently spreading this.
Cheers,
Ron