Heaters might stave off doom for bats

[LauraHohman]

Interesting article:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090305/ap_ ... at_die_off

[Squirrel Girl]

Wow, shows you how much I know. I figured warming the bat caves would make the bats wake up from their hibernation. Guess it might depend on how warm it is?

[Squirrel Girl]

RIght now I'm listening to Science Friday on National Public Radio. This hour they are going to talk about heating caves/mines to stave off WNS. If you can't catch it now, you can catch it later as a podcast.

[graveleye]

that plan seems fairly risky to me.

[karstmd]

I listened to the NPR program. A well-spoken grad student made it sound very doeable, without disturbing the normal hibernating environment. Quickie news reports are never adequate for delivering a complete story. Interesting experiment, but ultimately it will only produce data, and possibly a one-off solution. We certainly can use the data but if it works, can you envision 1000's of these bat warmers being installed? A captive breeding program makes more sense.

[Squirrel Girl]

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200903063

The audio is in the upper left of the page. They have a year-old video on the page, too.

[Squirrel Girl]

Mmmm. So I missed the actual broadcast because I had to be somewhere at the time. I'm listening to the show while doing computer stuff now. All of a sudden, I got to realizing, "I know that voice!" Sure enough, it was Bob Thrun.

[wyandottecaver]

Geeze....At least they are testing them on healthy bats first. The idea of prolonging the life of infected bats so they can then emerge in spring and fly farther to infect and kill others just seems backwards biologically but does make for warm fuzzy feel good news. They might as well airdrop infected bats into clean areas, then they could save them the energy of flying there....