WNS treatment testing

[rebelfirefighter]

I just saw this article that says they are testing some creams on bats to try and see if it does anything to the WNS. Anybody heard anything official on this. Sounds like athletes foot cream to me.



http://www.app.com/article/20100210/NEW ... source=rss

[JD]

This is referring to the current experiment with fungicide on bats in a mine. USFWS, biologist Hicks and the others are truly grasping at straws here. Tom Aley (Ozark Underground laboratory) has explained in clear language why this will not work and why it is a terrible idea for the overall ecology of a cave to apply fungicide widely. So they are trying little doses directly on bats. Yet USGS data shows that infected caves may have spores in the soil (or at least their DNA). We also have another study that shows healthy bats can become infected from an infected environment (no human vector required.) So exactly how is this going to clean the entire cave environment? Not to mention the bat roosts under bridges, in attics, and in trees, etc.?

There is a difference between doing something substantial and LOOKING like you are doing something, don'cha know?

The quality of analysis of data, treatments, and management strategies by some of these "experts" would never survive a first year graduate seminar. But I guess if you are in full Great WNS Panic of 2009 mode, reason goes out the window. They simply feel they HAVE to do SOMETHING, because they can not accept the conclusions Aley reached in his paper.

[wyandottecaver]

more to the point. You dont get MONEY to do nothing. More important, you dont keep getting money to do something that might actually be effective.

[rebelfirefighter]

As long as they can keep fooling the public with little things like this here and there in the news they will keep gettin the money. I've come to see that when it comes to them dealing with WNS and alot of things the govt does for that matter is all about putting up fronts and actually doing as little as possible.