Bats face many obstacles
By Kent Jackson (Staff Writer)
Published: March 7, 2010
Cave explorers from Europe might have spread a disease that is decimating bats in the Eastern United States, a biological researcher said.
Dr. Howard Whidden said spelunkers from Europe visited the area near Albany, N.Y., where a fungus associated with white-nose syndrome was discovered in February 2006.
White-nose snydrome has the potential to devastate bats, which also are dying from impacts with wind turbines, Whidden said Feb. 25 during a lecture at Penn State Hazleton.
Even before the new threats appeared to the nine species of bats regularly seen in Pennsylvania, one of them, the Indiana bat, was on the federal endangered species list, and that state listed the small-footed bat as threatened.
Widden, an associate professor at East Stroudsburg University, said people should care about bats as they would for any threatened form of life. Bats are the major, night-time predators of insects. Without bats, mosquitoes might cause more nuisances and spread disease, bat droppings won't fertilize forests; farmers might need to apply more insecticides to crops and and moths might weaken more trees by eating leaves.
"We don't know what the effects will be," Whidden said.
Nor do researchers know how white-nose syndrome, named for coloring bats develop on their faces and sometimes their wings, triggers bats to awake from hibernation. Once roused, bats leave their caves and mines and fly outside where they die from exposure and starvation.
Whidden said there is evidence that people spread the fungus, but also evidence that bats spread it to each other.
The link to cave explorers from Europe is just a theory, he said, that arose from trying to discover how a previously-unknown fungus arrived in the United States.
continued at the citizensvoice
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