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A bat infected with white-nose syndrome-infected in a cave in Pennsylvania.
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Helping bats fight back against white-nose syndrome

Greg Turner/Pennsylvania Game Commission

Helping bats fight back against white-nose syndrome

Life has gotten tougher for bats across America in the last 13 years.

A mysterious fungus first discovered in New York state in 2006 has infected millions of bats with white-nose syndrome, a deadly disease that causes bats to wake up frequently during annual hibernation, sapping their energy. Bat populations have reached historic lows in North America, and in some regions the fungus has brought certain species close to regional extinction.

But now, after more than a decade of panic-driven research into causes and solutions, a Pennsylvania researcher believes they are beginning to turn population numbers around.

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The disease, which is spread by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans, cannot be contracted by people, pets or livestock. By 2008, white-nose sydrome had been confirmed in bats in parts of New York, Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut. Four counties in Pennsylvania recorded the disease the next year, and by the early 2010s wildlife biologist Greg Turner said it had been found in bats throughout the state.

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“Everywhere we went had it,” said Mr. Turner, the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s section leader for endangered and nongame mammals. 

In 2017, a team of researchers from the Smithsonian Institution, the University of New Hampshire, Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., and the University of Adelaide in Australia, released a study showing that white-nose syndrome is not a recent phenomenon. A bat collected in France in 1918 was infected, they said, and other researchers found it exists in Europe today. Yet it has not decimated bat populations the way it has in North America.

Instead of trying to protect bats from infection, researchers began looking for ways to help them become resistant, Mr. Turner said.

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The team developed a plan. Research had shown that infected bats move to colder areas of the caves where they hibernate to lower their body temperature enough to survive. The team began to manipulate caves to make them colder.

Sometimes they erected barriers or took down walls built to keep tourists on designated paths. In other cases, Mr. Turner and his team advocated for artificial doors that could help keep temperatures lower in the caves.

So far, they have manipulated three sites in Pennsylvania, one each in Blair, Fayette and Huntingdon counties. In Huntingdon, the number of bat species present has increased from two to four, and the number of individual bats has increased from two to 10. Other sites have seen consistent growth rates for the last three to four years.

“It goes to show you that they are coming to our sites,” Mr. Turner said. “And the increases don’t have to be huge.”

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Bats have a slow reproductive pattern that yields just one offspring per year, so a 5% increase in bat population is monumental. 

Researchers still don’t know how the Pd fungus got here. It could have been brought by a caver who traveled from Europe, bringing spores into bats’ hibernation sites. It could have been a bat that hitched a ride on a shipping container.

Regardless, it started spreading, infecting bats across North America. Researchers and conservationists began to panic. Bats, which comprise 20% of the world’s mammal population, are vital to the environment and economy, each eating thousands of insects per night. A 2011 article in Science Magazine estimated that declines in bat populations could have a $3.7 billion impact on the U.S. agriculture industry every year.

The panic continued. Around the country, researchers closed caves to cavers, believing human travel was the likely main cause of the spread of Pd. Researchers tried preventing white-nose syndrome with vaccines, but that was made difficult by bats’ tendency to evade recapture. They looked for cures for infected bats, but found Pd to be a highly resilient fungus. As a result, Mr. Turner and other researchers shifted their focus.

“Once we knew it was statewide, we started looking at survivors,” he said. “We don’t want to mess with the survivors.”

The small population gains give Mr. Turner hope. 

“No wildlife disease is an easy problem,” he said. “But it seems to me like we’re stabilized at this point.”

Christian Snyder: csnyder@post-gazette.com.

First Published: June 27, 2019, 6:50 p.m.

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A bat infected with white-nose syndrome-infected in a cave in Pennsylvania.  (Greg Turner/Pennsylvania Game Commission)
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