hey little bat!

WNS fungus on the nose of a little brown bat photo courtesy of Ryan von Linden, NY Dept of Environmental Conservation Since my first post on White-Nose Syndrome , three more species and several more US states have been affected. First detected in February 2006 in New York state, the then-unidentified disease spread to Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut by Spring 2008. In Spring 2009, it spread to New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and then south into Virginia and West Virginia. (There was even one case confirmed in France in December 2009 - a bat tested positive for the WNS fungus but showed no symptoms.) In February/March 2010, it spread out into Tennessee, Maryland, and Ontario, and in April/May 2010, the fungus was confirmed on bats in Delaware, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Québec. This brings the total to 14 US states and 2 Canadian provinces. The rate that it is spreading is quite alarming - it was thought that once it hit the more southern latitudes or more northern lati...

Little Brown Bats exhibiting WNS symptoms photo courtesy of Nancy Heaslip, New York Department of Environmental Conservation I'm going to switch gears now and tell you about something quite serious that is devastating bat populations in the Northeastern United States and continuing to spread. It is called White-Nose Syndrome, or WNS, and since its discovery in a cave near Albany, New York in February 2006, it has wiped out an estimated 1 million bats in 9 states - with some caves experiencing a 90-100% mortality rate! - and scientists have yet to figure out the how's and the why's. So far, it has affected 6 different bat species, all of which are insectivorous and hibernating species - the endangered Indiana myotis ( Myotis sodalis ) , the little brown myotis (Myotis lucifugus ) , the big brown bat ( Eptesicus fuscus ) , the tri-colored bat ( Perimyotis subflavus ) , the northern myotis ( Myotis septentrionalis ) , and the eastern small-footed myotis ( Myotis leibii ) . To ...