WNS was discovered about a year and half ago, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service and New York Department of Environmental Conservation have done a great job of involving researchers from a variety of disciplines and locations. Mycologists, virologists, toxicologists, immunologists, physiologists, ecologists, and pathologists (and this is surely only a partial list) have been enlisted to try to find either the cause or a solution to WNS. Likewise, there are researchers working on the problem throughout the Northeast, as well as in Wisconsin, Indiana, Colorado, California, and Canada. I won’t venture a guess as to how many researchers and land managers are involved, but it’s safe to say that this is a very large collaborative effort.

Much of the research to date has focused on identifying the geographic scope of WNS and determining the pathogen causing the symptoms (if there even is a pathogen). A lot of work has been done on both fronts, but many questions remain unanswered. Affected caves have been found in New York, Massachusetts and Vermont, and a few caves in Pennsylvania are suspicious; however, I am wary of using affected caves to determine the geographic scope of the problem because these bats are migratory and will spread out over the entire Northeast this summer. Further, affected caves are being identified by conspicuous fungal growth on the bats, but we still do not know if this is a universal indicator of WNS. The pathology work is also a little inconclusive. Several species of fungi have been identified growing on the bats, but none have been directly implicated for actually killing the bats.

Several other projects were also conducted last winter. My involvement with this project has revolved around determining the energetic consequences of WNS. We know affected bats are prematurely running out of energy, but we still do not know why. We used thermal imaging cameras to determine if bats were hibernating differently than bats in unaffected caves. Affected bats do not appear to be doing anything different during hibernation, but we did find that they are not responding normally to disturbance, which is likely because of a lack of energy. During our trips into the caves, Marianne Moore from Boston University was also taking blood from hibernating bats to test the immune responses of affected and unaffected individuals.

The hibernation season is essentially over in the Northeast, so much of the in-field research has ended for the year. However, labs around the country are continuing the search for the cause of WNS. The next step is determining what research needs to be conducted and how projects should be prioritized for the upcoming winter. To this end, researchers will be meeting in New York this June to discuss what is known, what needs to be done, and where funding can be obtained to conduct the necessary research. Bat Conservation International is one of the sponsoring groups for this meeting, and donations to their WNS fund will help defray the travel costs of getting all of the relevant experts to the meeting. If you are interested in donating funds to be used specifically for research of WNS, Indiana State University’s Center for North American Bat Research and Conservation has started a fund as well.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 9:28 am and is filed under Justin Boyles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.