Bats play a vital role in ecosystems, from agricultural land to tropical rainforests, scooping up mosquitoes and beetles, pollinating plants and dispersing seeds. But these diminutive mammals are also long-term hosts for serious viruses, including Ebola, a ferocious disease that drains its victims of bodily fluids, rabies, a disease that affects the nervous system, and, most […]
Tag: big brown bat
Killer fungus: how a disease threatening bat species has spread to northern Canada
Crawling through a narrow passage in a cave beneath a boreal forest near Fort Smith in Canada’s Northwest Territories in May, two biologists spotted a lifeless bat on a limestone ledge, its body covered in a spindly white fungus. When they shone their headlamps to get a closer look, they saw another bat with the […]
Bats Are Recovering in a Big Way After Decimation by White-Nose Syndrome: Numbers Grow for the 3rd Year
In a positive development for a maligned animal, cave-roosting bat populations in Wisconsin are recovering from a fungal epidemic. Wildlife authorities are reporting that for the third year in a row, the state’s bat populations seem to be rising. Numbers of little brown bats, big brown bats, tricolored bats, and northern long-eared bats are estimated […]
Fungus among us
More bad news for bats, I’m afraid—the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has confirmed that white-nose syndrome (WNS) has now spread to the endangered gray bat. The fungus, which has devastated large populations of North American bats, was detected in Tennessee gray bats although biologists did not find evidence that it had killed any animals […]