In recent years, white-nose sickness has decimated northern long-ear bat populations. The US Fish and Wildlife Service has announced that the flying creatures would be reclassified from threatened to endangered. This comes after a study found that by 2025, the devastating white-nose sickness will have affected 100 percent of northern long-eared bats. In 2012, white-nose […]
Tag: white-nose syndrome
Not just for humans — scientists turn to vaccines to save endangered species
For more than a year, the world has closely followed the development, approval and deployment of various coronavirus vaccines that could bring an end to the global pandemic, debating every side effect and hurdle. But vaccines aren’t only used to spare humans from the ravages of disease; increasingly, they’re being used to conserve wild species […]
Endangered bats are evolving to fight off an exotic fungal disease
A mysterious disease is wiping out one of the world’s smallest bats, the aptly named “little brown bat,” which has an extensive range across the United States and Canada. But these tiny mammals, which are classified as an endangered species by the IUCN and Canada’s Species at Risk Act, are turning out to be more […]
‘Death by a thousand holes’: Scientists race to avert a salamander crisis
Any day now. That’s when Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal), the “salamander-eating” fungus, is expected to arrive in the United States, home to more than a third of the world’s species of these slippery amphibians.It all began in 2008, when Bsal traveledsome through the pet trade from Asia to northern Europe. There, it escaped into the wild […]
Notorious Bat Killer Found to Have a Weak Link
Mysterious cases of white-nose syndrome plague thousands of bats each year, frosting their snouts in toxic, white fungus. But researchers are fighting back against the dark reality—with light. A new study, published January 2 in the journal Nature Communications, shows that ultraviolet rays, the light source behind black lights and sunburns, irreparably break down the […]
Bat killing WNS fungus confirmed in Arkansas
A fungus that leads to a deadly disease that has killed almost seven million bats in the US is continuing its spread westwards, results have shown. Officials said the disease had been confirmed in Arkansas after samples tested positive for the fungus known to cause white-nose syndrome (WNS). To date, there is no known vaccine […]
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 […]