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 […]
Tag: white-nose syndrome
‘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 […]