Congress Ponders Threat To Nation's Bats

Bats are right up there with snakes for a lot of people in terms of their high creepiness factor. Some of this is no doubt related to the bad rap they've gotten from the blood-sucking Dracula story.

Partly, it's their flying rodent look though they really aren't rodents at all.

Then there are the freak-out tales, many of them apocryphal, of bats getting tangled in people's hair (baldness does have its advantages.)

But as weird and unlovable as bats can be, it's hard to imagine that there are too many people wishing the creatures to be wiped from the face of the earth.

The fungus disease that's attacking bat colonies, however, seems to have the potential to destroy much of the nation's bat population so much so that Congress is getting involved.

Congress heard testimony from bat experts today on the fungal plague that is killing entire colonies of hibernating bats, the worst threat to wildlife in our lifetimes.

As the Associated Press reports:

WASHINGTON (AP) - A mysterious fungus attacking America's bats could spread nationwide within years and represents the most serious threat to wildlife in a century, experts warned Congress Thursday.

Displaying pictures of bats speckled with the white fungus that gave the disease its name - white-nose syndrome - experts described to two House subcommittees Thursday the horror of discovering caves where bats had been decimated by the disease.

As a state wildlife biologist from Vermont put it, one cave there was turned into a morgue, with bats freezing to death outside and so many carcasses littering the cave's floor the stench was too strong for researchers to enter.

They also warned that if nothing more is done to stop its spread, the fungus could strike caves and mines with some of the largest and most endangered populations of hibernating bats in the United States.

 

At stake is the loss of an insect-eating machine. The six species of bats that have so far been stricken by the fungus can eat up to their body weight in insects a night, reducing insects that destroy crops, forests and carry disease such as West Nile Virus.

"We are witnessing one of the most precipitous declines of wildlife in North America," said Thomas Kunz, director of the Center for Ecology and Conservation Biology at Boston University,
who said that between $10 million and $17 million is needed to launch a national research program into the fungus.