Tina Cheng<\/a> is a bat scientist at Bat Conservation International. She leads research into white-nose syndrome. She says it\u2019s caused by a fungus that creeps up on the bats when they\u2019re hibernating.<\/p>\nDr. Tina Cheng: So then the fungus will start invading the skin tissue.<\/p>\n
Gauthier: It spreads on their wings and grows on their noses. It wakes the bats up when they should be sleeping and conserving their energy.<\/p>\n
Cheng: The problem with that is that bats come in with a certain amount of fat, a certain amount of energy that they need to save to make it through sometimes like five, six months of winter.<\/p>\n
Gauthier: Eventually, the constant waking up\u2026<\/p>\n
Cheng: \u2026 causes them to burn through their fat reserves and starve to death.<\/p>\n
Gauthier: The disease was first detected in the U.S. in caves in upstate New York. Photographs taken in the mid-2000s showed bats with white fuzz on their noses. And Tina says one biologist describes stumbling on the devastation of the disease early on.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He was studying bats in caves\u2026<\/p>\n
Cheng: \u2026 and instead of finding all the bats up on the ceiling like he normally does, there were just piles of dead bats on the ground.<\/p>\n
Gauthier: Since then, the disease has spread across the U.S. Within some species \u2014 it\u2019s killed more than 90% of bats.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s something interesting with the way the disease spreads.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t hit all bat species equally. The disease is mostly found in cold, damp places like caves or mines. And it spreads most easily when bats are packed together, like when they\u2019re hibernating in large groups.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So for bats that hibernate in warmer, drier places in smaller groups \u2014 they\u2019re not getting as sick.\u00a0<\/p>\n
During a recent study, researchers found bats spending the winter in crawl spaces under houses. And some of the bats did get sick, but some of them survived the infection.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And Tina pointed out that some bats don\u2019t hibernate at all, so they don\u2019t tend to catch the disease.<\/p>\n
So, knowing this, I wanted to learn a bit more about what was going on with New York City\u2019s bats. Let\u2019s go back to Nic Comparato in Prospect Park.<\/p>\n
(field tape)<\/p>\n
Gauthier: So to recap, what have we seen? What have we heard, rather?<\/p>\n
Comparato: Lots of eastern red, hoary bat and big brown bat.<\/p>\n
Gauthier: Ok, sweet.<\/p>\n
(end field tape)<\/p>\n
Gauthier: These three bats are some of the most common bats in New York City. According to Nic, they\u2019ve been popping up in the data for years.<\/p>\n
Comparato: What\u2019s saving a lot of urban bat populations are, like, and you do see it across cities, is that bats that do well in cities tend to be ones that, like, would naturally avoid caves anyways.<\/p>\n
Gauthier: So take the eastern red bat. It\u2019s around the length of a credit card. Toasty red coloring with a little bit of gray.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Comparato: Often compared to, like, powdered jelly donuts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gauthier: We don\u2019t know a ton about where they go in the winter, but we know they don\u2019t hibernate in caves.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also the hoary bat \u2014 that\u2019s the little diva we met at the start of the episode. And it heads south where it\u2019s warmer for the winter. It avoids damp, dark places.<\/p>\n
And there\u2019s the big brown bat. Nic says it\u2019s basically a New York City resident.<\/p>\n
Comparato: This bat will just find, like, a really nice protected spot, usually in the cracks or crevices between old brickwork like on the outside of apartment buildings. And it\u2019ll stay there, like, all year long.<\/p>\n
Also very New Yorker-y in the sense that it\u2019s just going to shove itself into any hole that it can, like, fit its body into. No standards.<\/p>\n
Gauthier: Apparently no standards, but again, no caves.\u00a0<\/p>\n
These three bats just don\u2019t hang out in places where the disease will get them.<\/p>\n
But\u2026<\/p>\n
Comparato:\u00a0 \u2026there is one bat that, like \u2014 at least it\u2019s been absent from my data for at least three years now \u2014 which is the tricolored bat. It used to be a relatively common bat here in the city and was like our smallest bat, arguably our cutest.<\/p>\n
Gauthier: And that little cutie is different from the other New York City bats because it does hibernate in caves. Nic estimates we\u2019ve lost around 90% of their population here in the city. U.S. Fish & Wildlife is currently considering<\/a> listing the tricolored bat as endangered.<\/p>\n(music)<\/p>\n
Gauthier: Giving bats endangered status is one way to help them. But Tina pointed me to some other work that\u2019s going on too.<\/p>\n
Notably, scientists have developed a bat vaccine. And U.S. Fish & Wildlife wants to get it out to a lot more bat colonies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Researchers are also testing out sprays. They are spraying probiotics on cave walls and ceilings. The probiotics then get on the bats\u2019 fur and skin and protect them from the fungus growing on them.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
(music)<\/p>\n
Gauthier: And for those who want to see your friendly neighborhood bats in New York City: They\u2019re hanging out in open spaces, typically near water. So think, Prospect Park or Greenwood Cemetery or even the Highline. Go there when the sun is setting and look up and you might just see little bat silhouettes flying around.<\/p>\n
This report would not have been possible without bat scientists Nic Comparato, Dr. Tina Cheng of Bat Conservation International and Dr. Samantha Hoff of the University of Vermont. And special thanks to Maude Adams for providing additional information for the story. Music courtesy of Blue Dot Sessions.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For Scienceline, I\u2019m Magali Gauthier.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Scienceline intro music) Sarah Hofmann: Hello! Welcome back to Scienceline. I\u2019m Sarah Hofmann, the digital editor, and today,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":387854,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1457,33213,9,24,55,54,56,140998],"class_list":["post-387853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-animals","tag-bats","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-white-nose-syndrome"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/387854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}