AEDC biologists help with effort to save bats

  • Published
  • By Philip Lorenz III
  • AEDC/PA
ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. --  Bats throughout the country are in serious trouble as a deadly disease has rapidly spread from state to state, wiping out whole colonies of the flying mammals.

According to U.S. Fish and Wildlife agency officials, in 2006, a caver photographing hibernating bats approximately 40 miles west of Albany, N.Y., observed an unusual white substance on their muzzles. Several of the bats were dead.

The following winter, observations at the same cave revealed that the bats were flying out of caves in the dead of winter and dying on the snow-covered landscape and their noses had this same white substance. Many more were found dead or dying inside the caves. Conservation biologists began documenting what is now known as White-Nose Syndrome (WNS) to determine the extent of the disease, find ways to mitigate it and hopefully find an effective treatment.

Since then, wildlife officials have found sick, dying and dead bats in large numbers in and around caves from New England to Tennessee. In many cases, there have been declines of 95-100 percent at hibernation caves and some formerly common species are predicted to go extinct in the northeast within the next 15-20 years or sooner.

WNS was detected in a few caves in Tennessee last winter and biologists are anxious to see what they will find this spring.

AEDC biologists John Lamb and George Wyckoff have helped train personnel from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA) and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on the techniques for conducting bat counts, banding and gathering other statistical information to help with the effort.

Lamb and Wyckoff have also joined forces with other scientists in a comprehensive study to document the health and numbers of gray bats, Indiana bats and other cave hibernating species in Tennessee caves, including a survey conducted in the winter of 2010 at Hubbard's Cave in Warren County. More than a half a million gray bats hibernate there every winter.

"The gray bat and Indiana bat are federally listed as endangered," Lamb said. "Based on previously observed patterns and rates of spread, we had anticipated that WNS could appear in bat populations in Tennessee as early as winter 2009-2010.

"Given the long-distance migratory movements of gray bats, according to a study by Dr. Merlin Tuttle in 1976, movement patterns of gray bats banded over the past 10 years at Arnold AFB and at caves in Middle Tennessee and the tendency for gray bats to roost in large colonies, it was thought that this species could potentially serve as a vector for the transmission of WNS throughout the southeastern U.S."

How will the decline in bat populations affect people?

"A bat can eat half its weight in insects every night," Lamb said. "Many people point out how important this is in terms of mosquitoes, but the more important impacts might be to agriculture and our forests. Many bat species specialize on moths, some of which - like the corn earworm moth - that can cause major damage to corn crops and the gypsy moth can devastate forests. An added concern to the Department of Defense is that once common species will more than likely be added to the endangered species list thereby adding to our regulatory burden."