And peer-review can take time.
--------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]"Cuter" organisms than bats got cuts in line, I'd think. The lumpen-prole like baby belugas and other cuddlier critters more than they do bats."Save the Beany Babies!"--------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]While it is good news to finally know the cause behind WNS, I have to wonder why it took 5 years and several million dollars for someone to finally conduct such a simple and obvious experiment to definitively prove G. destructans as the culprit.Jerry.In a message dated 10/26/2011 8:36:42 P.M. Central Daylight Time, [email protected] writes:http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111026/full/news.2011.613.html
Culprit behind bat scourge confirmed
A cold-loving fungus is behind an epidemic decimating bat populations
in North America.
By: Susan Young
Researchers have confirmed that a recently identified fungus is
responsible for white-nose syndrome, a deadly disease that is sweeping
through bat colonies in eastern North America.
The fungus, Geomyces destructans, infects the skin of hibernating
bats, causing lesions on the animals' wings and a fluffy white
outgrowth on the muzzle. When white-nose syndrome takes hold of a
hibernating colony, more than 90% of the bats can die (see Disease
epidemic killing only US bats). The disease was first documented in
February 2006 in a cave in New York, and has spread to at least 16
other US states and four Canadian provinces.
The culpability of G. destructans for this sudden outbreak was thrown
into question when the fungus was found on healthy bats in Europe,
where it is not associated with the grim mortality levels seen in
North America1. Some proposed that the fungus was not the primary
cause of the catastrophic die offs, and that another factor — such as
an undetected virus — must be to blame. But a study published today in
Nature2 reveals that G. destructans is indeed guilty.
"The fungus alone is sufficient to recreate all the pathology
diagnostic for the disease," says David Blehert, a microbiologist at
the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, and senior
author on the report.
Bat-to-bat spread
Blehert and his colleagues collected healthy little brown bats (Myotis
lucifugus) from Wisconsin, which is well beyond the known range of
white-nose syndrome. They infected the bats by direct administration
of G. destructans spores to the skin or by contact with infected bats
from New York. By the end of the 102-day experiment, the tell-tale
white fungus was growing on the muzzles and wings of all of the
directly infected Wisconsin bats and 16 of the 18 exposed to sick
bats.
This is the first experimental evidence that white-nose syndrome can
be passed from bat to bat, and is very worrying from a conservation
point of view because bats huddle together in large numbers in caves
and mate in large swarms, says Emma Teeling, a bat biologist at
University College Dublin in Ireland. "If a bat has this fungus on
them, it's going to spread quickly throughout the population," says
Teeling, who was not involved with the study. "It's like a perfect
storm."
The infected Wisconsin bats did not die during the experiment, which
may be due to the limited timeline of infection, the authors suggest.
Although the study does not directly show that a healthy bat will die
from infection with G. destructans, the results did show that the
fungus alone was sufficient to cause lesions diagnostic of white-nose
syndrome to form on previously healthy bats, indicating that the
fungus is the cause of the deaths so often associated with white-nose
syndrome in the wild.
To stop a scourge
Since it first appeared, white-nose syndrome has behaved like a novel
pathogen spreading from a single origin through a naive population,
says Jonathan Sleeman, director of the National Wildlife Health
Center, who was not involved in the study. Proof that G. destructans
is the primary cause of white-nose syndrome will "help us focus our
actions or management efforts into the future", he says.
Although little can be done to control the spread of the disease
through bat-to-bat transmission, the US Fish and Wildlife Service
(FWS) has asked people to stay out of caves in and near affected
areas, and has closed some caves on agency-managed land.
On 21 October, the FWS announced that up to $1 million in funding will
be made available for research on white-nose syndrome. Projects
covering topics such as how the fungus proliferates within caves and
mines, and the potential for biological means or environmental
manipulations to improve bat survival, are among the service's top
priorities.
*
References
1. Puechmaille, S. J. et al. Trends Ecol. Evol. 26, 570-576 (2011).
2. Lorch, J. M. et al. Nature doi:10.1038/nature10590 (2011).
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