Absolutely not!!!! Conservation money is in extremely short supply right now, in this uncertain economy. Bat conservation is an even lower funding priority than almost everything else I can think of. One of the biggest hurdles in figuring out what is killing off 90% of all the bats in the East (and soon, likely, the rest of the country), is the LACK of money for necessary research. In fact, some of the very questions being asked (such as "Are the bats going in to hibernation with adequate body weight, or are they starving even before entering hibernation?" and "Is this fungus actually a new species, or is it widespread and just never identified until now?") are pretty simple baseline types of information that we should have been collecting for years, if only we had unlimited budgets to do the research to answer those kinds of questions. But the reality is that we do not, and will not in the foreseeable future. Even in Texas I can't tell you how many bats of what species we have in our caves, because NO ONE IS DOING THAT RESEARCH. Even for the big, popular freetail caves that obviously contribute to our environmental well-being as well as our economic health, we only have a rough idea of numbers and no clue about whether those populations are stable, declining, or (unlikely) increasing. For other species, even the common cave myotis, entire cave populations could be disappearing and we wouldn't even know. So whatever efforts are being tried to stem the tide of WNS mortality, you can bet there is at least a pretty good chance that it has a good chance of success. We don't have the luxury of trying ideas that we know are foolish.
Jim "Crash" Kennedy Cave Resources Specialist Bat Conservation International ... and passionate lover of all caves and their contents -----Original Message----- From: Bill Bentley-Webmail [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, March 06, 2009 8:35 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Texascavers] RE: heaters for bats I think it is more about feeling good, than actually doing good... --------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
