Below is a post by Diana Tomchick from Texascavers about the heated bat house proposal to help bats survive WNS.
Mark Minton This topic was covered last Friday on the radio talk show Science Friday with Ira Flatow. You can download the podcast at http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200903063 In addition, if you go to the web site, there is a cool video to watch of researchers Alan Hicks and Melissa Behr collecting samples of the fungus from bats in a cave in NY state. These two scientists were two of the authors of the Science paper on White-Nose Syndrome that I mentioned here on CaveTex last week (Blehert D.S., Hicks A.C., Behr M., Meteyer C.U., Berlowski-Zier B.M., Buckles E.L., Coleman J.T.H., Darling S.R., Gargas, A., Niver R., Okoniewski J.C., Rudd R.J., Stone W.B. "Bat White-Nose Syndrome: An Emerging Fungal Pathogen?" Science vol. 323, 9 JANUARY 2009, p. 227). Admittedly the video shows the sort of science-geeky side of these two researchers, but I'm used to seeing that kind of thing. :) There are also images of the bat boxes on the web site. If you have problems accessing the podcast (an mp3 file), email me and I'll send it to you. From the web site: Caring for White-Nose Syndrome Bats (broadcast Friday, March 6th, 2009) Bat colonies across the Northeast US have fallen victim to 'White Nose Syndrome,' a lethal and mysterious condition. The syndrome is characterized by a white, fuzzy fungal infection on bats in infected colonies -- but bat specialists still aren't sure if the fungus is a symptom of the syndrome, or its cause. Bats affected by the syndrome appear to have difficulty conserving their energy during the cold winter, causing them to starve to death. Writing this week in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, a journal of the Ecological Society of America, a team of researchers propose a dramatic stopgap measure to protect affected colonies -- building warm 'bat boxes' inside affected caves that would allow affected bats to conserve their energy. We'll talk with researchers about the idea and what, if anything, can be done to protect colonies affected by the syndrome. Guests: Justin Boyles Graduate Student Center for North American Bat Research and Conservation Department of Biology Indiana State University Terre Haute, Indiana
_______________________________________________ NMCAVER mailing list [email protected] http://caver.net/mailman/listinfo/nmcaver_caver.net
