in Pennsylvania were looking at about a
99.9 percent decline of all of our cave
hibernating bats most of that is from
the little brown bat which is our most
common bat in the state prior to white
nose syndrome this fungus actually
digests the live cells of the bats
primarily in the wings and causes these
bats to arouse more frequently than they
should which depletes their energy
stores to make it through the whole
winter hibernating and that ensues with
mortality at that point
and so we really kind of switched our
focus here to survivors specifically
with the UV technique we had been
working on yep
so you get a batwing
but you don’t see anything with with
light light you see no visible damage
but you see it with UV light and as you
can see when they’re first infected
they’re just heavily heavily infected
all that yellow orange color across all
of that when use infection
we started tracking the populations
across time seven on the tragus and
we’re seeing for some reason that
there’s less infection occurring and we
don’t know if that is because of the
bats learning ways to avoid it you know
microflora on the bats wings are
increasing resistance if the bats
themselves are increasing resistance
it’s a variety of reasons why that may
be happening I don’t think there’s
anything that’s gonna stop this from
spreading I think we slowed it down with
decontamination protocols but bats are
gonna spread this from site to site and
this will spread to probably all of the
sites in North America where bats
hibernate right now our big goal is
locating where the survivors are at so
that is the good news we have the
survivors we know they’re adapting in
some ways to deal with this and our
emphasis in the future is likely going
to be trying to figure out where these
survivors are hibernating because the
bulk of the places that we monitor we’ve
seen these massive declines and very few
of them seem to be the places where
they’re aggregating
we gotta try and find where those
survivors are at so that we can protect
those bats and give them the best chance
99.9 percent decline of all of our cave
hibernating bats most of that is from
the little brown bat which is our most
common bat in the state prior to white
nose syndrome this fungus actually
digests the live cells of the bats
primarily in the wings and causes these
bats to arouse more frequently than they
should which depletes their energy
stores to make it through the whole
winter hibernating and that ensues with
mortality at that point
and so we really kind of switched our
focus here to survivors specifically
with the UV technique we had been
working on yep
so you get a batwing
but you don’t see anything with with
light light you see no visible damage
but you see it with UV light and as you
can see when they’re first infected
they’re just heavily heavily infected
all that yellow orange color across all
of that when use infection
we started tracking the populations
across time seven on the tragus and
we’re seeing for some reason that
there’s less infection occurring and we
don’t know if that is because of the
bats learning ways to avoid it you know
microflora on the bats wings are
increasing resistance if the bats
themselves are increasing resistance
it’s a variety of reasons why that may
be happening I don’t think there’s
anything that’s gonna stop this from
spreading I think we slowed it down with
decontamination protocols but bats are
gonna spread this from site to site and
this will spread to probably all of the
sites in North America where bats
hibernate right now our big goal is
locating where the survivors are at so
that is the good news we have the
survivors we know they’re adapting in
some ways to deal with this and our
emphasis in the future is likely going
to be trying to figure out where these
survivors are hibernating because the
bulk of the places that we monitor we’ve
seen these massive declines and very few
of them seem to be the places where
they’re aggregating
we gotta try and find where those
survivors are at so that we can protect
those bats and give them the best chance
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