[SWR] WNS

[C Tiderman]

Culprit behind bat scourge confirmed 
A cold-loving fungus is behind an epidemic decimating bat populations in North 
America.
Susan Young   
White-nose syndrome is killing bats throughout eastern North America.Greg 
Turner / Pennsylvania Game Commission
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

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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.

Carol
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