Occupy Cold Dark Caverns

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

White-Nose Syndrome is a recent problem that's been taking out American bats. Geomyces destructans appears to be to blame. Nobody knows where destructans came from; it could be foreign, it could be recently evolved. Whichever way, American bats seem to have just about no resistance to it.

Which has been bad. The ailment is cold-tolerant, has been moving north to south and west. It's gone from New York in 2006 to cover from New Hampshire to South Carolina to Tennessee in 2010. It's a bit too early to tell where it is in 2011 because the bats have only just started hibernating in the South. What's very bad is that bat colonies are surviving at rates from 15% to 5% to 0%. What's bad, very bad, is that some of these species are already endangered and this might be what knocks them off their perches.

Which as we all know is bad, very very bad, because insectivorous bats eat their weight in bugs per night and other bats are valuable pollinators. Biologists have thought about what happens if the endangered bats go extinct, but nobody's considered their extinction along with the loss of 90% of the entire bat population. Nobody knows how long the fungus will remain in caves, attacking bats that try to shelter there in the future.

We've had one piece of legislation to address it that I can find: The Wildlife Disease Emergency Act of 2011. Where is it? After being introduced in February, it went to hibernate in committee, where it has been ever since and possibly has died covered in a thin fuzz of destructans.

So what I'm wondering is why the quiet and inaction, considering the entire Eastern time zone is losing or at risk to lose a valuable natural resource. Loss of insectivores = need for pesticides. Insect-borne diseases are also likely to uptick. Not to mention we don't know how far west it could spread, and we have pollinator bats that are a vital peg in their ecosystems.

I've seen WNS in the media from time to time. Have you heard of it?

(Finally, don't actually occupy cold dark caverns unless you're sure your shoes aren't contaminated. And please don't wake the batties.)

Comments

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

It's too bad that it's an ailment and not a race of underworld demons, because Destructans is a very cool name.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Chiropterans vs. destructans! Coming soon to a cavern near you.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

I've known about WNS for at least a decade. Maybe more.

Human interaction with bats is very infrequent and when it occurs it is generally unpleasant. If bats looked like kittens and not like something out of a nightmare, people would care. Sad, but true.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

How's that?

I live pretty far south, so I missed the first reports and all, but I thought it started in 2006. Did I get something wrong?

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

I know I'm probably just weird, but I've always thought bats were cute....

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

I do too. We got bats in the house at least once a month growing up and it would freak my mother out. I thought that was weird. I had a pet rat though too.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Bats are adorable.

Ectophylla alba

[raichu100.livejournal.com]

A species of bats in Costa Rica, and one of the cutest animals ever to live.

Re: Ectophylla alba

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee


So. Cute.

Re: Ectophylla alba

[raichu100.livejournal.com]

ikr ^u^

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Obviously the invisible hand of the free market will deal with the problem.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

This is actually true. An abundance of insects will probably lead to a growth in a different species. Nature is never a balance.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Does this mean that because we've pretty much abolished smallpox, that some new disease will come and take its place?

But back to the OP: y'see, if the problem is the possible extinction of the bat species in question, new insectivores taking their place may be seen as some as a solution….but the bats still die off.

Anyway, it comes to almost every species that has ever existed: ergo, our time will come.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Any disease that gets a chance will take advantage of the human population. We can only wipe out the human-specific diseases. The others hide in the environment. We're still stuck in a battle with those. They evolve to handle the medications used against them, we develop new ones.

It's a big arms race in which we cheat every chance we get.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

It doesn't mean that but it does mean that there might be something smallpox kept in check (humans) will now spread wildly and cause changes in other areas, all because smallpox got eradicated. Again, always in flux.

[blue-mangos.livejournal.com]

I want to cuddle a panda.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

I want to club a seal. Thay is almost the same thing right?

[blue-mangos.livejournal.com]

You bet! Come on up to Canada, I think we have vacation packages for that.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Who doesn't?

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

I got this game yesterday:


It makes me happy.

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

OooOo baby seal is scared!

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

How does dealing with WNS disrupt the natural ecology? It's true we could be looking at an extinction event, if all colonies are infected and surviving bats keep visiting contaminated areas. But we like the ecology as it is not just because of tradition, but because it favors our survival.

The endangered species are at risk mostly because man put them there, so their being pushed over the edge (if they go and common bats don't) will not be natural.

Also, we don't know if destructans is the latest in evolution, or an import. European bats aren't killed off in the same clean sweeps, which means that bats can evolve protection but ours haven't, and may or may not have enough time and numbers. It also means that it might be like zebra mussels or those damn jumping catfish: foreign to the ecology and harmful.

Bats are adorable. You want an uphill climb, you try laws protecting rattlesnakes... which some states have still managed.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Mm, true. Some of our favorable changes have still resulted in unintended consequences. But I'm also talking about the environment as we've shaped it right now, not historical changes.

Since you mention it, this isn't just a one-species extinction we're talking about, like the passenger pigeon or the eastern peregrine. This is every species of eastern bat in the regions it's hit. If some changes have been beneficial, why is preservation of a beneficial animal a bad idea?

We also might not have that much time to study it. People are coming up with minimal solutions right now because there's not a lot to be done, but interested states may lose the bulk of their bat populations before they can get studying.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

The problem is that you can't imagine it because this kind of event doesn't happen often. It's slightly analogous to the Black Death, if bubonic plague hung around in villages waiting for villagers to repopulate.

We aren't sure why any surviving bats make it, whether that's random chance or innate genetic resistance. If it's the second, great! But we're not being left with a lot of innately resistant bats, and resistance is not going to help a whole lot if they keep roosting in a contaminated cave year after year. (Some bats winter in dead trees and such.) The problem is repeated exposure over time. It's unlikely that we'll have a lucky bat five years in a row. If there are immune bats, we don't know how their genetic immunity works. There might be more barriers than you think.

And some bat populations are artificially low, but... well, the Indiana Brown Bat is endangered. The Little Brown Bat is not. They're genetically distinct, so there's a chance that the IBB is resistant to something that would wipe out the LBB. If we lose the IBB, we lose the capacity of the bat population as a whole to ride out things like this.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but even genetic immunity is a matter of chance. If it were sex-linked or recessive, it'd be hard to spread through a population under severe pressure.

Thank you.

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

The premise behind the desire to prevent human-made change is that it is unnatural. But on the other hand, lots of climate changes have occurred partly due to contribution from the biosphere itself, and since humans are part of the biosphere (like it or not), perhaps it would be more prudent to look at the whole picture as a more complex system, where humans are not somehow separated from it. Especially since they are by far the most influential factor.

That said, I can understand why we would be anxious about the prospect of changing the ecosystem in a way that would be too fast, unnaturally fast (most graphs indicate a unprecedented speed of climate change in the last 50 years), which could and does cause all sorts of unintended and unpredictable negative effects. Probably some tiny pockets of people around the world are having a better time because they are lucky to have slightly more positive effects overall, but as a whole, rapid and random change has never been any good to the biosphere, as the dinosaurs might tell you. =)

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

Human extinction? Not really. Humans are adaptive enough to survive very extreme circumstances. But extinction of entire groups of organisms - yes, certainly. And mostly due to human activity.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Protecting endangered species is a matter of politics?

That's true to an extent, as most of the time there's no benefit to humans from protecting many of these species. It could be a matter of appearances.

I would say it's a matter of humanism. It may be nature's course to make these species extinct, as 99.9% of all species went extinct 'naturally', but humans have this tendency to muck around with nature to preserve diversity, because it's one of the things that are fascinating about the world.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

We don't know that there's not a benefit, frankly. The ecosystem is a web. Humans cut strings. Nobody knows how many strings you can cut before it collapses.

Biology gets political fast whenever we're discussing apportionment of money.

Most extinctions happen with space and time, and other things take advantage of the niches of the extinct animals. Humans not only take up a huge chunk of habitat, we affect animal populations. That makes it hard for natural processes to recover. In the meantime, it probably doesn't benefit us to sit around and wait until a new pollinator or insectivore evolves.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I tend to think in terms of keeping all the players in the game.

If the ecosystem is replaced by another ecosystem, that first one has collapsed.

It can take the niche a damn long time to fill, too. I'm sure eventually we'd have a highly adapted nocturnal bird that ate its own body weight in insects, but I'm not prepared to wait four million years for it.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I think we're talking about slightly different things. I'm not just talking about "there was a fire last year, and all the ferns are dead but the trees and streams are still there." I'm talking "beavers built a dam and my oak orchard ecosystem is now a bog ecosystem." The trees die, most plants die, burrowing habitat vanishes, and if you come back in five years it's all turtles, frogs, and ducks.

If you're talking about two islands side by side, you'd probably describe them from the ground up: ground cover, understory, trees. But if one island had a bunch of springs and the other had one salty one, even though they're both island ecosystems, they're totally different.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

lions_wings' point is that humans right now know how to exist in the current ecosystem. We don't know if we can live in a different one if this one changes significantly. Humans would prefer not taking that risk.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Speak for yourself...

[raichu100.livejournal.com]

most of the time there's no benefit to humans from protecting many of these species.

But drastic changes have been made, and there's no saying for sure whether a drastic change down the road will have a greater effect on the human population than those so far.

And I also think one of the reasons humans are so keen on preserving diversity is that frankly we are the single greatest threat to diversity. The changes that we cause to the environment are different, faster, and potentially of a greater scale than many natural changes, and consequences of such can be unpredictable. And diversity is beneficial in more ways than mere academic fascination.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

If you live in the US, we are already far beyond being able to do anything about that. ;)

Nothing in the US is in the state it was before europeans. For that matter nor is it in the state it was before native americans. On the west coast here they used to regularly burn down large sections of forest in order to make hunting grounds.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

It would of course be different but nobody can say better or worse. You are very right that humans are a part of nature.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

They did that on the east coast. Buffalo and elk habitat used to extend crazy far south and east.

Although fire is a more accepted part of nature than some people think.

Some local systems here are getting overrun and aren't good habitat for native plants because they relied on fire to clear things out every so often. Competition kills them. I've heard fire's more inevitable out west, being drier.

[raichu100.livejournal.com]

It's unclear whether the G. destructicans infection is natural or not.

[raichu100.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I didn't really understand what you meant when I made that comment. I agree that we should proceed with caution.

[raichu100.livejournal.com]

I think for some reason this just isn't on peoples' radar. It's not an immediate, scary concern (in their eyes), and not as scary-sounding as global warming. People just don't see it as urgent.

It's very sad.

Thanks for sharing.