— Alright so, real quick, guys, I want to do a safety talk.
So we are going underground into a mine.
Avoid touching the walls, if you can help it,
and watch your head, certainly, where you’re going.
— Our job is to find every dead bat and every band.
So we have to make sure we’re paying attention to that, and that’s our prime goal going in there.
— Onward.
— Tim Carter and Maarten Vonhof are researchers in Michigan,
investigating white-nose syndrome, a disease killing millions of bats in the U.S.
— So you haven’t been to this specific mine,
you haven’t checked out these bats since the fall.
— No. — That’s correct.
— We are here to assess the results
of a long-term experiment to test a treatment against white-nose syndrome.
— What is white-nose syndrome?
— It’s a fungal disease that affects the bats.
It’s a pretty devastating disease,
that came over from Europe in 2006 accidentally, introduced into New York,
and it has been spreading from that epicenter in New York across the country.
— So far, white-nose syndrome has been identified in 31 states, mostly in the northeast.
But U.S. Fish and Wildlife tells us it’s spreading west.
In March, the fungus that causes it was identified in Texas,
and, last week, the disease was confirmed in Oklahoma.
— And as it moves through these populations of bats,
we’re seeing massive declines, mortality rates of certainly over 80%,
in some cases, as high as 90, 95% of the population is dying as a result of this disease.
— White-nose syndrome isn’t just devastating to bats,
it’s a huge problem for the economy.
Bats eat a lot of insects, including moths and beetles.
That means that they’re crucial for pest control,
saving American farmers an estimated $3.7-billion in crop damages every year.
Researchers across the country are trying to figure out what can be done to stop the disease’s spread.
— What is the absolute worst case scenario once we go into that mine?
— Worst case scenario is that we go into that mine and find every bat dead on the ground.
— Maarten and Tim conducted an experiment in this mine last December.
They catalogued 165 bats, and treated half with Chitosan,
a compound they hope will help fight the fungus.
They sealed up the mine last fall.
Today, they’ll find out if any of the bats survived the winter.
— So, this one’s dead.
— Dead bats are sorted into Ziploc bags, and live ones into paper bags.
— Bunch of dead bats around here…
— Both live and dead bats will then be taken to a field lab for analysis.
— Okay, so we’ve got a live bat up in here.
Live bat, believe it or not, this is how much they move when they are hibernating.
— The fungus irritates certain bat species, like little brown bats,
causing them to wake up and fly around during the winter when they should be hibernating.
Because of this, they end up spending a lot more energy than they should,
at a time when there’s no food available to sustain them.
— So this poor guy is alive. He’s not doing very well.
— Eventually, they die from starvation.
— What are we looking at?
— That’s what they’re supposed to look like.
— So there are a bunch of different bats around here.
— Yeah, we’ve got three, we’ve got a pair right here, and then a single one right up in there.
— They’re cute little guys. — Yeah, they are kinda cute, aren’t they?
— I’m sorry, guys. — Oh, they’re not happy.
— He’s snarling at you. — Yeah, well, he’s not happy at all.
— So far you’ve found a few dead ones, lots of live ones, what does that tell you?
— It’s kind-of what we expect.
We were hoping to have some live bats and some dead bats.
Of course, we will not know who's who until
after we get back and check the numbers on their bands,
so I don’t know if I’m looking at a treated bat or if I’m looking at a control bat.
So it’s really too early to tell if we’ve had any success,
other than we’re happy that we’ve got some live bats and some dead bats.
— Alright, folks.
We only have roughly 57 live bats.
We will PD swab and microswab every bat.
— Some infected bats develop a white, fuzzy growth on their noses,
but the most common sign of the disease are lesions on their wings and tails.
— Female… band number is M-2-4-0-2.
— …and here will be tissue punch number eight.
— The only way to truly tell if a bat has the disease, however, is to send samples for analysis.
Right now, Tim and Maarten are trying to save as many bats as possible.
But they know that even if an effective control method is found,
bat populations will take a long time to recover.
That’s because, unlike other small mammals, bats reproduce slowly—
females only have one “pup” a year.
— Every year that white-nose impacts bat populations,
it will take approximately a hundred years or more to offset those losses.
So, right now, we’re at about 10 years of white-nose losses.
If we could wave a magic wand today and just get rid of white-nose,
it would be more than a thousand years before bats could get back to where they were just 10 years ago.
— Tim and Maarten will have to wait for the final results of this winter’s treatment trials.
In the meantime, they’ve released some of the surviving bats back into the cave.