My mama told me this story, as her mama told her, and all the mamas for ten generations or more. It’s from the time big roads and buildings covered the land, when everyone lived in separate boxes and travelled through the sky. Mama said this story should have been important but not enough people noticed or cared.
Back then, even though all the stuff we built covered earth, so many plants and animals lived on the land that special people studied them just because they wanted to learn about their lives. The animals weren’t as important as humans, but these people studied them anyway … like bats. Seems to me bats would be important because mama said they ate mosquitoes, but most people didn’t pay attention. Large groups of bats lived together in caves and flew out at night to catch insects. I wish we still had bats. Bet people then didn’t get as many mosquito bites as I do.
Mama says these special people went into the caves every December to count bats. As more roads and buildings spread across the land, they counted fewer bats. Then the bats began to die from a sickness that gave them white noses. All across the land, bats were dying fast, millions in only a few years. Because the sickness came from far away, bats weren’t strong against it.
One winter, they decided not to count bats. The special people said they might not find any, but if some bats had survived the white nose sickness, going into their caves could kill them. That’s an important part of this story — the people stopped counting bats because if any survived, being counted could kill them. Mama says not counting the bats was unusual, it might have been the first time. Imagine, every year people count the bats and then suddenly so few bats are left we shouldn’t bother them. There’s so much we don’t know because not enough people were paying attention.
We don’t know what bats looked like but Mama told me that losing them was a big reason why insects ate the crops and people starved. We don’t know what these crops were either, because the insects also ate the plants grown for seeds. I know about the bats because my many-times-great-grandmama was one of the special people who stopped counting bats.
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Minnesota’s bat population, devastated by a fungal disease known as white-nose syndrome, has become so shrunken and fragile that state biologists are giving up their annual December “bat count” as a lost cause.
Researchers believe that even if their cave count did turn up a few survivors, the naturalists might risk disturbing bats when they’re most vulnerable, said Gerda Nordquist, mammalogist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. “Best to just leave them alone,” Nordquist said. “There’s just nothing left to find.”
The bats’ plight is especially troubling because of their far-reaching impact on the region’s economy and environment. The four species at risk of extinction here — the little brown bat, northern long-eared bat, tri-colored bat and big brown bat — all eat their weight in mosquitoes, beetles and crop-damaging moths every night. Scientists fear that their extinction would result in significant crop damage and increased use of chemical pesticides, to say nothing of the increased nuisance for people.
White nose syndrome (WNS), a fungus, is primarily a disease problem for bat species that hibernate. Over half of the 47 species in the US and Canada hibernate.
WNS came from Europe/Asia and was first documented in New York in 2006. In 8 years it spread to 25 additional states and 5 Canadian provinces. Since 2014, white nose has expanded to at least 7 additional states and another province. In 2018, it was found in the world’s largest known bat colony in Bracken Cave near San Antonio Texas.
One of the worst modern wildlife diseases, WNS has killed millions of bats in the US/Canada since 2006. Twelve bat species (2 endangered, 1 threatened) have shown symptoms of infection, while six other taxa (1 endangered) are positive for the disease but have not shown symptoms, yet.
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