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A European tourist with an interest in caves arrives in New York state. He seeks out Howe Caverns west of Albany and joins a commercial tour through its underground passages.
As he passes stalactites and stalagmites, his shoes scuff the rock, his jacket brushes the cave walls, and microscopic spores of a European cold-loving, cave-dwelling fungus are scraped from his attire onto the walls and floor.
The tourist goes home.
The fungus lives on.
During the weeks or months or years that follow, the fungus spreads in the cave and finds its perfect victims: thick clusters of another cold- and damp-loving life form.
Settling on the bodies of tiny hibernating bats, the fungus thrives and multiplies, digging into the bats' skin, furring their noses with white fuzz, disrupting their winter sleep.
The killing has begun.
Scientists do not know with any certainty how or why the affliction known as white-nose syndrome appeared suddenly in Howe Cave in 2006. The spore-carrying visitor is a working hypothesis, according to Thomas Kunz, a leading bat ecologist at Boston University.
What they do know with certainty is the calamitous effect the new-to-America fungus has had on the hibernating bats of eastern North America.
In less than five years, white-nose syndrome has spread to 15 states and is believed to have killed more than 1 million bats. Humans barely had recognized the syndrome's existence before it had mowed through northeastern caves and had spread as far south as Virginia.
The disease has all but wiped out cave colonies where little brown bats once hung by the thousands in heavy grape-like bunches. In an old graphite mine near Lake George, N.Y., the number of bats plunged from 185,000 to 2,000 in three years.
Last week, the Vermont Endangered Species Committee urged the Agency of Natural Resources to place two of Vermont's six cave-wintering bat species on the state's endangered list. The little brown bat and northern long-eared bat once were the most common of those species. Now scientists say the little brown bat could become extinct in the Northeast within 16 years.
Scientists say white-nose syndrome is something entirely new, a fungus that directly or indirectly can kill a mammal and moves through a population with great speed.
The illness has moved so fast that biologists are racing to understand and counter it before the bats are gone. In New York and Vermont, where swarms of bats no longer gather for fall mating outside caves, work has shifted to advising other states as white-nose syndrome marches west and south.
"We are the ghost of Christmas future," said Al Hicks, the former New York state biologist who was the first to encounter and track white-nose syndrome. "Our bats are almost gone."
Consider the little brown bat, a thumb-sized creature that darts through the sky all night eating its weight or more in moths and other insects. This service to the ecosystem, human comfort and agricultural productivity goes largely unappreciated by most humans.
Instead, it's the myths that cause many people to shudder at the sight of a bat: that they are blind (bats see just fine), that they are rodents (nope), and that they suck blood (only three bat species - all in Latin America - will take blood from birds or animals).
The little brown lives a long and inoffensive life - mating in the fall, hibernating all winter and gathering in maternal summer colonies.
Until 2007, the little brown bat and its cousin the northern long-eared were thriving in the Northeast. Populations were stable.
Then on March 14, 2007, New York state biologists surveying a cave outside Albany called their boss, Al Hicks. "There are dead bats everywhere," they reported.
Hicks knew something was up. It would be another year before he learned of a photograph of a white-nose-afflicted bat taken by a spelunker at Howe Cave in early 2006.
In 2009, a group of scientists in Wisconsin identified the white fuzz as a new species of a widespread type of cold-loving fungus, geomyces. They named the new species Geomyces destructans for the devastation it was causing. G. destructans, they learned, grows best in temperatures between 39 and 59 degrees Fahrenheit.
That, it happens, mirrors the temperatures inside a bat cave.
From Boston to Santa Cruz, a cadre of researchers attacked the questions about white-nose syndrome from all sides. Discovery of G. destructans on a bat in a French cave was one breakthrough, and it was followed by identification of the fungus in other European caves - without any mass die-offs of infected bats.
The French discovery offered an answer to the question, Where did white-nose syndrome come from? DNA analysis has yet to establish that the European and North American fungi are identical, although some scientists expect that to be the case.
In the United States, there were new potential answers to the question of how white-nose syndrome kills. By one theory, the white-nose fungus irritates the bat's skin, rousing it from sleep. Each of those awakenings can burn as much energy as 30 days of hibernation. The bats essentially die of starvation.
Another group of scientists has studied the action of the fungus itself and suspects the G. destructans is killing more directly. Unlike most skin fungi, white-nose sends its tentacles through dead surface skin and into living tissue - dissolving that tissue and using the liquid to feed itself.
"We need to understand the fungus and its process, from the spores to the bat dying or not dying," said Paul Cryan, a bat ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Fort Collins, Colo. "There might be weak links in the chain where we could break or disrupt the cycle."
Biologists have yet to find that weak link.
Doing our bit for bats
Humans appear powerless to protect cave-wintering bat species from a killing fungus, but we can give the surviving bats a helping hand in other ways:
- Stay out of bat caves: Although scientists believe white-nose syndrome spreads from bat to bat, the fungus also can be carried from cave to cave on human clothing and food.
- Evict unwelcome guests gently: A bat in the bedroom is disconcerting, but whacking the bat to death no longer is an acceptable answer. Better strategies include simply opening a window (bats often will exit quickly on their own) or catching the bat in a towel and releasing it outdoors. If the bat lights on a wall, cover it with a plastic container, slide on a lid and remove the bat to the outdoors. Bat Conservation International offers video instructions at www.batcon.org.
- Install a bat house: It's fine to batten up your attic to exclude bats, but pregnant bat mothers do need summer homes. Buy a bat house or find instructions to build and install one, as well as tips for attracting bats to the house, at www.batcon.org.
- Maintain a bat-friendly woodlot: Woodlot owners can help the endangered forest-dwelling Indiana bat by leaving loose-barked live and dead trees as roost trees for the animals.
is fine, but let's give credit where it is due also, to former NYS Wildlife Pathologist, Dr. Ward Stone!!!