Winter Visitors At Great Smoky NP Seeing Bats Flying In Daytime - White Nose Suspected
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CURWOOD: So Katie, tell us, what kinds of behaviors are they seeing in these Smoky Mountain bats?
GILLIES: The bats should be underground nestled in their caves sleeping away the cold winter months. Unfortunately, they’ve been seeing some very erratic behavior, which involves bats flying around up and down the trails, up around all the buildings, and I think they’ve even had a bat fly into a human being. And this is behavior that’s usually indicative of a sick bat.
CURWOOD: So what do scientists think is causing this behavior?
GILLIES: Well, what they think is causing it is a disease known as white-nose syndrome. And this a new disease here in North America, that’s only been on the landscape for about the past six years. It is a fungal infection. It’s a really aggressive fungus. It was recently named Geomyces destructans because it is a very destructive fungus that invades the bats’ wings and nose and ears, their really thin dermal tissue. The fungus goes in and basically breaks down that tissue. And this is very irritating and disruptive to the bats. The bats’ immune systems are suppressed in the wintertime, and they’re in a deep state of torpor. So their breathing is low, their heart rate is low, their immune system is very unresponsive. This causes them this irritation, and this disruption causes them to wake up repeatedly through the winter months. This is very costly to them. Waking up uses critical fat reserves, and what happens is they’re dehydrated, they’re undernourished, they’re malnourished. And they leave their caves or their mines, wherever they’re hibernating, in search of food and water. And it’s very harsh for them out in the winter, that type of condition, and they end up dying.
CURWOOD: Now what bat species are affected?
GILLIES: Right now we have nine species of bats that are confirmed either with the disease or the fungus. And almost all those species are seeing high fatality rates. The endangered Grey bat just earlier this year was confirmed with the disease, there’s about a one to three year latency period when the disease is first documented before a serious fatality would start to occur. So we haven’t seen any fatalities from Grey bats yet. We may start to see those this winter though. The endangered Indiana bat has also been confirmed with the disease and we are seeing significant fatalities there. The Little Brown bat, which was once the most common bat in North America, is seeing such significant population declines that it’s been petitioned for listing under the Endangered Species Act.
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