Bats' White-Nose Syndrome May Be Cured 89
New submitter alabamatoy writes: Several news outlets are reporting that a common bacteria may be proving successful in curing "white-nose syndrome" which has been decimating the bat populations across North America. A new treatment using a common bacterium was developed in Missouri by Forest Service scientists Sybill Amelon and Dan Lindner, and Chris Cornelison of Georgia State University. The Nature Conservancy reports: "On May 20, 2015, Scientists and conservationists gathered outside the historic Mark Twain Cave Complex in Hannibal, Missouri, to release back into the wild some of the first bats successfully treated for deadly White-Nose Syndrome." Bats are a key player in the environment, keeping insect populations under control, especially mosquitoes.
Re:Is a reduction (Score:5, Informative)
of 10% really that significant? Bats are rodents, they breed prodigiously.
1. Bats are not rodents.
2. They don't breed prodigiously, often having on one offspring per year.
The big problem with the white fungus is that it keeps the bats awake, and makes it so they can't hibernate properly. So their body temperature stays high, which means they burn calories, which means they starve to death before springtime.
Re:Is a reduction (Score:5, Interesting)
I just wanted to add, that I am a donor to the Nature Conservancy. They do a lot of good work, and I am happy to see that my money is helping to save these little critters. If you are looking for a worthy cause, you should check them out. Unlike some other environmental organizations (Sierra Club, Greenpeace, NRDC, etc.) they focus on pragmatic solutions rather than political lobbying, advertising, and public relations.
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I'm glad they do 'real work' with their money, but don't underestimate the value of a successful lobbying campaign. If the resources of the government can be brought to bear, they have the capability to make much bigger changes, even if they seem hobbled by compromises and special interests.
Re:Is a reduction (Score:5, Insightful)
don't underestimate the value of a successful lobbying campaign.
For every lobbying campaign, there is an equal and opposite lobbying campaign. So a lot of money is spent to accomplish nothing. Why should I donate to an organization that is then going to lobby the government to raise my taxes so I can pay again? Instead of lobbying or lawsuits, the NC worked with the Forest Service, and a state university, provided funding to pull together experts with complementary skills, and solved a real problem. I consider that a much better use of my money that donating to the Sierra Club, so they can lobby the government to shut down nukes, so we can burn more coal, or sue power companies [sierraclub.org] for building windmills that might kill a few birds.
Re: Is a reduction (Score:2)
Unfortunately, those wind turbines also kill bats (a friend of mine is just finishing her PhD on that work). The good news is that the folks that operate wind farms aren't in it to destroy wildlife, so they're amenable to doing things that help reduce the number of bat deaths.
(Bat deaths due to wind farms are especially painful, since they often kill bats that are migratory which wouldn't be affected by white nose syndrome.)
Lobbying worse than useless (Score:3, Insightful)
If the resources of the government can be brought to bear ....
Then they will fuck everything up, and burn hundreds of millions of dollars in the process that could have gone into doing something real.
The problem will go unsolved and everyone living around the problem will be a hundred times worse off than they were before.
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That why despite the best attempts of government there are no North American Bison left.... oh... wait......
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but don't underestimate the value of a successful lobbying campaign.
What the government giveth, the government can taketh away.
And until property rights are taken away nothing beats putting your money into land purchases.
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The Nature Conservancy does some really cool work, however, make no mistake, the bats that currently face potential extinction can't be saved by an organization such as them. It will require Government, and that usually requires an association with the devil (lobbyists)
The devil is right. The Government does some really cool work, but as long as we have vested interests that don't give a damn about critters, failure is only one mid-term election away.
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Perhaps you attempted to troll, but it looks like ShanghaiBill sawed you off at the knees.
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The hard part is getting the bats to draw lots to see which one gets beat to death by the remaining 9/10.
What? You only wanted to go back _one_ previous definition of decimate?
Tequila drinkers rejoice! (Score:2)
A great disaster [wired.com] has been averted!
Re:Is a reduction (Score:5, Informative)
As ShanghaiBill says, Bats aren't rodents. I'll just add that bats and rodents are about as taxonomically unrelated as two mammals can possibly be.
Bats are more closely related to horses, bears, rhinos, even whales -- like most mammals they're members of the huge and diverse superorder Laurasiatheria. Rodents are in the much smaller superorder Euarchontoglires, the only non-extinct members of which are: rodents, rabbits, hares, pikas, tree shrews, flying lemurs, and the various primates.
Re:Is a reduction (Score:5, Funny)
Rodents are in the much smaller superorder Euarchontoglires, the only non-extinct members of which are: rodents, rabbits, hares, pikas, tree shrews, flying lemurs, and the various primates.
You forgot to specifically mention managers and politicians in that rodent group..... oh wait, my bad, there it is right at the end: primates.
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politicians are "low order" primates, And like many other low level primates they also throw their poo.
I find this insulting to primates.
Re:Is a reduction (Score:5, Insightful)
10%
Very few people nowadays the word "decimation" with it's original meaning, and I'm guessing the author didn't here either. Or rather, we should probably say that the word has evolved to mean "an arbitrarily large percentage" and not just 10%. I see that definition listed as #3 in Merriam-Webster, where the original meaning is #1. Those should probably be reversed now. #2, in case you're wondering, is related to taxation. Go figure.
I went to the article to find out that this fungus was apparently introduced ten years ago, which obviously seems to indicates human involvement, and explains why the bat have no natural defense. I think this also justifies human involvement in finding a solution.
Re:Is a reduction (Score:5, Informative)
Very few people nowadays the word "decimation" with it's original meaning, and I'm guessing the author didn't here either. Or rather, we should probably say that the word has evolved to mean "an arbitrarily large percentage" and not just 10%. I see that definition listed as #3 in Merriam-Webster, where the original meaning is #1. Those should probably be reversed now. #2, in case you're wondering, is related to taxation. Go figure.
Eradicating would have perhaps been a better word to use.
Fatality rate for the total bat population in affected caves is 90-100%. In many caves in Missouri, the bats are *gone*.
I went to the article to find out that this fungus was apparently introduced ten years ago, which obviously seems to indicates human involvement, and explains why the bat have no natural defense. I think this also justifies human involvement in finding a solution.
Very likely human involvement. The fungus is natural in European caves, and European bats can have the fungus on them without becoming colonized by it.
The fungus is thought to spread between American caves by people.
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Thanks for this explanation. I was wondering earlier that if the problem was only as bad as "decimation", had scientists considered the various unintended consequences of this treatment? But seeing that the disease is likely anthropogenic, and that it is really wiping out entire populations, it sounds like this treatment can only be a Good Thing.
Re: Is a reduction (Score:2)
Usually it's simple confusion between 'decimation' and 'devastation'.
" 'Decimation' means the same thing as 'devastation' except it sounds cooler."
Signed,
The Committee to Reduce the Number of Useful Words in the English Language
Red Nose Syndrome is better (Score:2, Funny)
Too bad the bats don't have Red Nose syndrome. If they did, they could at least lead Santa's sleigh through the snow!
Excellent news (Score:5, Informative)
This is great news. For those who haven't been following it, white nose syndrome is an emergent disease affecting bats [usgs.gov]. It's caused by a fungus that grows on the skin of the animals, and has been killing millions of bats across many parts of the eastern United States (map [whitenosesyndrome.org]). A decontamination protocol [whitenosesyndrome.org] has been established for researchers and cavers who come into contact with the animals. This is the first really optimistic piece of news about the disease that I've seen.
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Thank God, Gotham City is safe!
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Aw, how sad - I got modded down for making a Batman joke, it seems. Not a good one, I freely admit, but are there really people who get offended when you joke about a rather pathetic cartoon character? If only I could afford to worry about so small things.
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Yes, most excellent! (Score:1)
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White-nose has also affected bats in Middle and South America as well.
Source?
And I assume your mean "Central" America.
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You'll be seeing the bats soon enough...
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And yes, every caver I know who has been caving in America for about a decade has been strict over decontamination procedures. Or just didn't bring anything back other than photographs (not difficult
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And the bacteria are fighting the effects of the fungus. Go reread the summary.
Re:Fungi not bacteria (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry about the bacteria getting out of hand. If necessary we'll kill them with a virus. Or gorillas.
Administration... (Score:4, Interesting)
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And slow down the arrival of The Rapture.
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Re: Reducing the number of insects... (Score:1)
insects=bat food
The bats control mosquitoes story is overblown. (Score:1, Informative)
Bats eat up to 600 mosquitoes an hour.
This one may have gotten started with a study in which mosquitoes were released into a room full of bats while researchers counted how many they ate. The bats consumed about 10 per minute, or 600 per hour. But mosquitoes were the only insects in the room for the hungry bats to eat. Since then, studies have found that mosquitoes make up less than 1 percent of bat diets.
http://www.mosquitoworld.net/mosquito-myths/
Mixed feelings about this (Score:3, Informative)
My question for the armchair epidemiologists here is to what extent this is outweighed by bats' feeding on mosquitoes (in the areas which this story concerns).
Re:Mixed feelings about this (Score:5, Interesting)
Cute, and potentially deadly weapons of mass destruction [napalmbiography.com]! Note that your concern about germs has not gone unconsidered in history.
Excerpted from The Scientific Method [amazon.com] by Louis Fieser:
The carrying power of a 10-11 gram bat is indeed amazing, some 15-18 grams; the incendiary bomb was in this range (17.5 grams). Bats can carry such loads for miles. And bats with dummy bombs released in housed areas dragged the loads into sites highly favorable for fire-starting. We released bats successfully at various altitudes both from the B-2 S and from an open Attack Bomber, in which flying was great fun. The smoke bombs functioned satisfactorily and provided further information. Col. Epler and the Qther officers all favored a full-scale trial with live incendiaries to be injected for a 10-minute take-off just before release. I considered a live test highly hazardous and likely to lead to disclosure o£ the project. I also thought it unnecessary. But the officers insisted that a report to the CWS and AAF chiefs would be incomplete without it and so, on a Saturday, a live test was scheduled for the following Monday.
Everything went off on schedule, and shortly after dinner the bomber flew in loaded with shrieking, kicking bats. The airmen had taken delight in a form of hunting which consisted in swinging landing nets at the mouth of an inexhaustible cave, and the crates were all jam full. The crates were loaded into the truck and the refrigeration turned on full tilt. But the howling went on without abate for a couple of hours, and it became evident that the refrigerating unit was not adequate to cope with such a large amount of body heat all of a sudden. So we mounted a series of fans in positions to blow air in over cakes of ice. Finally, about midnight, the noise ceased; hibernation had been accomplished. A night watch of soldiers took over, and we turned in.
The next day the bats were still nicely quiet and we started a trial with the lightest of the dummy bombs. A first batch of bats in hibernation with weights attached was dumped out of the bomber at a low altitude, 2,000 ft. as I recall. The ground crew scurried around in jeeps and eventually located a group of free-fallers large enough to show that few if any of the bats had come out of hibernation. Other batches were released from higher and higher altitudes, which made reconnaissance increasingly difficult. Eventually it was clear that the bats were not in hibernation but dead. Our cooling had been too efficient, too sudden.
Imagine, then, a surprise attack on Tokyo in which a succession of bombers would operate at high altitude for about half an hour, say starting at midnight, each delivering a load of bat-bombs equivalent to some 3,700 fires. There would be no explosions or fire bursts to give warning, and the bombers would depart. With the activated mechanisms all set for a fourhour delay, bombs in strategic and not easily detectable locations would start popping all over the city at 4 a.m. An attractive picture? AU those working on the project thought so. Then, suddenly, X-ray was cancelled. I never learned the reason, but can make a guess. The bats would be vectors for bombs, but they would be vectors also for germs. Our side might be accused of initiating biological warfare. But the job was done very effectively by M-69s.
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You're a genius! To save the bats we refer to them as 'wetware weapons delivery systems' and the DoD and right wing politicians will start throwing money at the problem.
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You know what's said about genius: 1% inspiration, 99% staying up way too late reading Slashdot.
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I am so totally going to steal that.
Re:Mixed feelings about this (Score:4, Informative)
incorrect.
Typically less than 1% of a bat population is sick (rabies, etc.). The reason this fallacy has gained traction is that bats, normally a very shy creature, are more likely to come into human contact when they are sick. They become easier to capture and less likely to fly away when a human approaches them.
i would highly recommend looking at a valid scientific website and not just wiki.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110131133323.htm
MOD PARENT UP (Score:3)
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... [nih.gov]
http://rspb.royalsocietypublis... [royalsocie...ishing.org]
By the way, implying 1% rabies infection rate is not a concern is ludicrous, as it's plenty to prevent eradication of a infection with human mortality rates, when undiscovered before symptoms, only rivaled by prion disease.
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Bats don't control mosquitoes (Score:3)
Mosquitoes are an insignificant part (under 1% [mosquito.org]) of the diet of insectivorous bats. Bats prefer moths and wasps - many more calories per catch. Bats will eat mosquitoes, they just prefer just about anything else.
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Mosquitoes are an insignificant part (under 1% [mosquito.org]) of the diet of insectivorous bats. Bats prefer moths and wasps - many more calories per catch.
Bats will eat mosquitoes, they just prefer just about anything else.
You're claim does not even remotely follow from your citation. Liverwurst is far more nutritious than cake... NO ONE PREFERS liverwurst to cake.
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Re:Bats don't control mosquitoes (Score:4, Interesting)
Interestingly enough, it's difficult to find quantitative information ranking mosquito predators. I tried, and all I came up with was a literature review [e-m-b.org] on British mosquito predation, which primarily listed lots of things known to eat mosquitoes if placed in a tank with only mosquitoes. That paper also made the comment that it's difficult to find information. The phrase "poorly understood" is frequently found in the papers I did come across.
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There appear to be absolutely no creatures which subsist primarily on mosquitoes, but nobody knows for sure. The problem is that you have to analyze stomach contents to find mosquitoes, you can't just analyze some mosquitoes to find out who eats them.
As far as anybody can tell, though, we could lose mosquitoes entirely with no big secondary effects. So let's get on eradicating those fuckers. Way more important than anything the Gates foundation has claimed to do.
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As far as anybody can tell, though, we could lose mosquitoes entirely with no big secondary effects. So let's get on eradicating those fuckers. Way more important than anything the Gates foundation has claimed to do.
Considering one of the pieces of the Gates Foundation anti-malaria campaign is sterile mosquito introduction in an effort to eradicate the local population I think you're a bit off there.
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Considering one of the pieces of the Gates Foundation anti-malaria campaign is sterile mosquito introduction in an effort to eradicate the local population I think you're a bit off there.
Sterile mosquitoes are well-known to only retard the problem as long as you're doing it. It will require more severe measures to eradicate the mosquito.
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Nuke all known mosquito habitat from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
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Mosquitoes are an insignificant part (under 1% [mosquito.org]) of the diet of insectivorous bats. Bats prefer moths and wasps - many more calories per catch. Bats will eat mosquitoes, they just prefer just about anything else.
I've seen some pretty impressive insect eating campaigns by bats. One was late day when there were hundreds of swallows flting above a church and catching gawd knows how many insects, must have been a hatch that day. Then as it was almost dark, the swallows flew away to be instantaneously replaced by bats. Likewise hundreds of them. Now imagine should the swallows and bats go away. The insects like that. But we might not.
Second was one evening I was driving in the woods, and my headlights suddenly illumin
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Sounds like a great idea until they take up residence in your house.
They normally huddle in trees. But the eaves and soffits of your house are much better for huddling in to stay warm, because besides being cozy and secluded, they naturally collect heat during the day. It is a very annoying process to exclude the bats without killing them once they're moved in, and once they're out you have to immediately seal every opening over 1/4 inch in diameter or they'll come back. Yes, that small.
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Sounds like a great idea until they take up residence in your house.
They normally huddle in trees. But the eaves and soffits of your house are much better for huddling in to stay warm, because besides being cozy and secluded, they naturally collect heat during the day. It is a very annoying process to exclude the bats without killing them once they're moved in, and once they're out you have to immediately seal every opening over 1/4 inch in diameter or they'll come back. Yes, that small.
Living in a wooded development, we've had issues with Squirrels, bats and chipmunks.
As it turns out, there is a fairly simple solution to all three. First thing is you need to seal up the ingress points. Turns out we had a triple walled Chimney which was part of an ill thought out scheme to use as ventilation. But the wire mesh deteriorated over the years. So you have to take care of that. But now you might have animals trapped inside. Stinky dead squirrel sucks.
Now where's the trick. You make a egress
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Next up... (Score:2)
we can work on a cure for politicians' "brown-nose syndrome"...
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Are you looking for someone to destroy one tenth of your ass for being and anonymous coward, or do you not understand that etymology and current definition can be not completely the same?
Here's the real news about the Pd cure (Score:4, Informative)
The article referred to in the original news above is fluff. Here's the actual publication being used to effect a probiotic cure for the bats:
http://journals.plos.org/ploso... [plos.org]
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http://www.biomedcentral.com/1... [biomedcentral.com]
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Thanks for the correction and reference. The original news posting is fluff, without any reference to the biological literature, so I though the cure was new enough to be seen in a one-year search radius, and missed the 2012 paper--my bad.
Dislexia acting up again (Score:2)
Not a Cure (Score:2)
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matte... [mnn.com]
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The trials that were conducted were a treatment, not a cure. A cure insinuates the organism is no longer susceptible to the disease, which is not the case with these treatments. A better article, that represents our research and treatments, and quotes us better, is the MNN article below.
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matte... [mnn.com]
I expect their cure to be temporary.
Fungus, if it's stopped by bacteria is due to living space and biological niche being filled.
Just like someone on lots of antibiotics is at higher risk of thrush infections (fungus) and can be helped by consuming "probiotic" foods, the inoculation will depend on the bacteria PERSISTING on the bat and staying there.
For whatever reason, bacteria that used to fulfill the role for bats is gone and the niche was exploited by the fungus.
Finding something more effective
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I expect their cure to be temporary.
Again, it is not a cure. To use this word is misleading at best. I am one of the researchers who are developing this treatment, if you did not pick that up from the wording of my comment you replied to.
Fungus, if it's stopped by bacteria is due to living space and biological niche being filled.
The bacteria being used for treatment are not contacting the bat or the environment, therefor there is no persistence on either. Please read the article before making these kinds of assumptions. This is exactly now misinformation is spread.
For whatever reason, bacteria that used to fulfill the role for bats is gone and the niche was exploited by the fungus.
Quite the contrary. Microbiome research conducted on bats does not sug
Rehab (Score:2)
Sort of not surprising (Score:1)