Archive for the ‘white-nose syndrome’ Tag

Helping bats get to the light at the end of the tunnel

I’ll admit that the reading I’ve done on white-nose syndrome over the last few weeks has been pretty depressing- at one point I saw an estimate of 6.7 million bat deaths so far (Cohn 2012), which is a horrifying number. But I think it would be even more horrifying to simply resign ourselves to the […]

Posted July 24, 2013 by Mirka Zapletal in Mammals

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If the fungus can’t take the heat (or cold), will it leave the bat alone?

Looking through the most recent literature on white-nose syndrome isn’t exactly reassuring, although it does suggest that progress is being made in understanding how the fungus affects bats and what conditions may help bats survive infection. As of last year, at least 19 US states and 4 Canadian provinces contained infected bats (Blehert 2012) and […]

Losing our insect control

Over the past week, I’ve been looking into when and how scientists first became aware of white-nose syndrome in northeast bats, as well as what the loss of those bats could mean for all of us. It’s pretty depressing reading on the whole- especially when you realize that it has developed so quickly. What were […]

Things that flutter in the night

This month I had some help picking a topic to focus on- a fellow doctoral student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette had approached me about doing something together and then suggested bats as a topic. To be specific, she suggested white-nose syndrome, and I agreed with her for several reasons: first, bats are […]

Posted July 3, 2013 by Mirka Zapletal in Mammals

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