Potential Treatment for Deadly U.S. Bat Disease

White-nose syndrome is a poorly understood condition that, in the two years since its discovery, has spread to at least seven northeastern states and killed as many as half a million bats.

A pair of researchers has proposed a novel way to help bats in the Northeast survive a deadly fungal attack that has decimated the flying mammals' populations during the past two winters.

Instead of treating the fungus directly, Justin Boyles, a graduate student in biology at Indiana State University, and colleague Craig Willis of the University of Winnipeg, propose putting sources of heat in hibernation caves to allow bats to warm themselves during the times that they briefly come out of hibernation.

It's believed the newly identified fungus causes the bats to spend more time out of hibernation, depleting their fat reserves to keep warm and eventually causing them to starve to death.

Since bats normally fly to the warmest part of a cave during the brief breaks in their wintertime slumber, the use of warming boxes could help the species survive until a long-term cure is discovered.

Boyles and Willis write in the journal Frontiers in Ecology that the method could cause mortality rates from "white nose syndrome" to drop to as little as 8 percent if localized heat sources are used.

Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service