National Zoo to breed bats to study disease that killed 1 million

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WASHINGTON - Wildlife experts believe the White Nose Syndrome epidemic that has killed more than a million bats isn't going away anytime soon, so Washington's National Zoo is creating an "insurance" population of bats to preserve one species and study the disease.

"The spread of this disease is like nothing we've seen before in the wildlife community," said Jane Lyder, the U.S. Interior Department's assistant deputy secretary for fish, wildlife and parks, at a news conference this week.

There are 45 bat species in the U.S., and six are endangered. The spread of the condition means more species might have to be added to that endangered list, Lyder said. Bats are responsible for fruit pollination, and they feed on insects -- one bat can eat 1,000 mosquitoes in an hour.

Officials still don't know much about the disease. The white fungus was first found on bats in a New York cave in 2006.

In the past three years, White Nose Syndrome has spread to 81 known sites in nine states -- Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia.

Jeremy Coleman, an endangered species biologist working with the Interior Department, said the disease is acting like a pathogen, spreading quickly, already hitting all six northeastern cave bat species.

The syndrome has a 90 percent mortality rate and attacks bats while they are hibernating, when their immune systems are suppressed. The bats eventually die from malnutrition, but it's not known whether the fungus contributes to their emaciation or if it's because they awake early from hibernation and can't find food.

However, officials do know the fungus is found only on the bats' skin, not the fur. Other animals found in the caves -- insects, snakes, birds and raccoons that eat the bats - don't appear to be affected by the diseases. Damp caves seem to attract more WNS cases, and bat species that migrate for the winter aren't affected.

The Interior Department gave $322,000 to the zoo to fund its project for the next two years. That grant was part of $800,000 the department allocated for WNS research. Interior has spent $4.3 million on WNS research since 2007.

The zoo plans to look after 40 Virginia big-eared bats, a species that's already endangered. Found in Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina, the bats reside in only nine caves. As insectivores, they are more difficult to care for than fruit-eating bats, and this is the first federally backed effort to raise insect-eating bats.

Bats will be collected the first week of November, before they go into hibernation. Each will be implanted with a microchip and monitored around the clock, as if they "are in intensive care," said Luis Padrilla, the zoo's Conservation and Research Center veterinarian, who is on the team that's caring for the insurance population.

The Conservation Research Center is located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Front Royal, Va. The facility is open to the public only one weekend a year, and the bats will be off limits to anyone but researchers, especially since it is not known if human interaction transmits the disease.

The center ran a similar program 20 years ago with the black-footed ferret. Only 18 ferrets existed at the time due to human interference, and the center brought the species' population up to more than 500 after 20 years.

It will be difficult to bring bat populations up to what they were before the syndrome because bats only produce about one pup a year, Coleman said.

Coleman said he personally thinks WNS is an invasive disease -- meaning it came from outside of the U.S. -- but has no evidence.

A similar disease struck Europe in the early 1980s, he said. Those bat populations weren't affected as severely as those in the U.S. have been, but it could have been a different disease.

Bats in Europe tend to cluster by the hundreds, while U.S. species cluster by the thousands. That could have made the disease less deadly, Coleman said.

"Bats have been very much maligned and often ignored in favor of other, more charismatic species," Padrilla said. "When I was a child, I thought bats only came out at Halloween or were Dracula. Or people think of them as little flying rats spreading rabies. ... But we're working to prevent them from going extinct."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)