America’s Most Common Bat Headed for Eastern Extinction

[n2doc]

By Brandon Keim

By the time today’s toddlers graduate from high school, the most common bat in North America may have vanished altogether from the eastern United States.

Researchers combined historical population trends with mortality counts in Myotis lucifugus colonies struck by White-Nose Syndrome, an extraordinarily virulent bat disease first identified in 2006. According to their models, M. lucifugus, better known as the little brown bat, has a 99 percent chance of vanishing from the east, soon.

“If mortality and spread continue the way it has in the past four years, that’s where we get the very distressing prediction of a high chance of regional extinction in 16 to 20 years,” said Winifred Frick, a Boston University bat researcher.

White-Nose Syndrome — shortened to WNS, and named after a fungus that grows on infected bats, which become weakened and die after waking too soon from hibernation — was first found in upstate New York. Since then it’s spread through caves as far south as Tennessee, and west as far as Oklahoma. In some caves, mortality is almost total. Caves where bats lived since the last Ice Age now stand silent.



Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/bat-extinction/

[HillbillyBob]

1. This is very bad, bats help keep insect populations in check

Then we have the honey bees dying and disappearing too.
WE are ruining our planets ecosystem, once its gone so are we.

[stuntcat]

2. sickening.

ALL animals are important but bats are one of those that ONLY TOTAL ASSHOLES take for granted. And bees of course. We have the scary 'ugly' things to thank for every bite we take, you'd thing the Consumers would wise up but no, they're backward-ass monkeys taking Dominion of the whole fycking world.
:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:

We used to see bats every night as the sun went down, so we put up four bathouses. But now we don't see as many, but we're in a bright city so maybe that's why.

[n2doc]

3. I see bats all the time around our house

It is lots of fun to go walking in the evening and watch them hunt bugs. I fear for their future.