Many caves will remain closed in Tennessee this summer in an effort to slow the spread of a disease that’s been wiping out whole colonies of bats in the northeast.
State agencies first closed their caves to visitors two summers ago, in hopes of limiting the spread of white-nose syndrome, an invasive fungus that disrupts bats’ hibernation. It causes them to wake up in winter when there’s nothing to eat, and often starve or freeze to death.
The Nature Conservancy’s Cory Holliday says the disease has killed off perhaps millions of bats in its spread from cave to cave over the last few years. He says the state’s ongoing closures are meant to keep humans from making things worse.
“But the largest transmission is definitely bat-to-bat transmission, and there’s very little you can do to control that because bats fly long distances.”
Holliday says the unfolding disaster has economic consequences, because bats eat crop pests, saving farmers billions of dollars in insect-control.
WEB EXTRA:
Cory Holliday on the prospect of losing cave-dwelling bats in North America:
Of the almost 10 thousand known caves in Tennessee, Holliday says about 750 are on public property.
“And we have a lot of caves on private property that are protected as well, either through management agreements or cave gates… And really, the largest user-group of caves, the recreational caving community, are very, very conservation minded. They typically know where bat caves are, more than land managers such as myself, and they do a pretty good job of staying out of them when the bats are present.”
State agencies closed caves on public property even before white-nose syndrome had been spotted in Tennessee. According to the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency other groups followed suit, including the Nature Conservancy, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Link back to WPLN’s story on the confirmation of white-nose in Tennessee.
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