An invasive fungus that kills hibernating bats is taking its toll more slowly than expected in Tennessee. That may be thanks in part to the relatively mild winter. WPLN’s Daniel Potter reports on the fungus that gives bats white-nose syndrome.
The fungus grows in caves before spreading onto bats – particularly their faces, hence the name for white-nose. It makes it hard for bats to stay asleep through winter. Often infected bats wake up when it’s cold and there aren’t many bugs to eat, and end up starving or freezing to death.
Except, as the Tennessee Nature Conservancy’s Cory Holliday notes, this past winter was warmer than usual:
“In Tennessee, especially winters like this, if bats are diseased and they’re having problems, they can come out of the cave and feed here. It’s one of the big issues in the Northeast – when bats have this disease they come out of hibernation real frequently, wake up and burn up all their fat reserves.”
In New England, where the fungus first began its spread a few years ago, white-nose has wiped out millions of bats. Holliday says Tennessee has yet to see die-offs of that scale. And if white nose moves slower in the south, it could buy more time for bats – and for researchers looking for a way to protect them.
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