By Jenni Vincent, Journal staff writer, September 27, 2009 MARTINSBURG – It’s only been three years since White-nose syndrome was discovered in bats living in caves near Albany, N.Y., but the number of bats now believed to have this fungus has grown significantly and spread to other states such as West Virginia. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials, who are working to determine the cause of this problem, are not only worried about an “unprecedented die-off of thousands of bats in the Northeast,” but also are concerned about bat populations nationwide. “We have found sick, dying and dead bats in unprecedented numbers in and around caves and mines from Vermont to Virginia. In some hibernaculum, 90 to 100 percent of the bats are dying,” a Fish and Wildlife Service Web site reads. In a cave advisory issued earlier this year, federal officials said it has not only “killed hundreds of thousands” of bats in northeastern states, but it threatens to spread to the Midwest and Southeast – home to many federally endangered bat species, as well as one of the largest bat populations in the country. Those concerns have not gone unnoticed locally. Bob Bennett, Tri-State Grotto vice chairman, is familiar with the Mount Aeolus cave in Dorset, Vt., which he calls the “poster child” for this mysterious malady because of how severely it has impacted bat populations there. “The cave is a big bat hibernaculum. And at that cave alone, out of thousands and thousands of bats, none of them are left. That’s the poster child because there have been a lot of pictures of all the dead bats lying on the ground and outside the cave,” Bennett said. …
Southern bats now dying from fungus via Apocadocs
