"Researchers have found several promising ways to thwart the fungus, which causes the deadly white-nose syndrome in bats."
"Giorgia Auteri is still haunted by what she saw in an abandoned mine in 2014. As a graduate student studying how bats hibernate, she had frequently climbed into mines and caves to observe thousands of sleeping bats hanging from the walls.
But when she walked into the mine in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 2014, she discovered heaps of dead bats on the floor.
“It smelled of death,” recalled Dr. Auteri, now a biologist at Missouri State University.
A fungus began spreading among bats in North America in 2007, causing a disease called white-nose syndrome, which marks the animals with patches of pale fuzz before killing them. The pathogen first appeared in New York State and then spread west. Since Dr. Auteri’s grisly discovery, it has moved even farther west, killing many millions of bats all the way to the Pacific."
Carl Zimmer reports for the New York Times with photographs by Graham Dickie September 17, 2024.
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