The federal government’s animal-CSI investigative team has finished its work, and now it’s official. White nose syndrome, the mass killer of bats from the East Coast to Oklahoma, somehow afflicted a little brown bat in the Cascade Mountains region of Washington.
That shouldn’t have been possible. Bats only fly so far, and it’s taken the fungus 11 years to spread 1,500 miles from Albany, New York, where it was first detected. So how did it suddenly jump another 1,300 miles from Oklahoma to the Cascades?
The question might not be answered for months. But what’s certain, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, is that the fungus on the Washington bat matches the Pseudogymnoascus destructans that has killed at least 7 million bats in the East and the Midwest. The USGS announced the results Wednesday.
The notion that this could happen was so outlandish that scientists considered a variety of other explanations. They wondered if the fungus were a different strain brought from elsewhere in the world by a traveler who’d unknowingly tracked it, or if it were some kind of clone of the original fungus. A DNA analysis put those theories to rest.
“Although it remains unclear how [Pseudogymnoascus destructans] reached Washington, this finding guides us to look to North America as the source,” said Jonathan Sleeman, director of the National Wildlife Health Center.
Here’s why that sends chills up the spines of bat biologists and the close-knit groups of regular people who love the animals. White nose kills most of what it touches – not only little brown bats, which enter caves and mines for their annual winter migration and never fly out, but also big brown bats, Indiana bats and a host of others. In Pennsylvania, more than 95 percent of little brown bats were gone in 2012.
More than likely, the number of dead bats has surpassed the 7 million estimate that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service offered that year. The agency dialed down talk of the estimate because it was challenged and proving the number was hard. But over the last five years, bats have only continued to die, with no cure in sight.
Added to the mystery of how white nose first reached the United States, and how to kill it, is how it reached Washington unnoticed.
“Every single avenue we look at seems far fetched,” Greg Falxa, a wildlife biologist for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, said in April after the dying bat was found by a hiker. “This bat had the deterioration already, which suggests the fungus didn’t just get here this year. Who knows how it got here? Everything is speculation right now.”
The speculation continues. But the reality is clear, and grim, conservationists say.
“I think this is really bad,” Katie Gillies, director of the Imperiled Species Program at Bat Conservation International in Texas, said this spring. “I really do think this is a big leap. Now we’re going to see it radiate from that new point. It’s like having breast cancer and finding that it’s metastasized.”