Giorgia Auteri is still haunted by what she saw in an abandoned mine in 2014. As a graduate student studying how bats hibernate, Auteri would frequently climb into mines and caves to observe thousands of bats hanging from the walls as they slept.
But when she entered a mine in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 2014, she discovered a huge colony of dead bats on the floor.
“There was a smell of death,” recalled Dr. Auteri, now a biologist at Missouri State University.
In 2007, a fungus began spreading among North American bats, causing a disease called white-nose syndrome, which causes the bats to develop patches of pale hairs on their bodies and leads to death. The pathogen first appeared in New York state and then spread westward. Since Dr. Auteri’s horrifying discovery, the pathogen has spread farther west, killing millions of bats all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
White-nose syndrome has been devastating not only to bats but also to the ecosystems they inhabit. Bats have long been considered pests that transmit rabies, but they eat huge amounts of insects, and without them, insect populations could explode. This month, researchers reported that the dramatic decline in bat populations due to white-nose syndrome has led to increased use of pesticides against crop-eating insects, which the researchers say is linked to higher infant mortality rates.
When Dr. Auteri brought some dead bats from a Michigan cave back to his lab to study them in 2014, he said it felt like a kind of grief, like witnessing an unstoppable catastrophe.
But a decade later, her grief has turned to hope. Dr. Auteri and other researchers have gained important insights into how white-nose disease kills bats, and that knowledge has sparked a movement to stop the die-off. Now scientists are working to eradicate the fungus and find ways to help bats survive the infection.
“It feels like we’re finally starting to see signs of recovery,” said Greg Turner, a wildlife biologist with the Pennsylvania Game and Game Commission. “We feel a lot more secure, that’s for sure.”
