Gallery: A Visit to a Site of the Batpocalypse
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Rather than holding out and recovering, it's possible the bats will be hit again, and every winter to come, until they're all gone. A couple of years after that, the last skeletons will have decomposed. It will be as if they never existed. Only time will tell.
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The most important question is: Have these bats hit bottom yet? Perhaps the few remaining bats represent a resistant population of survivors, immune to the ravages of disease. Maybe someday, several centuries from now, these slow-breeding animals will have refilled the cave with life.
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It's impossible to know, and impossible not to wonder, whether and what the bats in this cave think of what's happened. Of course, this isn't a question that scientists ask, at least not formally. Biology still hasn't recovered from a half-century of behaviorist supremacy. Chimpanzees and whales may be exempted from B.F. Skinner's brutal and dogmatic insistence that [animals are mechanical](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/08/0818bf-skinner-in-box/), incapable of meaningful consciousness -- but not yet bats. Dogma aside, though, bats live for decades and use complex verbal communications. One researcher told me he feels that bats have language. And when you see a pair that will spend the next several months sleeping side by side, awaking briefly every few weeks, partners in hibernation and warmth ... what's more "logical"? To assume the absence of feeling, or the possibility of something like companionship and memory?
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On this little brown bat, the fungus is already evident, growing in patches on its wings. Bat wings are marvelous pieces of design. Bats may be the only flying mammals, but they're as aerodynamic and nimble as any bird. The fungus will eat right into them. It's one likely reason why bats with WNS seem to wake and groom so often during the winter. And then, as waking from hibernation is so draining -- imagine having the flu, and being driven out of bed into the cold at 3 in the morning again, and again, and again -- they burn up their fat reserves and fly outside, looking for food. Except it's winter, and there is no food. One Pennsylvania biologist I visited described a cave -- visible on the landscape as a hole in the ground -- out of which a bat flew, every minute, for about six weeks last winter. The bats died scattered in the snow of the surrounding countryside. It's as if the ground itself were sick, spewing up life. New York has lost more than 90 percent of its cave-dwelling, hibernating bats. So has Vermont. The disease has spread to 14 states and two Canadian provinces, and could go nationwide. Up to half of all bat species in the United States may be threatened.
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The researchers swabbed the bats' fur and took biopsies of their wings. These samples will be sent to academic researchers. Much of the research on WNS occurs in this way. State biologists are out in the field, working directly with the bats. Their names generally won't end up in prominent positions on high-profile scientific papers, but their work is invaluable. Most, if not all of the bats in this cave likely carry *Geomyces destructans*, the fungus that (almost certainly) causes WNS. At this point in the season, however, it can't be seen. The bats have just gone into hibernation, so it hasn't had time to grow.
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ROSENDALE, New York -- Until several years ago, about 100,000 bats hibernated in an abandoned limestone mine outside of town. I visited the site with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation's bat biologists on Nov. 8. White Nose Syndrome, the virulent bat-killing disease first seen in 2006 in upstate New York, reached here in 2008. About 1,500 bats are thought to have survived.
