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| A little brown bat is swabbed during a white nose syndrome study Dec. 15 at New Mammoth Cave near LaFollette, Tenn. Researchers with the University of Tennessee and Bucknell University are collecting 100 little brown bats. Photo by Amy Smotherman Burgess |
Working by head-lamp light, the researchers quickly turned this portion of the cave into an underground laboratory. A set of scales was removed from one of the backpacks, along with surgical gloves, swabs, notebooks, tweezers and vials. A boulder slab served as a work table. The first little brown bat plucked from the ceiling tipped the scales at 8.2 grams, about the weight of a quarter.
It was Day Two of a research blitz aimed at combating white nose syndrome, a fast-spreading fungal disease that infects bats while they hibernate. Discovered in New York state during the winter of 2006, the disease has killed more than one million bats across the northeastern U.S. and has since been confirmed in six counties in Tennessee.
Researchers with the University of Tennessee and Bucknell University recently made back-to-back visits to two Tennessee caves to collect 100 little brown bats needed for their research projects. Joining them were representatives from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency and The Nature Conservancy.
"One of the issues for white nose syndrome research is that a lot of the work has to be done in labs where they can control the variables, so they have to have bats," said Cory Holliday, cave specialist for The Nature Conservancy. "In the Northeast, they're literally running out of bats due to the epidemic, so they come here."
Inside the cave, Amanda Janicki, a graduate student in the UT Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, swabbed the forearm and muzzle of each little brown bat to test for the fungal spores that cause white nose syndrome. In assembly-line fashion, each bat was swabbed, banded and weighed before being placed in a small bag bearing its wing tag number.
Some of the bats were injected beneath the skin with a tiny implant that contained Lamisil, the same antifungal medicine used to treat athlete's foot. This new approach is the idea of Marcy Souza, assistant professor of public health and wildlife medicine at the UT College of Veterinary Medicine, who said a similar technique is used to administer melatonin to ferrets to treat adrenal disease.
Souza said the bats with the antifungal implants would be rushed to Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pa., where they'd be infected with the white nose syndrome fungus and placed in a special refrigerated chamber designed to simulate the conditions of a winter cave.
"This is a clinical trial to see if it works," Souza said. "If it comes down to species survival, we could bring the bats into captivity and treat them with the implants, which involves less handling than if we gave them daily injections. It's having to treat bats on an individual basis, but at this point we're willing to try anything."
With almost 10,000 caves, Tennessee is the most cave-rich state in the U.S. Since the arrival of white nose syndrome, caves on state and federally owned lands throughout the country have been placed off-limits to recreational caving to help contain the exotic fungus, Geomyces destructans, that leads to the disease.
Tennessee is home to 15 bat species, eight of which hibernate in caves or mines. White nose syndrome has been found on three of the state's most common bat species — little brown, northern long-eared and tri-colored bat — but so far the disease has not been documented on Tennessee's two federally endangered bat species, the gray and Indiana bat.
White nose syndrome gets its name from the fungal spores that show up as white flecks on the bat's snout and wings. Recent research suggests the disease kills by damaging the bats' wing membranes, which causes them to dehydrate and eventually die as they leave the cave and burn precious winter fuel reserves looking for water.
Scientists say the disease so far has not spread across Tennessee as rapidly as was feared. Some even hold out hope that white nose syndrome might encounter a natural barrier in the South where winters are warmer and hibernation periods are shorter than in the northern U.S.
Meanwhile, wildlife agencies and universities are scrambling to advance a treatment that can address the fungus without harming the caves' fragile environments.
The recent two-day cave blitz in Tennessee was designed to serve numerous research projects simultaneously to minimize the cave disturbance.
After two hours the scientists exited the cave. After a short hike down the mountain they came to an SUV parked at the edge of the woods where they loaded the sleeping bats — each individually bagged — into two large coolers for the 12-hour drive back to Bucknell University.
"Sometimes you have to take individuals out of a population to benefit the entire population," observed Sterling Daniels, TWRA wildlife biologist. "It's a small sacrifice when you think of the bigger picture."
Researchers with the University of Tennessee and Bucknell University recently made back-to-back visits to two Tennessee caves to collect 100 little brown bats needed for their research projects. Joining them were representatives from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency and The Nature Conservancy.
"One of the issues for white nose syndrome research is that a lot of the work has to be done in labs where they can control the variables, so they have to have bats," said Cory Holliday, cave specialist for The Nature Conservancy. "In the Northeast, they're literally running out of bats due to the epidemic, so they come here."
Inside the cave, Amanda Janicki, a graduate student in the UT Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, swabbed the forearm and muzzle of each little brown bat to test for the fungal spores that cause white nose syndrome. In assembly-line fashion, each bat was swabbed, banded and weighed before being placed in a small bag bearing its wing tag number.
Some of the bats were injected beneath the skin with a tiny implant that contained Lamisil, the same antifungal medicine used to treat athlete's foot. This new approach is the idea of Marcy Souza, assistant professor of public health and wildlife medicine at the UT College of Veterinary Medicine, who said a similar technique is used to administer melatonin to ferrets to treat adrenal disease.
Souza said the bats with the antifungal implants would be rushed to Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pa., where they'd be infected with the white nose syndrome fungus and placed in a special refrigerated chamber designed to simulate the conditions of a winter cave.
"This is a clinical trial to see if it works," Souza said. "If it comes down to species survival, we could bring the bats into captivity and treat them with the implants, which involves less handling than if we gave them daily injections. It's having to treat bats on an individual basis, but at this point we're willing to try anything."
With almost 10,000 caves, Tennessee is the most cave-rich state in the U.S. Since the arrival of white nose syndrome, caves on state and federally owned lands throughout the country have been placed off-limits to recreational caving to help contain the exotic fungus, Geomyces destructans, that leads to the disease.
Tennessee is home to 15 bat species, eight of which hibernate in caves or mines. White nose syndrome has been found on three of the state's most common bat species — little brown, northern long-eared and tri-colored bat — but so far the disease has not been documented on Tennessee's two federally endangered bat species, the gray and Indiana bat.
White nose syndrome gets its name from the fungal spores that show up as white flecks on the bat's snout and wings. Recent research suggests the disease kills by damaging the bats' wing membranes, which causes them to dehydrate and eventually die as they leave the cave and burn precious winter fuel reserves looking for water.
Scientists say the disease so far has not spread across Tennessee as rapidly as was feared. Some even hold out hope that white nose syndrome might encounter a natural barrier in the South where winters are warmer and hibernation periods are shorter than in the northern U.S.
Meanwhile, wildlife agencies and universities are scrambling to advance a treatment that can address the fungus without harming the caves' fragile environments.
The recent two-day cave blitz in Tennessee was designed to serve numerous research projects simultaneously to minimize the cave disturbance.
After two hours the scientists exited the cave. After a short hike down the mountain they came to an SUV parked at the edge of the woods where they loaded the sleeping bats — each individually bagged — into two large coolers for the 12-hour drive back to Bucknell University.
"Sometimes you have to take individuals out of a population to benefit the entire population," observed Sterling Daniels, TWRA wildlife biologist. "It's a small sacrifice when you think of the bigger picture."