Another Canary in the Mine?

Buried back on page A21 of the Saturday March 22, 2008 Toronto Star was a story about a new disease that is killing bats in the U.S. Northwest. White-nose syndrome as it has been dubbed typically appears as a white powdery dusting on the animals’ nose. In most cases the bats that have it become dehydrated and die. It first appeared last winter in New York State and has since spread to Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut this winter. This new disease, previously unknown to science, has a mortality rate of 50% to 90% in all infected animals. Last winter 8,000 to 11,000 over wintering bats in the Albany, New York area died of this disease, perhaps half of the total local population.

A lot of people don’t like bats. At best they think of them as flying mice, at worst they get to be bit players in our darker fantasies. Despite this unearned reputation bats play an incredibly important role in the ecosystem, eating literally tons of insects every warm summer night, controlling populations of moths, flies and mosquitoes. We might want to think about that this summer in Toronto when there will undoubtedly be yet another series of dire warnings about the dangers of West Nile Virus, the potentially fatal condition carried by, you guessed it, mosquitoes. As far as we know white-nose syndrome hasn’t affected bats in southern Ontario yet. We better hope it doesn’t because if it does we will have a lot fewer allies out there controlling mosquito populations for us this summer. What will we fall back on then; aerial spraying, pesticide in ponds and wetlands?

At this point no one knows why this disease has started to kill the bats of the U.S. northwest as they hibernate in their caves. But like the fungal infections that have begun to attack amphibians in North America, or the collapse of honey bee colonies, we need to be paying attention to this. Something is happening to these little canaries in the coal mine and we ignore their fate at our own peril.