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11/15/2009: Whats killing the bats?, Boston Globe Magazine

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At least 1 million have died in the past three years from a mysterious disease, posing serious questions for our environment. But one Boston University biologist is leading the hunt for answers.

By Stacey Chase | November 15, 2009

Thomas Kunz emerges from Aeolus cave in East Dorset, Vermont, with a half-dozen metal ID bands -- smaller than SpaghettiOs -- cupped in the palm of his latex-gloved hand. Theyre tiny emblems of death, having once been affixed to the forearms of little brown bats.

The renowned bat biologist from Boston University, who bears a passing resemblance to Harrison Ford, minutes earlier had recovered the bands while trudging, like a real-life Indiana Jones, through a slippery mud-like ooze of rotting bat carcasses, liquefied internal organs, toothpick-sized bones, piles of guano, and a strange white fungus on the cave floor.

If bats had come out of hell, it couldnt have been worse than this.

What we saw was bat soup. There were a lot of bones of wings and skulls and emulsified bodies, Kunz says. There were dead bats -- decomposing bats -- hanging from the walls of the cave.

My heart sunk, he says, noting some of the bands bore his initials, THK. It was as if I had lost family members.

Its late August, when bats are in their swarming phase, and the 71-year-old Kunz and two fellow biologists have trekked, at night, in hard rain, with heavy gear, 2,520 feet up the rugged Taconic Mountains to Aeolus -- the largest bat hibernaculum in the Northeast -- to bleed live bats and collect samples for researchers leading the hunt for clues into the cause of mysterious bat deaths like these.

At least 1 million bats in the past three years have been wiped out by a puzzling, widespread disease dubbed white-nose syndrome in what preeminent US scientists are calling the most precipitous decline of North American wildlife in human history. If it isnt slowed or stopped, they believe bats will continue disappearing from the landscape in huge numbers and that entire species could become extinct within a decade. Its enough to make some wonder: Is the bat in the cave the new canary in the coal mine?

Were at the vanguard of an environmental catastrophe, says Tim King, a conservation geneticist with the US Geological Survey in West Virginia. Theres very little definitive information available at this point. Everybodys just scrambling, with very limited resources, to do whatever they can to help -- help stop this.

The little brown bat, historically among the most common of North American bats, has been the hardest hit of the six species known to be afflicted with the baffling illness. The others are: the big brown bat, the Eastern small-footed bat, the Northern long-eared bat, the tri-colored bat (formerly known as the Eastern pipistrelle), and the Indiana bat.

The mass deaths are difficult to quantify because wild bats are almost impossible to count, but to scientists monitoring hibernation sites, serious declines are as undeniable as they are unprecedented. Population counts at two dozen small winter colonies in Massachusetts, New York, and Vermont show they have plummeted from 48,626 bats to 2,695 -- an average 94.5 percent decline -- since the outbreak began.

If it continues at this pace, says New York bat specialist Alan Hicks, in a few years we wont have any of these bats.

Scientists are alarmed that white-nose syndrome, unlike many wildlife diseases, is a multi-species killer, infecting nearly every cave-dwelling bat species in states where it has struck. It attacks the bats as they hibernate in caves and mines, typically from mid-October to mid-April.

Since white-nose was detected in February 2006 by a caver photographing a private section of Howe Caverns near Albany, New York -- considered the disease epicenter -- its spread, from New England to South Atlantic states, has been terrifyingly swift. Infected hibernation sites were discovered the second winter less than 20 miles from Howe; the next, about 120 miles; and by last winter, more than 650 miles.

In addition to Massachusetts, New York, and Vermont, the plague-like condition has been confirmed in Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and, earlier this year, Virginia and West Virginia. It appears headed toward caves and mines in Kentucky and Tennessee, and possibly North Carolina and Ohio. (There have been no confirmed cases in Ontario or Quebec.) For Kunz and his colleagues, this winter will be telling.

* * *

White-nose syndrome gets its name from the white fungus that looks like confectioners sugar found around the noses -- as well as on the ears, wings, and other exposed skin -- of many infected bats, though not all show signs of the disease.

Researchers strongly suspect but have not proved that the sickness is caused by a newly identified cold-thriving soil fungus aptly named Geomyces destructans. (Some believe the fungus is a secondary infection that grows on bats with already weakened immune systems.) Nor have they unraveled the enigma of a perplexing chain of events that leads from an apparent fungal infection to erratic bat behavior to death by what appears to be starvation.

The hallmark of the syndrome is a skin infection that creates holes in and scarring of the bats wing membranes, causing them to lose elasticity. Its challenging to think of why an animal might die of a skin infection. Isnt that just like getting athletes foot? says David Blehert, director of diagnostic microbiology at the National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin and lead author of the report that identified the fungus. But you cant really liken it to that, he explains, because this infection actively invades living skin cells.

Initial white-nose studies have produced two consistent findings: The fungus has been found on bats at every site where mass deaths have occurred, and most of the dead bats are emaciated. But the link between them has evaded scientists. The leading hypothesis -- Kunz shorthands it as itch and scratch -- is that the fungus irritates the bats skin, arousing them more frequently than normal in hibernation to groom it off. Those actions, the thinking goes, squander their fat reserves until, ultimately, they starve to death.

The animals, which are nocturnal, are exhibiting other aberrant behaviors, such as clustering near cave entrances where its coldest, perhaps an attempt to lower body temperatures further to conserve energy, and flying around outside in winter, in daylight, possibly in a desperate search for food.

Because Geomyces destructans grows in chilly cave-like temperatures, optimally 41 to 57 degrees Fahrenheit, bat biologists originally thought the die-offs might end when surviving bats fled the hibernacula. But they kept on dying into May and June. Even those bats that might make it through the winter may have sufficient wing damage that theyve lost maneuverability and they cant catch food very effectively, says DeeAnn Reeder, a bat researcher at Bucknell University. So, theres all of these things that are happening to them, and we havent connected those dots.

Heightening concerns further, female bats give birth just once a year to a single pup or twins. They are not going to be able to rebound from this very quickly, if at all, says Vermont Fish and Wildlife biologist Scott Darling.

Scientists are not certain how white-nose syndrome is spread but say its rapid dispersal suggests bats -- which can migrate 200 miles between summer roosts, where they intermingle, and hibernation sites -- are most likely transmitting the disease to one another. Increasingly, however, there are suspicions that humans who explore caves and mines may play a role in the spread by unwittingly carrying fungal spores, which attach to their clothing and equipment, from infected sites to clean ones. As a precaution, the US Forest Service last spring closed approximately 2,000 caves and mines in 33 states in its Eastern and Southern regions for up to one year. The action followed a US Fish and Wildlife Service request that the public observe a caving moratorium in 17 states. Since then, cave owners and managers have closed dozens more.

Of the six species of bats affected so far, only one -- the Indiana bat -- is on the federal endangered list. If white-nose syndrome continues its anticipated blitzkrieg deeper South and into the Midwest, three more species on that list are likely to be imperiled: the gray bat, the Virginia big-eared bat, and the Ozark big-eared bat. Yet even fears that some species could vanish entirely are being overshadowed by the enormity of ordinary bats, like little browns, dying by the tens of thousands. No one can predict the ecological fallout from

1 million dead bats -- some say the actual figure might be double that -- but whenever something is taken out of the ecosystem in large numbers, there are obvious concerns.

Given that the little brown was so numerous and now has become so rare, the potential for impacts on the insect populations and the rest of the ecosystem is much greater from its decline than from the decline of species that were already fairly uncommon, says Mollie Matteson, a conservation advocate with Vermonts Center for Biological Diversity.

All the bat species under siege by white-nose syndrome voraciously feast on night-flying insects like moths, beetles, and leafhoppers that damage agricultural crops and defoliate trees. Fewer bats mean fewer insects consumed, which, in turn, could increase the need for pesticides -- which could set off other unforeseen environmental consequences. Bats also devour mosquitoes, and more mosquitoes mean greater exposure to the diseases they transmit, like West Nile virus and Eastern equine encephalitis. (There is no evidence the bat fungus poses risks to human health.)

The insect-eating ability of bats is staggering: Little browns and other species can consume up to half their body weight in insects a night. Kunz estimates that there are 694 tons of insects loose in the environment now that would have been consumed by the estimated 1 million bats that have already died.

* * *

Back At Aeolus Cave, a captured little brown -- turned on her back and chirping -- is clinging to biologist Ryan Smiths gloved thumb as Kunz pricks a tail-membrane vein with a micro-injection needle, then extracts the blood in glass capillary tubes. Nearby, a third biologist, Susi von Oettingen, gingerly unfolds a just-euthanized little browns rice-paper-thin wing on a white cutting board and, using a biopsy punch, removes a dark speck of skin the size of a pepper seed.

As a pall of death hangs in the cool night air, the bat biologists do the tedious, unglamorous work of collecting blood, tissue, feces, and other samples that they and other researchers across the country need to solve this fatal riddle. Six months earlier, biologists monitoring Aeolus were horrified to find the floor carpeted with about 20,000 freshly dead bats.

Though bats loom large in our imaginations and mythology, up close the Lucys -- the nickname of little browns, or Myotis lucifugus -- are astonishingly fragile creatures with shiny black, map-pin eyes and black, five-digit feet that eerily resemble human hands but are the size of pencil erasers. They typically weigh less than three pennies.

We just havent studied them enough, says von Oettingen, who works at the US Fish and Wildlifes field office in New Hampshire. Theyre not charismatic. . . . We dont make money off of them. They are not cute and cuddly.

The struggle to save the bats has been exasperating because scientists knew frustratingly little about bat ecology to begin with. Now, though, the deadly disease is focusing attention on bats -- the worlds only flying mammal -- like never before. Scientists across the country have convened in Austin, Pittsburgh, and other cities in the past year to discuss everything from possible fungicides to bat genetics, and on June 4, US House subcommittees held hearings on the unexplained deaths.

Still, the response to the deepening crisis has been crippled by a lack of funding and coordination -- one critic calls it a many-tentacled octopus -- among the more than 52 federal and state agencies, academic institutions, caving and conservation groups, and others working on the problem.

Officials at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the lead agency on white-nose syndrome, say about $3.3 million has been allocated to date to study the diseases causes and effects on bats. Two weeks ago, an appropriations bill that earmarks $1.9 million for research this fiscal year became law. However, in a budget request he prepared for Congress, Kunz estimates scientists and wildlife managers need $17.6 million this fiscal year, and $38.3 million more over the next four, for critical research, surveillance, and management.

A biology professor and director of the Center for Ecology and Conservation Biology at Boston University, Kunz has been studying bats for more than 45 years and is uniquely qualified for his leading role in efforts to solve the white-nose syndrome mystery.

Currently, he and researchers in his bat lab are conducting studies, among others, focused on how wing damage caused by the disease (and possibly frostbite) affects the little brown bats ability to navigate and whether the bats can effectively mount an immune response to Geomyces destructans. Kunz has a brevity atypical of scientists when describing his lifelong passion for bats. Theyre nocturnal. Theyre secretive, he says. I just found them fascinating creatures to study.

Before white-nose syndrome, Kunz was perhaps best known for pioneering applications of thermal infrared imaging of bats to assess their impact on agriculture and forest ecosystems. Earlier in his career, he did extensive field work on tropical, fruit-eating bats in India, Ecuador, and other foreign countries, and, in Malaysia, discovered a species of wild bat in which the male lactates.

Last month, Kunzs lifetime of work was recognized with his nomination for the $100,000 Indianapolis Prize, the worlds top animal conservation award. Has he considered retirement? No. Ill probably continue my research on bats until I keel over, he says, chuckling. Im having too much fun.

The latest research examines a strange new twist. European scientists have begun tracking a fungus similar in appearance to Geomyces destructans that has affected bats (different species than their American cousins) for at least two decades -- but with no attributable deaths. The unnamed fungus had been observed in seven countries, including Germany and Switzerland, as far back as the 1980s but piqued interest after Americas devastating bat losses; genetic tests are underway to determine if the fungi are the same. A match could intensify speculation that European cavers inadvertently carried the fungus to New York bat caves on their gear.

It would really be helpful to know if they have the same fungus on bats, and, if so, why its not killing them, says Paul Cryan, a research biologist with the US Geological Survey in Colorado.

Some have tried to draw connections between white-nose syndrome and other, equally mystifying wildlife diseases such as the chytrid fungus that has killed off dozens of frog species over the past three decades and the colony collapse disorder that has decimated about a third of US honeybee colonies in the past few years. Scientists have found no links. Still, Scott Darling, the Vermont Fish and Wildlife biologist, wonders if all the phenomena, taken together, serve as some kind of ominous warning.

This is more than just about bats dying. Its about a key player in our ecosystem disappearing before our eyes, Darling says. It may be a model for the severity of diseases that our native species are going to be confronted with.

If its frogs yesterday, bees two days ago, bats today, and something else in two more years, he adds, how long before this system falls apart on us?

Stacey Chase is a freelance writer in Maine. E-mail her at storychaser@earthlink.net.

11/05/2009: Foxes, skunks spreading bat rabies variant in Arizona, JAVMA News

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Foxes and skunks in northern Arizona are spreading an adapted version of a rabies virus variant associated with bats.

The state is also enduring a second consecutive record year for rabies cases in animals.

More than 200 animals in the state tested positive for rabies in the first nine months of 2009, including dozens of foxes and skunks that were infected with a bat virus variant that has adapted and spread among those terrestrial mammals. By contrast, only 176 rabid animals were discovered in all of 2008.

Craig Levy, an epidemiologist and the manager of the vector-borne disease program for the Arizona Department of Health Services, said southern Arizona has historically had reservoirs of the gray fox rabies strain and the south-central skunk variant, and the state has multiple bat virus variants. But in 2001, the state had an unusual outbreak of rabies among skunks in Flagstaff, which is in northern Arizona.

"We never saw rabid skunks that far north in Arizona," Levy said. "So we knew something was out of whack, and we had those skunks variant-typed to find out what type of virus we were talking about.

"And it turns out that the skunks were transmitting big brown bat variant, but it was going skunk to skunk to skunk."

A scientific report in the August 2006 issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases, "Bat-associated rabies virus in skunks," states that 19 skunks in Flagstaff were confirmed to be infected with a bat-associated rabies virus variant in 2001.

"This is the largest recorded cluster of bat RABVV (rabies virus variant) infection in terrestrial mammals," the report states.

"Investigation of this novel outbreak showed evolution in action with the emergence of an RABVV that successfully adapted from Chiroptera to Carnivora."

10/19/2009: Type E botulism found in shorebirds in Door County, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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The Department of Natural Resources has found cases of botulism in shore birds on the Green Bay side of Door County this month.

Tests at the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison show evidence of Type E botulism toxicity in ring-billed gulls.

The cause of the outbreak is not completely known, but Julie Langenberg, wildlife veterinarian with the DNR, said that a leading explanation is the growing presence of invasive species in Lake Michigan.

Langenberg said that birds such as ring-billed and herring gulls and cormorants eat invasive species like zebra and quagga mussels and somehow concentrate the naturally occurring botulism. Botulism spores germinate and grow into toxic bacteria. The botulism doesn't seem to affect the invasives, she said.

Thus far, only a few dozen birds appear to have died from Type E botulism - about the same as last year. Higher mortality was reported in 2006 and 2007.

The eastern side of Lake Michigan, notably near Sleeping Bear Dunes, has experienced far greater mortality from botulism.

Langenberg said the trend appears to be moving from the eastern Great Lakes to the western Great Lakes.

"It's creeping up," Langenberg said. "It's not going away. "It's another example of why invasive species is not a good thing."

Another concern is how migrating loons might be affected. Loons use the bay as a flyway. The presence of botulism could be a factor in hindering Wisconsin's loon population.

09/22/2009: Sounding the alarm for bat health, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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The folded brown paper lunch bags fluttered and quivered at Melissa Ponik's feet, filled not with sandwiches but stunned bats.

It was dinner time, and the furry plum-sized mammals had just left their cave in search of a filling meal of mosquitoes and other insects. But the bats had flown into a harp trap - a device with two rows of fishing line that resembled the musical instrument - and while most figured out the first row was there and shifted position to fly through, they didn't sense the second row.

Soon they were scooped up, placed in bags by Ponik and taken to a nearby field station in the back of a pickup truck, where they were quickly measured, scrutinized and freed. All were healthy and gaining weight for the winter hibernation.

For now, Wisconsin's bat population is hale and hearty. But a devastating fungus is racing through cave-dwelling bat populations in eastern states and it's headed this way. White-nose syndrome has now killed an estimated 1 million bats, and experts say it could reach Wisconsin within two to three years.

"We need to set a baseline and if we do get hit (by white-nose syndrome) we need to know what's here and what's healthy," said Dave Redell.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources bat ecologist is at the forefront of a massive effort to take the pulse of the state's bat population. Other states are doing the same thing. What's alarming is that there's no known cure, nor do scientists know exactly how it spreads.

"The way I look at it - you've got all your eggs in one basket and we're standing on the basket here," said Redell, in front of one of the entrances to Neda Mine in Dodge County, the largest bat hibernaculum in the state. "If you don't have the primary predator of night-flying insects out on the landscape, we'll see what happens."

Redell is scheduled to give a presentation Wednesday to the state Natural Resources Board on white-nose syndrome and outline steps for the DNR to develop a state and regional response plan.

Part of ecosystem

Bats are a vital part of the ecosystem, vacuuming up insects that spread West Nile virus and other illnesses. Without them, farmers would need more pesticides for their crops.

With the fungus already wiping out 1 million bats, "that's about 700,000 tons of insects that weren't eaten this summer because those bats weren't there," Redell said.

White-nose syndrome, named for the white fungus on bat muzzles, was discovered in 2006 in New York. It has now spread to eight other eastern states and has killed 90% to 100% of bats in some hibernacula. Three species - little brown bats, Northern long-eared bats and Eastern pipistrelles - are expected to be extirpated in the Northeast in the next few years. This is why scientists are calling white-nose syndrome one of the biggest wildlife crises in decades.

Wisconsin is home to five cave-dwelling bat species - the three likely to disappear in the Northeast as well as big brown bats and Indiana bats. There are also three species of tree bats here, Eastern red bats, hoary bats and silver-haired bats. Plus, some species migrate through the state.

09/14/2009: Bat experts watch health of Northwest colonies, The Seattle Times

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The tiny male bat didn't expect to wind up in a biologist's hand when he set out in search of a nighttime snack along Box Canyon Creek.

After being snagged in a net, weighed and measured, the unhappy creature gnashed its teeth and squirmed as Pat Ormsbee stretched its wing for inspection.

The light from a headlamp shone through the translucent tissue, revealing bones tinier than toothpicks.

"This is one of the key things we need to be looking for," Ormsbee said, scanning for rips or scars that could signal infection with white-nose syndrome, the mysterious blight that has devastated bat colonies in the northeastern United States.

This bat its body no bigger than an apricot is given a clean bill of health.

Though wildlife officials in Washington and Oregon have received scattered reports of bat deaths this year, there's no evidence of large-scale die-offs and no sign of the fungus believed to be the cause of white-nose syndrome.

09/10/2009: Bat Man vs. White Nose: Thomas Kunz is fighting a killer disease, Boston Universtiy Today

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On a sticky August evening, the woodsy suburbs of Boston fading into darkness, gray clouds threaten rain. As the cicada and mosquito buzz grows louder, attention focuses on a dark, open window of an old barn; its a bat stakeout.

A camera is mounted on the barn wall, paired with an infrared light source and wired into a computer. Another video camera sits on a tripod. All this is under the watchful eyes of Thomas Kunz, a College of Arts & Sciences biology professor, director of Boston Universitys Center for Ecology and Conservation Biology, and one of the worlds top bat experts. Hes studied these misunderstood mammals for more than four decades, around the country and world, trying to counter their horror-movie image by extolling their critical roles in pollination, controlling insect pests, and sustaining ecosystems.

But in the past couple of years, a mysterious bat-killing disease has spread across the eastern United States, threatening entire species with extinction. The disease, known as white nose syndrome, has transformed Kunz the scientist into Kunz the crisis manager, convening emergency meetings and testifying before Congress to warn of ecological and economic disaster if the bats cant be saved.

The barn is one of several hundred known sites throughout New England used by migrating female bats and their pups. Kunz reclines outside in a blue folding chair, counting bats as they flutter from their roosts and head out the window on the first of two nightly insect hunts. These are little brown bats, one of the most numerous in the United States, capable of eating their own weight of insects in a single night. Last year, there were more than 600 bats in this barn; this year, Kunz has counted 350. Its worse at another colony in a state park near Worcester, where Kunz says the bat population has dropped about 90 percent in a single year.

Estimates are that since white nose syndrome was first seen in a cave near Albany, N.Y., in 2006, it has killed more than one million bats across several species, spreading throughout the Northeast and as far south as Virginia, wiping out entire caves. It isnt slowing down, and bats produce only one pup a year, leaving researchers in a race to maintain bat populations in the United States.

The disease gets its name from a fungus that appears on the faces and wings of infected animals while theyre hibernating. And this brings up the first mystery: is the fungus killing bats, or is it a symptom of a compromised immune system caused by something else perhaps a pathogen, an environmental contaminant, or a sudden change in diet?

This question is at the heart of research being done by one of Kunzs students, Marianne Moore (GRS10), a biology doctoral student in the ecology, behavior, and evolution program. Over the past two winters, Moore has traveled to hibernation caves and abandoned mines around the country, known as hibernacula, collecting blood samples. She takes blood from infected and seemingly unaffected bats where white nose syndrome is prevalent, as well as from bats hibernating in sites where the disease is not yet apparent. She is now running immune response tests on the samples and hopes to have some definitive results later this year.

In addition to being fascinated by bats, Im also interested in infectious disease ecology and immune function, and so I could not imagine a bigger opportunity than this research, says Moore. She describes the bats dying off as really scary. What began as a few dead bats around caves in the winter of 2007-2008 became thousands of frozen bat carcasses observed last winter. Its just devastating, she says.

European bats have been documented as having a similar fungal infection, but without the die-offs. David Blehert, a microbiologist for the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center, whose lab investigates large-scale mortality among animals, is now analyzing the DNA of the European fungus, to see if its the same as whats killing American bats. If so, it would suggest that European bats developed an immunity long ago, and this fungus was somehow introduced to American bats with no natural defenses.

This is the most significant disease that Ive encountered in my six years in this position, says Blehert. Hes also looking into the mystery of how exactly white nose syndrome kills. Some fungi produce toxins, but cultures of the fungus havent yet revealed that, and dead bats dont exhibit any telltale damage to their livers or other organs.

One thing that is shared by most (although not all) of the dead bats is emaciation is the fungus causing bats to starve to death? Kunz invokes the itch and scratch theory: perhaps the fungus is an irritant, waking bats up from hibernation, burning precious body fat needed to survive the winter and early spring.

Yet the fungus does cause damage to skin and wings, as Kunz and doctoral student Jonathan Reichard (GRS07,11) document in yet-to-be-published research. Thats not a cosmetic problem; wing membranes of healthy bats are pliable and flexible, which makes it possible for them to fly and effectively catch more than a thousand insects every hour, says Kunz. But the wings of many bats with white nose are covered in lesions and stiff scar tissue. Some had such bad damage that we suspect they couldnt feed, he says.

A lack of body fat could also disrupt the hormone triggers in females that lead to ovulation, says Kunz, preventing reproduction. All of this has come together pretty suddenly, and now we have a national crisis.

Kunz, who became fascinated by bats as a young man exploring caves in the Ozarks of his native Missouri, has taken up the challenge. Hes stepped up efforts to quantify what are known as bats ecosystem services. They make tons of chemical pesticides unnecessary and help pollinate and protect untold acres of agricultural crops; their 1,116 known species represent about 20 percent of all mammals. In one paper Kunz published in 2006, he and several colleagues, including lead author Cutler Cleveland, a CAS professor of geography and environment, calculated that Brazilian free-tailed bats save Texas cotton farmers about $750,000 in pesticides needed to control cotton bollworm. Kunz also cites a calculation that the one million bats killed by white nose syndrome would have eaten about 1.4 million pounds of insects in a year

Kunz and ecologist Merlin Tuttle, founder of Austin-based Bat Conservation International have organized two Emergency Science Strategy Meetings to combat white nose. This past June, Kunz argued before Congress for millions in additional research money.

Im what they call a silver back, he says, one of the older guys who, due to my age and tenure, may get a little more traction and a better hearing when I speak up.

Thus far, Kunzs efforts have not been successful. Bats have never had great public relations, he says. People think of them as vile, dark, and icky. And people fear the darkness. He has often been called out to help panicked neighbors deal with a wayward bat that has found its way indoors. His advice: calm down, turn on the lights, and open a window.

During the congressional summer break, Kunz has been in touch with sympathetic legislative staff members, lobbying to obtain more money by spreading research costs across several federal agencies.

In the meantime, he and fellow bat researchers continue with as many investigations as funding allows. This fall and winter, Blehert will try various fungicides as potential treatments; such efforts will have to work bat by bat, rather than spraying whole caves. Caves are complex ecosystems, with hundreds, sometimes thousands of species, in addition to serving as important filters for groundwater, says Kunz.

Stretching out of his blue folding chair, feeling the rain around the suburban barn grow heavier, Kunz stops this nights bat count at 117; no bats will emerge in the downpour, while the ones who left earlier swarm back inside. Its time to pack up for the evening. In a week or two, the mother bats, along with their pups, will begin flying off to hibernacula, where theyll mate and store sperm throughout hibernation, before ovulating in the spring. Kunz predicts that researchers will find white nose syndrome in more states this winter, which could mean far fewer bats at the barn when he returns next June.

Edward A. Brown can be reached at ebrown@bu.edu.

09/05/2009: Researchers work to protect Wisconsin bats against deadly disease, Wisconsin State Journal

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By RON SEELY rseely@madison.com 608-252-6131 | Posted: Saturday, September 5, 2009 3:00 pm

DODGEVILLE - Bat researcher Dave Redell went to work trapping bats one night last week with the gloomy knowledge that, within two to three years, many of the animals caught in his nets could be dead.

Redell, who studies bats for the Department of Natural Resources, lives every day now with the threat of a disease called white-nose syndrome hanging over his head. The disease, though not yet in Wisconsin, has killed more than 90 percent of the cave bats in Eastern states such as New York and Vermont. Experts predict it could make its way to Wisconsin, with its eight species and hundreds of thousands of bats, in as little as two years.

"The next three years are the most important of my career," Redell said as he prepared to set up his nets. "You never think you are going to be faced with helping to save a species from extinction."

So Redell carries with him on his trapping expeditions not only his equipment - nets, headlamps, bags, gloves, scales and devices to record the clicking calls of the bats - but also a building sense of urgency.

The landscape on this night is washed in the pale light of a nearly full moon. The evening is still and calm, and Redell is confident that the bats will be flying in good numbers, swooping down from their roosts to its insect banquet.

Redell has had luck trapping bats in his mist nets here before. So he's hoping that the hills and wooded shadows of Governor Dodge State Park give up some bat species he still needs for his studies - tree bats, for example, or maybe even a hoary bat or two.

Redell, who has studied bats in the state for 12 years, turns somber as he pauses to talk about white-nose syndrome, a disease that has so many in the field utterly discouraged.

Researchers such as Redell are spending long hours in the field, trying to document and describe Wisconsin's bats, compiling information that may help in the battle against the disease. Others are hunched over microscopes in laboratories, including Madison's National Wildlife Health Center, racing to understand the fungus that causes white-nose.

Future at stake

At stake is the fate of a tiny, flying mammal that has an impact on the ecosystem far out of proportion to its diminutive size. One female little brown bat - with a body less than the length of your thumb - can eat its body weight in insects in one evening, Redell said. Such is the insect-hunting prowess of the bats that they are thought to save farmers billions of dollars in crop losses, according to Sheryl L. Ducummon, with Bat Conservation International.

In a recent scientific article on the ecological and economic importance of bats, Ducummon reported that, in one summer, the 150 bats in an average colony of big brown bats can conservatively eat 38,000 cucumber beetles, which attack corn and other farm crops. Damage from the beetle and their larvae cost corn farmers as much as $1 billion a year.

The loss of such an insect-eating force could be devastating, Redell said. The approximate 1 million bats that have already died of white-nose syndrome in the last three years on the East Coast would have eaten 700,000 tons of insects were they still hunting the night skies, he said.

Bats perform other important tasks, too. Several Western species serve crucial roles as pollinators for desert plants such as agave and as seed dispersers for dozens of species of cacti.

Still, for all of their usefulness, the loss of bats would be much more than just a matter of economics. They are remarkable creatures that cause even stoic scientists to marvel at their evolved skills.

Dave Blehert, a researcher at the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, is studying the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome. And though he spends his days involved in highly detailed lab work, he doesn't lose sight of the animal that is the focus of his work.

"I mean, this is like a mouse that flies, but it has the predatory capabilities of a polar bear," Blehert said. "They are physically adapted to command the night sky. You're talking about a little thing with a body less than half the size of your thumb whose heartbeat can get up to 1,000 beats a minute when they are flying but that can slow when they are hibernating in the winter to 4 beats a minute. And they live 20 to 25 years!"

Killer fungus

Blehert has no trouble staying motivated. And his work has yielded plenty.

Working with other scientists, he has identified the fungus that is killing bats as a new form of a common soil fungus in the genus Geomyces. The fungus, which normally is involved in the decay of organic matter, appears as white fuzz on bats' noses but, more importantly, grows on other exposed skin surfaces and the wings.

Damage to the wings is critical because it diminishes a bat's ability to fly and feed. The new fungus also flourishes in the colder temperatures that typify caves and is passed from bat to bat in the close confines of winter hibernation. Some caves, such as Neda Mine in Dodge County, can contain as many as 200,000 bats from an area as large as a thousand square miles, according to Redell.

Blehert is now working to better describe the fungus and pinpoint its origin. Some evidence, he said, points to the fungus being an invasive from Europe. That, plus the presence of the fungus in the soil, argues for heightened efforts to control visits to caves that serve as important hibernariums, the places where bats hibernate.

At Governor Dodge State Park, Redell busies himself with his nets. One large net is strung between poles that rise as high as a goalpost. The net has to be strung just right; too tight and the bats will bounce off like tennis balls and fly away into the gloaming.

Tonight, Redell will capture and gather data on more than 30 bats, including two northern long-eared bats - a species of concern in the state. He and the wildlife technicians working with him will gently hold the bats and record their sex, weight, health details and size before releasing them into the night. It all goes into a database that will tell us more about the creatures we may stand to lose.

Redell said that with the natural world so besieged by everything from invasives to climate change, wildlife biologists generally anticipate having to face such a crisis at some point in their careers.

"I just didn't think it would be this soon," Redell said.

08/27/2009: Cancer in wildlife, normally rare, can signal toxic dangers, Environmental Health News

(Link to the original article)

Wild animals normally are killed by cancer only in rare cases. But scientists have found that some deadly cancers in animals--including Quebec's belugas, California sea lions and North Sea flounder--seem to be triggered or accelerated by environmental contaminants. The tumors highlight the dangers that industrial activities pose not just to animals, but to people in the same areas, exposed to the same chemicals. But lack of research and environmental obstacles mean most cancers in wildlife remain undetected.

By Crystal Gammon

Environmental Health News

August 27, 2009

Thirty years ago, a Canadian marine biologist noticed something mysterious was happening to beluga whales in the St. Lawrence Estuary. Decades of over-hunting had decimated the population, but several years after the government put a stop to the practice, the belugas still hadnt recovered.

Two decades and hundreds of carcasses later, he had an answer.

They were dying of cancer, said Daniel Martineau, now a professor of pathology at the University of Montreal.

The white whales were victims of intestinal cancers caused by industrial pollutants released into the St. Lawrence River by nearby aluminum smelters.

Now research points to environmental pollutants as the cause of deadly cancers in several wildlife populations around the world. Normally rare in most wildlife, cancers in California sea lions, North Sea flounder and Great Lakes catfish seem to have been triggered or accelerated by environmental contaminants.

Other animal populations, including Tasmanian Devils, sea turtles, woodchucks, manatees, eels and sperm whales, also have been stricken with cancers, although they appear to stem from natural causes, including viruses, spontaneous tumors, or genetic factors.

In some cases, the survival of a species and the stability and biodiversity of an ecosystem is jeopardized. The cancers also highlight the dangers that industrial activities pose not just to animals, but to people in the same areas, exposed to the same compounds.

We know that toxic compounds in the environment can cause cancer in humans, so it's not a far stretch to realize that pollutants can cause cancer in animals, says Denise McAloose, a pathologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, who recently reviewed the topic in the journal Nature Reviews Cancer.

Animals have long been recognized as sentinels for human health hazards. Wildlife populations, such as the belugas, often interact with the same pollutants as people.

In the St. Lawrence region of Quebec, people who worked in smelters near the cancer-stricken belugas have reported many cases of lung and bladder cancers linked to coal tar exposure at the factories. Other residents of the region have higher rates of digestive tract and breast cancers than people who live elsewhere in Quebec and Canada.

Scientists say careful monitoring of wildlife populations can reveal cancer patterns that could send early warning signals to people. While human cancers arising from pollutants can take decades to appear, wildlife diseases often show up earlier.

Nevertheless, few resources have been dedicated to identifying wildlife cancers. Most cases go undetected.

Obstacles such as high altitudes or deep waters make monitoring and collecting sick animals difficult, and carcasses are often decomposed or destroyed by scavengers before researchers can collect them.

Cancer, overall, is very infrequent in animals, apparently less frequent than in humans, said Carol Meteyer, a wildlife pathologist with the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis.

Meteyer said the shorter lifespan of birds and small mammals means fewer tumors than in people, although there is little data estimating the prevalence. In the past 34 years, the center has examined over 100,000 wild animals. Only 22 had tumors, and cancer killed only a handful of thema death rate about 5,000 times lower than that of human beings.

Even when sick animals are identified, it can be difficult to link their cancers to environmental causes. Tying tumors to specific pollutants is very challenging, Meteyer said, because of the small number of cases and the wide geographic range of many animals.

Many tumors are spontaneous, arising from a wild cell type that takes off on its own, she said. Most of the cancer cases shes seen in her 17 years at the center involved spontaneous tumors.

Only certain tumors can be indicators of environmental contamination and ecosystem health, McAloose said.

Despite the obstacles, identifying animals at risk of cancer is essential for protecting these populations and their human counterparts, she said.

Some persistent organic pollutants are implicated in wildlife cancer clusters. These pollutants, including PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and the pesticide DDT, build up in the environment and accumulate in the fatty tissues of wildlife.

Called POPs, these compounds contribute to cancers in a variety of ways. Often they interact directly with an animals DNA by disrupting its structure and leading to mistakes in replication. These mistakes accumulate over the animals lifetime, leading to tumors and, possibly, death.

In other cases, the chemicals attach to DNA and turn genes on or off. Pollutants can also contribute to cancers by distracting an animals immune system, allowing certain types of viruses to cause tumors.

Flounder from Germanys contaminated Elbe estuary had higher rates of liver cancer than fish from unpolluted regions, according to a study published last year. Researchers found a link between higher levels of heavy metals and POPs and increased liver lesions in the flounder.

Also, sea lions along Californias Central Coast are dying from a cancer possibly associated with industrial pollutants.

A 2005 study found elevated levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, in the blubber of adult sea lions with reproductive tract cancers. Those with cancer had PCB levels 85 percent higher than those without cancer. One weakness of the study, however, is that sick or dead marine mammals often have higher contaminant concentrations in their bodies because they have less fat.

The carcinomas in California sea lions are caused by a herpes virus. Its unclear how PCBs may contribute to the cancer, but researchers speculate they may suppress their immune systems, allowing the herpes virus to replicate unchecked. Previous research showed that PCBs in fish destroyed the immune cells of another marine mammal harbour seals and contributed to a European die-off from a distemper-like virus.

Although the United States banned PCB production in 1979, PCBs are still found in electrical equipment, and they sometimes leak into the air or water.

PCB levels along the California coast will likely pose a threat to the sea lions for decades, wildlife experts say.

Mothers dump their contaminant loads to their first born pups, said Gina Ylitalo, a research chemist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle, Washington, who led the study.

Up to 90 percent of the PCBs in a mothers body can be transferred to her first pup, meaning that PCB loads decrease only slightly from generation to generation. High levels of PCBs are also passed to pups through milk.

While these cancers havent impacted the overall number sea lions the population has grown steadily by about six percent each year they suggest that people might also be exposed to dangerous levels of pollutants from consuming the same fish. In California, state officials warn anglers against eating some fish caught in San Francisco Bay and in waters off the Los Angeles area because of the cancer risk posed by PCBs and DDT.

In Ohios Black River in the 1980s, brown bullhead catfish were nearly wiped out by liver cancers caused by contaminants from a coking facility. The population rebounded within four years of the facility closing in 1983.

Belugas in the St. Lawrence Estuary have drawn the most attention because of the estuarys proximity to aluminum smelters. The smelters released 20 tons of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons into nearby waters every year. One of the substances, benzo(a)pyrene, which is classified as a probable human carcinogen, accounted for nearly a ton of the smelters yearly emissions.

The compounds accumulated in sediments and were absorbed by mussels and other invertebrates, which are the main food source of the one-ton whales. One study found that blue mussels transplanted into the estuary increased their benzo(a)pyrene levels 200-fold.

When Martineau and his group began analyzing beluga carcasses in the early 1980s, they noticed that many of the whales had intestinal tumors. Over the next 20 years, the group found cancer to be the major cause of death in adult belugasa surprising finding given the rarity of the disease in wildlife.

In particular, small-intestinal tumors seemed to be especially prevalent and deadly for the animals: 27 percent had died of cancer, and 30 percent of the cancers were found in their small intestines. Colon cancer is common in humans and other animals, but small-intestinal cancers are relatively rare.

The 27 percent rate of cancer deaths for the estuarys belugas is similar to the 23 percent rate for humans in the Western world, Martineau noted. McAloose called that similarity very interesting Similar diseases caused by similar circumstances often have similar outcomes.

In 2004, two years after the beluga study was published, the aluminum smelters near the St. Lawrence estuary closed.

But, five years later, the belugas that first caught Martineaus attention have not recovered. And he is not surprised.

Cancer is the consequence of a lifetime of accumulating mutations, said Martineau, who added that the deadly disease is exactly what you would expect to find in animals that are eating from these sediments.

The beluga population, he suspects, wont begin to recover for at least half a lifetime 35 years, in the case of these long-lived whales. Fewer than 1,000 belugas, which are listed as a threatened species in Canada, remain in the estuary.

Researchers like Martineau and McAloose continue to stress the importance of studying wildlife diseases driven by pollution. Developmental disorders and reproductive problems in animals may also be linked to industrial pollutants and other contaminants.

Cancer may just be the easiest endpoint to get our hands on, McAloose said. We need to continue try to see connections between pollutants and disease, but currently there just arent a lot of people looking.

Copyright 2003 Environmental Health Sciences. All rights reserved.

08/05/2009: Shipwreck damages pristine coral reef via destructive organism, Scientific American

(Link to the original article)

Nestled within the new Pacific Remote Islands Marine Monument lies Palmyra Atoll, one of the last pristine coral reefs left on the planet some 960 nautical miles south of Hawaii. Or near pristine. In 1991 a 100-foot longline fishing shipthe "Hui Feng No. 1"foundered on the reef under mysterious circumstances. In the wake of that shipwreck, a destructive species of corallimorphariana kind of half-coral, half-anemone sea creaturebegan to take over the reef.

In the intervening years, the species has spread to cover nearly two square kilometers of the reef, though its density declines the further from the shipwreck you go, ultimately disappearing entirely in more undisturbed areas. Near the shipwreck, however, this Rhodactis howesii has overgrown the underlying reef, killing its coral cousins. It also crops up near buoys in the area. "They are very aggressiveand use specialized anatomic structures called 'sweeper tentacles' that have stinging cells," says wildlife veterinarian Thierry Work of the U.S. Geological Survey, who has studied the problem. "These tentacles are used to kill adjacent organisms, like corals, so as to capture real estate."

It remains unclear what exactly is enabling the corallimorpharian takeover, though Work and other scientists who discovered the phenomenon speculate it could be that increased iron dissolving from the man-made structures is boosting R. howesii's growth. "However, this phenomenon is not seen in wrecks on all Pacific islands," Work notes.

A solution? Tow the wreck off the reef and into the deep sea, though estimates for the cost of that range as high as $3 million due to the remoteness of the atoll. And there are no guarantees that it will work. There may already be a sufficient number of R. howesii in place to ensure their spread at the reef, regardless of any intervention. "That said," Work notes, "inaction is most certainly far worse than doing something."

08/04/2009: Plague Vaccine for Prairie Dogs Could Save Endangered Ferret, Wired Science

(Link to the original article)

Wild prairie dogs may soon get a dose of something extra in their daily diet: an oral vaccine against the plague.

The same Black Death that devastated Europe during the Middle Ages is still alive and well in wild rodents across the western United States. Although only a few Americans get plague each year, small outbreaks like the one reported Tuesday in Ziketan, China are not uncommon. The disease also regularly wipes out whole colonies of black-tailed prairie dogs and kills one of the most endangered mammals in North America, the black-footed ferret.

Now researchers have developed a vaccine cocktail that can be mixed with food and given to wild prairie dogs. In lab testing, the oral vaccine protected prairie dogs against plague better than a vaccine given by shot. And it was certainly a lot easier to administer.

An oral vaccine will allow us to deliver it much more efficiently to larger number of animals, said wildlife biologist Tonie Rocke of the US Geological Survey, who will present the work Wednesday at the Wildlife Disease Association Annual Conference. We couldnt capture enough prairie dogs to vaccinate them individually, but because we are putting it in bait, we can broadcast it widely from vehicles or perhaps even planes.

Scientists want to vaccinate prairie dogs not just to protect the cute, furry rodents, but also to save their endangered predator, the black-footed ferret. Once abundant across the western United States, wild ferrets were thought to be extinct until 1981, when a small population was discovered in South Dakota. A captive breeding program rescued the ferret from the verge of extinction, but scientists estimate only about 1,000 black-footed ferrets are now living in the wild. The animals are highly susceptible to plague and depend on prairie dog colonies for food and shelter: When plague destroys prairie dogs, it also kills endangered ferrets.

Last year, an outbreak of plague decimated more than 9,000 acres of prairie dog habitat in southwestern South Dakota, which was also home to around 300 black-footed ferrets. Researchers tried to protect the ferrets by capturing them and giving them a shot of plague vaccine, but Rocke says individual vaccination isnt a good long-term strategy.

Black-footed ferrets only eat prairie dogs, she said. So if the prairie dogs die from plague, even if the ferrets are vaccinated, they are left without their food supply.

Wildlife biologists hope mass immunization of prairie dogs with an oral vaccine will be more effective than trying to capture and give each ferret a shot. Field trials are still needed to test the oral vaccine in large populations of prairie dogs, but lab experiments showed promising results: After getting the oral vaccine, 95 percent of prairie dogs survived infection with Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes plague. Thats an impressive success, given that the disease usually has a greater than 90 percent mortality rate.

For the lab experiment, the researchers mixed the vaccine with mashed sweet potato, and the prairie dogs gobbled it up. But thats not the kind of bait that well use in the field, Rocke said. In the field well need a bait thats not like Jell-O, thats a little more resistant to the elements. Thats what were working on right now.

The researchers are also testing the vaccine in other wild animals, including pregnant ones, to make sure that the vaccine wont have any harmful effects if accidentally ingested by a hungry passer-by.

Although the main goal is to protect ferrets, the plague vaccine might have side benefits for people, Rocke said. Humans usually catch plague from fleas living on infected wild animals, so if fewer animals get the plague, Rocke said, fewer people will be exposed to it. Mass vaccination may also cut down on pesticide use on public lands, because park rangers wont have to dust prairie dog colonies with flea killer.

Only about a dozen people catch plague in the United States each year, mostly because we have minimal contact with rodents and their fleas. But worldwide, several thousand people contract the disease every year.

There are parts of the world where it causes disease, Rocke said. The plague is still out there.

08/03/2009: New Ouchless Plague Vaccine, Shipwrecks Wrecking Coral Reefs, White-Nose Syndrome in Bats, and More at the Wildlife Disease Association Conference, SENTINEL

Sentinel Weekly News

(Link to the original article)

Note to reporters and editors: The 58th annual meeting of the Wildlife Disease Association (WDA) will be August 2-7, 2009, in Blaine, Wash. The theme is Wildlife Health from Land to Sea: Impacts of a Changing World. This release is based on USGS research being presented at the conference. Also see a full press release on emerging diseases in fish.

Get Your Shots! Eating Ouchless Vaccines Protects Prairie Dogs in the Lab Against Plague: A new oral vaccine against sylvatic plague is showing significant promise in the laboratory as a way to protect prairie dogs and may eventually protect endangered black-footed ferrets who now get the disease by eating infected prairie dogs, according to results by a USGS researcher at the USGS National Wildlife Health Center. Sylvatic plague is an infectious bacterial disease usually transmitted from animal to animal by fleas. This exotic disease is usually deadly for black-footed ferrets and their primary prey, prairie dogs, resulting in local extinctions or regional population reductions. Along with other wild rodents, prairie dogs are also considered a significant reservoir of plague for other wildlife, domestic animals, and people in the western U.S. Prevention of plague in wild rodents by immunization could reduce outbreaks of the disease in animals, thereby reducing the risk for human exposure to the disease.

USGS scientists offered plague vaccine in food for voluntary consumption by 16 black-tailed prairie dogs. They also injected a plague vaccine into 12 other prairie dogs and then studied how much protection against plague the two kinds of vaccines offered. USGS researcher Dr. Tonie Rocke, the lead researcher of the project, found that the prairie dogs that ate their vaccine were better protected from the disease than the ones who were injected with a vaccine. These results, said Rocke, demonstrate that oral immunization of prairie dogs against plague provides significant protection from the disease, at least in the laboratory. Black-footed ferrets, of course, are one of the rarest mammals in North America. An oral vaccine, said Rocke, could be put into bait and delivered into the field without having to handle any animals, a process that is time-consuming, costly, and sometimes stressful for the animals. The same bacterium that affects ferrets, prairie dogs, and other rodents, is also responsible for human cases of plague. For more information, contact Dr. Tonie Rocke at 608-270-2451 or trocke@usgs.gov

Shipwrecks Wrecking Coral Reefs? A Case Study at Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge:

For the first time, researchers have definitively shown that shipwrecks and other man-made structures increase the potential for large invasions of unwanted species into coral reefs, even comparatively pristine ones. These unwanted species can completely overtake a reef and eliminate native corals, dramatically decreasing the diversity of marine organisms on the reef. Coral reefs can undergo fast changes in their dominant life forms, a phenomenon referred to as phase shift. Scientists have speculated on many possible causes of phase shift, but this study is the first one to clearly show that a rapid change in the dominant life forms on a coral reef is associated with man-made structures.

In September 2007, USGS researcher Dr. Thierry Work, Dr. Greta Aeby from the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, and Dr. James Maragos from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service studied a 100-foot vessel that wrecked in 1991 on isolated Palmyra Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean. They found extremely high numbers of an invasive species related to anemones and corals, Rhodactis howesii, on and around the shipwreck site. The density of this species progressively decreased with distance from the ship, and it was rare or absent in other parts of the atoll. Likewise, the researchers confirmed high densities of R. howesii around several buoys installed on the atoll in 2001.

Even though phase shifts can have long-term negative effects for coral reefs, eliminating organisms responsible for phase shifts can be difficult, particularly if they cover a large area. The extensive R. howesii invasion and subsequent loss of coral reef habitat at Palmyra highlights the importance of rapid removal of shipwrecks on corals reefs to help prevent reefs from being overgrown by invasive species.

Why this phenomenon is occurring remains a mystery, said Work, a scientist at the USGS National Wildlife Health Centers Honolulu Field Station. One possibility, he said, is that iron leaching from the ship and mooring buoy chains, accompanied with other environmental factors particular to Palmyra Atoll, are somehow promoting the growth of Rhodactis. For more information, contact Dr. Thierry Work at 808-72-9250 or thierry_work@usgs.gov

Society, Wildlife Disease and Wildlife Conservation: Oxymoron or Evolutionary Siblings? Over the past 50 years, the field of wildlife disease as an issue for concern has exploded in significance, mostly because of the increased realization that most emerging human diseases are zoonotic, that is, diseases that can spread from people to other animals or vice-versa. USGS emeritus scientist Dr. Milt Friend, in an invited talk at the Wildlife Disease Association conference, will explore how and why the field of wildlife disease research has changed over the last 50 years.

One of the biggest differences, says Friend, is that until very recently, wildlife disease was not an important focus for the wildlife conservation community. Now, though, a new wave of social environmentalism and public concerns about emerging zoonotic diseases are placing increased pressure on wildlife agencies to address disease crises involving wildlife, Friend says.

He emphasizes, however, that emerging zoonotic diseases often result in double jeopardy for wildlife: not only do wildlife often suffer direct negative effects from a disease, they also endure indirect effects associated with actions taken to reduce human risks by suppressing wildlife populations. In addition, says Friend, wildlife can also be jeopardized by actions taken if they happen to share diseases with domestic animals, even if those diseases do not pose a significant public health threat. Conversely, within the wildlife conservation community, the role of disease as a factor for species extinctions is receiving increased worldwide attention, Friend noted. For more information, contact Dr. Milton Friend at 608-270-2488 or mfriend@usgs.gov

Disease Risks When Moving Wildlife to New Areas: Endangered Laysan Duck Cautionary Tale:

Laysan ducks, one of the worlds most endangered waterfowl, are native to only the Hawaiian archipelago. For 150 years, Laysan ducks were restricted to an estimated 4 square kilometers of land on Laysan Island in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands. In 2004 and 2005, in an effort to rebuild the

population, biologists released 42 Laysan ducks on Midway Atoll, located one days boat ride from Laysan. By 2007, a breeding population was well established on Midway, reaching 200 ducks. However, in August 2008, more than half of the Midway duck population (181 ducks) was lost to a disease epidemic lasting 30 days. Necropsies (the animal equivalent of autopsies) on dead birds revealed botulism type C as a cause of the die-off.

Disturbingly, said Work, 3 ducks were also infected with a worm suspected to be Echinuria uncinata; this worm has been responsible for mass die-offs of Laysan ducks on Laysan Island. Work notes that this worm was either moved to Midway during translocations of ducks from Laysan, despite preventive treatment of all founding birds, or it arrived with migratory waterfowl. Either way, says Work, this epizootic highlights the disease risk to birds restricted to small island populations and the challenges associated with managing newly translocated endangered species. Frequent population monitoring for early disease detection and comprehensive wetland monitoring and management will be needed to offset the potential effects of avian botulism and parasitism on endangered Laysan ducks, Work said. The bigger picture, though, is that disease risks need to be closely examined for translocations of all kinds, especially in light of translocations being proposed for dealing with habitat range changes that affect endangered species due to climate change. For more information, contact Dr. Thierry Work at 808-72-9250 or thierry_work@usgs.gov

Bat white-nose syndrome: An emerging fungal pathogen? New research provides even more evidence that a previously undescribed, cold-loving fungus is associated with white-nose syndrome, a condition linked to the deaths of up to 1,000,000 cave-hibernating bats in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic states. Since the winter of 2006-2007, bat populations plummeted from 80 to 97 percent at surveyed bat-hibernation caves, called hibernacula. USGS microbiologist Dr. David Blehert and his colleagues identified the fungus last year, and have followed up by trying to determine if the fungus may be responsible for the deaths or if it is simply a side effect of another underlying disease. The researchers found that 90 percent of all bats they examined from suspected WNS sites had a severe fungal skin infection that did not just occur on the skin, but below it as well. The growth temperature requirements of the fungus are consistent with the core temperatures of cave-hibernating bat species throughout temperate regions of the world. Given the hundreds of thousands of hibernating bats found throughout the WNS-affected region, as well as the potential for the spread of this disease to other parts of the United States and Canada, white-nose syndrome represents an unprecedented threat to bats of the northeastern United States and potentially beyond. For more information, contact Dr. David Blehert at 608-270-2466 or dblehert@usgs.gov

Sick Fish May Get Sicker: Climate Change and Other Stresses Expected to Affect Entire Populations of Fish (see full press release on emerging diseases in fish)

Entire populations of North American fish already are being affected by several emerging diseases, a problem that threatens to increase in the future with climate change and other stresses on aquatic ecosystems, according to a noted U.S. Geological Survey researcher giving an invited talk on this subject today at the Wildlife Disease Association conference in Blaine, Wash.

A generation ago, we couldnt have imaged the explosive growth in disease issues facing many of our wild fish populations, said Dr. Jim Winton, a fish disease specialist at the USGS Western Fisheries Research Center. Most fish health research at that time was directed toward diseases of farmed fish. In contrast, said Winton, recent studies in natural aquatic systems have revealed that, in addition to being a cause of natural death, infectious and parasitic fish diseases can produce significantly greater mortality in altered habitats leading to population fluctuations, extinction of endangered fish, reduced overall health and increased susceptibility to predation. For more information, contact Dr. Jim Winton at 206-526-6282, x328 or jwinton@usgs.gov

08/03/2009: Eating 'Ouch-less' Vaccines Protects Prairie Dogs In The Lab Against Plague, Science Daily

(Link to the original article)

ScienceDaily (Aug. 3, 2009) A new oral vaccine against sylvatic plague is showing significant promise in the laboratory as a way to protect prairie dogs and may eventually protect endangered black-footed ferrets who now get the disease by eating infected prairie dogs, according to results by a USGS researcher at the USGS National Wildlife Health Center. Sylvatic plague is an infectious bacterial disease usually transmitted from animal to animal by fleas.

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Earth & Climate

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Black-footed Ferret

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This exotic disease is usually deadly for black-footed ferrets and their primary prey, prairie dogs, resulting in local extinctions or regional population reductions. Along with other wild rodents, prairie dogs are also considered a significant reservoir of plague for other wildlife, domestic animals, and people in the western U.S. Prevention of plague in wild rodents by immunization could reduce outbreaks of the disease in animals, thereby reducing the risk for human exposure to the disease.

USGS scientists offered plague vaccine in food for voluntary consumption by 16 black-tailed prairie dogs. They also injected a plague vaccine into 12 other prairie dogs and then studied how much protection against plague the two kinds of vaccines offered. USGS researcher Dr. Tonie Rocke, the lead researcher of the project, found that the prairie dogs that "ate" their vaccine were better protected from the disease than the ones who were injected with a vaccine. These results, said Rocke, demonstrate that oral immunization of prairie dogs against plague provides significant protection from the disease, at least in the laboratory.

Black-footed ferrets, of course, are one of the rarest mammals in North America. An oral vaccine, said Rocke, could be put into bait and delivered into the field without having to handle any animals, a process that is time-consuming, costly, and sometimes stressful for the animals. The same bacterium that affects ferrets, prairie dogs, and other rodents, is also responsible for human cases of plague.

This research was presented at the 58th annual meeting of the Wildlife Disease Association (WDA) held on August 2-7, 2009, in Blaine, Wash.

07/31/2009: Botulism suspected in Reno duck deaths, Reno Gazette News

(Link to the original article)

Jasmine McCarty of Sun Valley got quite a shock Friday morning during a visit to Teglias Paradise Park in northeast Reno. She said she and three of her grandchildren, ages 4, 6 and 7, found about a dozen ducks lying dead near the edge of the parks large pond.

It was freaky, McCarty said. Poor little ducks. It upset (six-year-old grandson) Christopher so bad, he threw up.

Concerned and unsure what caused the ducks demise, McCarty called 911 to report the dead fowl.

Washoe County Regional Animal Services interim field supervisor Bobby Smith said he dispatched a sergeant to Paradise Park to clean up the area.

Apparently it looks like botulism, Smith said. NDOW (Nevada Department of Wildlife) and their vet were notified, the U.S. Dept. of Fish and Game were notified, he said. Its their jurisdiction, they do the testing and all that, and Im just waiting to hear as to what exactly has happened.

Nevada Department of Wildlife spokesman Chris Healy said scenes like the one McCarty and her grandchildren found Friday morning are not uncommon during the summer when water gets warm and stagnant.

This time of year, avian botulism happens, Healy said.

Avian botulism, which does not infect humans, is a paralytic disease caused by the ingestion of a toxin produced by a bacteria, according to the National Wildlife Health Center.

This has been going on around here for a long time, said Healy, whos been with the department 24 years. A duck eats some kind of dead organism and dies. Then its carcass infects the other ducks. This is a fairly common thing.

Although the duck carcasses picked up at Paradise Park Friday still need to be tested to confirm avian botulism, Healy said recent high temperatures had him expecting the kind of outbreak McCarty witnessed.

07/27/2009: The Wild's Creeping Killer, Newsweek

(Link to the original article)

In 1999, wildlife disease specialist Thierry Work looked over the bow of his small whaler as it cut through a lagoon on the south side of Molokai, an island in Hawaii. On an emergent rock he saw a listless sea turtle, waiting to die.

"This guy was so weak that he just let us pick him up," says Work, who runs the National Wildlife Health CentersHonolulu field station. "He was so emaciated that his ventral was completely disked in. You could fill him up with water and use him as a bowl." Like more than quarter of the green turtles Work has plucked from the water or found stranded on Hawaii's beaches, this one was covered with tumors on its eyes and mouth, dying from a poorly understood form of cancer.

Work's turtle is one of a wide array of species afflicted by a range of cancers, according to a paper published in the July edition of Nature Reviews Cancer. "Wildlife Cancer: a conservation perspective," summarizes mounting evidence of human's contribution to carcinogenesis in wild-animal populations across the globe, thanks to man-made toxins dumped into wildlife's natural habitats.

"I am concerned that we as humans continue to impact the environment quite significantly," says Denise McAloose, the report's lead author and chief pathologist for the Wildlife Conservations Society's (WCS) Global Health Program. "As the human population continues to grow and utilize resources and damage the environment, I do believe that we will continue to see the emergence of disease, including cancer in wildlife."

On San Francisco's touristy Pier 39, the incessant barking of male sea lions and their harems of smaller females fills the air. Periodically Frances Gulland, the director of veterinary science at the Marine Mammal Center in neighboring Sausalito, receives calls from the pier reporting a sea lion crippled by tumors. Despite huge swelling on and around their hind flippers and anus, Gulland says the animals "mask their pain" in a last ditch effort to elude opportunistic predators. "You see that they have been struggling and struggling."

According to Gulland, 17 percent of the sea lions brought to the center die of renal failure or paralysis, caused when tumors linked to Otarine herpesvirus-1 travel up the genital tact and push against the kidney and spine. According to the Nature Reviews Cancer article, sea lions that died of genital carcinoma had an 85 percent higher concentration of toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in their system than other sea lions. (PCBs are toxic compounds used in coolants and electrical transformers.) Gulland points out that blubber samples of sea lions who died of cancer also show high concentrations of the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), in part because many are born near the Channel Islands where 1,700 tons of the toxin were dumped prior to its ban in 1972.

07/26/2009: After seven years, attitude toward chronic wasting disease changing, Wisconsin State Journal

(Link to the original article)

After seven years of living with chronic wasting disease in the Wisconsin deer herd, the initial fears about eating venison have calmed.

But the news last week of a death at UW Hospital due to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease brought to mind once again the dangers of the neurological illnesses known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or TSEs.

The UW-Madison patient died of classic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a form of the brain disease not caused by eating meat from an ill animal. Still, for some people, the headlines about Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease may have renewed the fear of getting brain disease from chronic wasting disease infected deer.

"There are a number of lines of evidence that show it may not happen," said Judd Aiken, a former UW-Madison researcher who is now at the University of Alberta. Aiken studies prions, the deformed proteins that are believed to cause chronic wasting disease and other TSEs.

"Clearly," Aiken continued, "animal transmission studies have shown that CWD doesnt transmit well to other species."

Humans have contracted a variant type of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from eating beef from an animal with mad cow disease but so far science has turned up no indications that chronic wasting disease can be transmitted to people.

Aiken said other studies have shown that CWD is more similar to scrapie, a prion disease in sheep, than to mad cow disease.

"Sheep scrapie has been around for well over 100 years," Aiken said. "And theres no evidence that sheep scrapie causes disease in humans."

Even so, the state Department of Natural Resources has maintained its policy of cautioning hunters to get their deer tested and to not eat venison that has tested positive. Davin Lopez, who oversees the DNRs CWD program, said surveys show 50 percent of hunters eat their venison regardless of test results.

Aiken said that despite the lack of scientific evidence that the disease is transmissible to humans, caution is still warranted.

"Show me a prion researcher who is going to sit down to a meal of CWD-infected venison," Aiken said. "Youre not going to find that."

As concern about the human health impacts of CWD has waned, the DNR has faced increasing criticism of its approach to controlling the spread of CWD. This year, for example, pressure from hunters prompted the DNR to drastically reduce the number of areas where hunters are required to shoot a doe before they shoot a buck, a management strategy designed to increase the number of deer killed.

Lopez said the spread of CWD continues to be a concern. Last year the proportion of bucks that tested positive in the central disease control area increased from 10 percent to 15 percent.

"This could have some devastating impacts on the herd long term," said Lopez of the disease. "Were still calling for population reduction. Thats really the only known method of control."

Meanwhile, an increasing number of studies of animal prion diseases, such as CWD, are also providing insights into how the prions that cause the illnesses work.

Last year, studies by researchers at UW-Madison showed the CWD prions, which are already know to be resistant to extreme heat and caustic chemicals, are so tough that they are not degraded by standard wastewater decontamination and can end up in discharged treated water or in fertilizers made from the wastes.

Researchers at Madisons National Wildlife Health Center are studying both the tough nature of the prions and their structure and infectivity. One researcher, for example, has found that voles are susceptible to infection from prions and serve as a good model for studies.

Another scientist is studying the enzymes in lichens, hoping that the destructive enzymes that allow the lichens to destroy even rock will prove effective in deactivating prions.

06/19/2009: WNS Not Yet Confirmed In Local Bats, DNR Online

(Link to the original article)

It remains unclear whether bats found earlier this year in Endless Caverns were infected with a mysterious fungus that has wiped out hundreds of thousands of bats in the Northeast.

. . . In April, biologists with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries discovered bats in Endless Caverns, a commercial show cave near New Market, with symptoms of WNS.

Rick Reynolds, a state game department wildlife biologist, sent three bats suspected of having the disease from Endless Caverns to a national testing facility in Madison, Wis.

On Monday, Reynolds said the lab had trouble culturing the fungus from the bats, making it difficult to determine whether the specimens in fact had the disease.

The lab will likely perform other tests on the bats, including a histopathology - a microscopic examination of tissue, but it may be some time before the results are available, he said.

06/12/2009: Island has dead birds, no rats, Anchorage Daily News

(Link to the original article)

POISONING: Toxic pellets may have halted infestation of rodents.

By MIKE CAMPBELL

mcampbell@adn.com

Published: June 12th, 2009 09:06 PM

Last Modified: June 13th, 2009 09:35 PM

The first check on the effects of a $3 million rat-poisoning campaign on remote Rat Island turned up no living rodents on the 10-square-mile island in the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge -- but 227 dead birds.

Nine months after blanketing the island with compressed-grain pellets of Rodenticide, a seven-member survey team this week collected 186 glaucous-winged gull and 41 bald eagle carcasses. Most were juveniles, many in advanced stages of decomposition.

"Certainly, the numbers are far higher than we would have anticipated," said spokesman Bruce Woods of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "It's not clear why. We'll have to wait for the lab results."

Woods said it's unlikely carnivorous eagles ate the Rodenticide grain pellets, but they may have devoured some dead rats that had consumed them.

"Eagles are scavengers of opportunity," he said. "Rats don't make up a big part of their diet naturally, but if meat is available, they're going to take it."

An assessment conducted before the pellets were dropped on Rat Island suggested birds would have to consume a large number of rodents to be harmed by the poison.

Bird carcasses and tissue samples have been sent to the National Wildlife Health Center laboratory in Madison, Wis., to determine the cause of death. Results are expected later this month.

Nearly two dozen people -- some in helicopters -- participated in the eradication project last September on the Aleutian island some 1,700 miles from Anchorage.

They coated the island with toxic pellets, hoping to exterminate Norway rats, which jumped off a wrecked Japanese ship in the 18th century and colonized the 6,871-acre outcropping. The island is one of more than 2,400 in the sprawling refuge that stretches from Cape Lisburne on the Chukchi Sea to the tip of the Aleutian Islands in the west and Forrester Island in the southern Alaska Panhandle region in the east.

Rats have been removed from some 300 islands around the world, including islands in New Zealand and atolls near Hawaii. This was the first attempt to remove rats from an Alaska island.

All together, rats inhabit about a dozen large islands in the refuge as well as many smaller ones, feasting on seabirds and their eggs. Such seabirds as puffins, auklets and storm petrels nest on the ground, often in cracks and crevices in the volcanic rock, and the foraging birds spend considerable time away from their eggs and vulnerable young.

Prolific rats can produce four to six litters a year with six to 12 young in each -- making complete eradication necessary.

"To put it in its simplest form, a single breeding pair left alive is essentially a failure," Steve Mclean of the Alaska Nature Conservancy in Anchorage said as the project got under way last year.

The Nature Conservancy raised more than $2 million for the project, Mclean said.

"So far, no living rats have been observed," said Woods, who noted that seven observers walked the island looking for signs of survivors. "We're cautiously optimistic, but it's a big island. It would be presumptuous to assume that we would have noticed rats if only a few were left."

Before federal biologists consider the island rat-free, they will survey it again next year.

"We are extremely pleased with no rats in evidence on the island," said Bill Waldman, executive director of Island Conservation, another organization that was a partner on the project. "We're surprised and concerned with the mortality."

Fish and Wildlife said none of the bird deaths happened recently, and pointed out the losses "will not significantly impact" overall Aleutian bird populations. The agency estimates some 2,500 eagles live in the Aleutians, with gull numbers far higher.

Woods said researchers did a small test application on an island near Adak before the Rat Island project and did not note any eagle deaths.

This week, field workers collected additional tissue samples before destroying bird carcasses to eliminate any ongoing risk.

Eagles were the only area bird species not to see a population increase since the rat poison was applied last September, according to the fish and wildlife service. Juvenile eagle numbers, in particular, were lower.

Black oystercatchers were found on the island for the first time, Woods said. Aleutian cackling geese, ptarmigan and peregrine falcons are also there.

"We're already seeing species nesting out there that are very vulnerable to rats, and that's a very encouraging sign," said Randy Hagenstein of The Nature Conservancy. "Nobody likes to see dead birds, but we're trying to not jump to any conclusions.

"We want to get to the bottom of it. We need to know exactly what went on. But the bottom line is that Rat Island is now going to produce generation after generation of eagles, oystercatchers and other birds."

To kill the rats, helicopters emptied buckets filled with 700 pounds of toxic Rodenticide pellets over the island last year. The pellets, smaller than dog-food chunks, containing an anticoagulant that, when consumed, makes the rats bleed to death.

The Rat Island Restoration Project is a partnership among the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Nature Conservancy and Island Conservation. The project was reviewed by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, and National Marine Fisheries Service.

If the project is successful, Rat Island will become the third largest island to rid itself of rats. The largest is 27,922-acre Campbell Island south of New Zealand.

Worldwide, rats cause up to 60 percent of seabird extinctions, with most of those happening on islands, according to Island Conservation, the California-based conservation group that's focused on protecting island life.

Reach reporter Mike Campbell at mcampbell@adn.com or 257-4329.

06/04/2009: Experts: Bat fungus causing wildlife threat, Associated Press

(Link to the original article)

DINA CAPPIELLO

Associated Press Writer

4:43 PM EDT, June 4, 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) A mysterious fungus attacking America's bats could spread nationwide within years and represents the most serious threat to wildlife in a century, experts warned Congress Thursday.

Displaying pictures of bats speckled with the white fungus that gave the disease its name white-nose syndrome experts described to two House subcommittees Thursday the horror of discovering caves where bats had been decimated by the disease.

As a state wildlife biologist from Vermont put it, one cave there was turned into a morgue, with bats freezing to death outside and so many carcasses littering the cave's floor the stench was too strong for researchers to enter.

They also warned that if nothing more is done to stop its spread, the fungus could strike caves and mines with some of the largest and most endangered populations of hibernating bats in the United States.

At stake is the loss of an insect-eating machine. The six species of bats that have so far been stricken by the fungus can eat up to their body weight in insects a night, reducing insects that destroy crops, forests and carry disease such as West Nile Virus.

"We are witnessing one of the most precipitous declines of wildlife in North America," said Thomas Kunz, director of the Center for Ecology and Conservation Biology at Boston University, who said that between $10 million and $17 million is needed to launch a national research program into the fungus.

Merlin Tuttle, a world-renowned bat expert and president of Bat Conservation International in Austin, Texas, said that white-nose syndrome was probably the most serious threat to wildlife in the past century. He also called for more research to determine its cause and how it was being spread.

"Never in my wildest imagination had I dreamed of anything that could pose this serious a threat to America's bats," Tuttle told the panel. "This is the most alarming event in the lifetime of a person who has devoted his life to recovering these populations."

Since it was first discovered in a cave west of Albany, N.Y., in March 2007, white-nose syndrome has spread to 65 caves in nine states, turning up last winter in West Virginia and Virginia, federal wildlife officials said. There are also several caves suspected of harboring the fungus in Canada.

To date it has killed between 500,000 to 1 million bats, mostly common species. But what has wildlife officials concerned is the fungus looks to be on the verge of entering the Southeast and Midwest, where some of the most endangered and largest populations of bats live. The fungus is known to occur in caves used by the Virginia big-eared bat, which has a population of only 20,000.

"If it goes farther, we are going to see some serious bat issues," said Marvin Moriarty, acting deputy director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. "If it makes that jump, we have a real problem."

The Interior Department and Forest Service have so far spent $5 million researching the problem, closed caves to people on forest lands in 33 states and urged the public not to enter caves or abandoned mines in states with white-nose syndrome. While there is no evidence the people can be harmed by the fungus, they may be contributing to its spread.

There is also a plan in place to start raising the Virginia big-eared bat in captivity to prevent its extinction if and when the fungus strikes that species.

But some lawmakers Thursday wondered if that was enough.

"The severe mortality and sudden spread of white-nose syndrome demonstrates the need for a rapid response beyond closing caves where bats live," said Del. Madeleine Z. Bordallo, D-Guam, who said the syndrome "could be an ecological and economic disaster if it remains unchecked."

One possible consequence of the syndrome's toll on bats is increased used of pesticides to control inspect populations, Moriarty said.

The fungus attacks bats during winter hibernation, when they are most vulnerable and their temperature is lowered so they can last through the winter on the fat they've put on by feasting on insects. Research has shown that the fungus thrives in cold temperatures and the densities of bats huddled on the ceilings and walls of cave likely help it to spread.

How exactly the fungus kills bats is poorly understood, but once the fungus attaches it invades tissues. The bat then fidgets, burning up its excess energy. Most simply starve and die, others leave the cave prematurely to look for nonexistent food in the winter and perish.

If it goes further, we are going to see some serious bat issues

"I went into a cave last spring and most damn near cried," Moriarty said in an interview after the House panel.

There were supposed to be 3,000 bats in the cave, the Greeley mine in Vermont. Moriarty and his colleagues could only find 33.

"And I don't think a single bat was going to make it out of the cave," he said.

___

On the Net:

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: http://www.fws.gov/northeast/white_nose.html

U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center: http://tinyurl.com/batdieoff

06/02/2009: Anteaters caught (human) H1N1 flu in zoo outbreak, expanding range of wily virus, The Canadian Press

(Link to the original article)

Helen Branswell, Medical Reporter, THE CANADIAN PRESS

TORONTO - Chalk up another species for the wily flu virus.

Humans, horses, dogs, whales, seals, birds, cats, ferrets and even raccoons are known to be susceptible to the tiny eight-gene viruses. Researchers in Tennessee have now added giant anteaters to that list.

"Who would have thunk it?" senior author Dr. Melissa Kennedy says with a laugh. "We were pretty amazed."

The February 2007 outbreak, involving 11 adult giant anteaters at Tennessee's Nashville zoo, is reported in an article that will be published in the July issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. All the anteaters survived the illness.

Beyond the initial "Even anteaters?" reaction, some who study influenza profess to be less taken aback than Kennedy and her co-authors. The virus is so unpredictable, scientists who work in the field expect the unexpected.

"Mainly it's an indication of how much we don't know, and the promiscuity of flu in terms of being able to change hosts and infect and adapt to new situations," says Dr. Jeffrey Hall, who last November added raccoons to the lengthening list of flu's hosts.

The description of the illness in the article creates a vivid mental picture. The extraordinary looking animals suffered "severe" nasal discharge, congestion, loss of appetite and lethargy.

Knowing those nasal discharges could provide hints as to what was afflicting the animals, veterinary staff at the zoo took diagnostic samples and sent them off to the University of Tennessee's college of veterinary medicine in Knoxville.

"Now that's a nasal swab, yes indeed," says Kennedy, who is the clinical virologist at the college.

The zoo's staff didn't know what the animals were suffering from. So Kennedy's team applied bits of the nasal secretions to a variety of different cell cultures, hoping something would grow.

"We had no idea what an anteater is most closely related to, and what cell lines to use. So we threw it on absolutely everything," she explains.

To their surprise, two of three samples produced influenza A viruses of the H1N1 subtype - the human type, not the new swine flu virus.

Sequencing of the genetic blueprints of four of the eight genes of the viruses showed they were virtually identical to the human H1N1 viruses circulating in Tennessee at the time.

Kennedy says there were some small mutations - a few amino acid changes - but it's unclear if they contributed to the virus's ability to jump to a new species. Testing of blood samples taken later from two of the animals confirmed they had antibodies to the virus.

Because it had been an unusually cold winter, the animals had been housed indoors when the outbreak happened. They had no contact with other animals, and limited contact with people.

Though the theory hasn't been proven, the investigation into the source of the sickness points to their main caregiver, who was working at the time with an undiagnosed respiratory illness.

It's not clear whether all the animals caught the flu from the zoo worker, or if some of the spread was anteater to anteater.

"There are many confounding variables to define how this particular virus spread so I can not state beyond speculation how that happened or may have happened at this point," Dr. Sally Nofs, the veterinary services director for the zoo and the first author of the study, says via email.

On the surface of it, it seems unlikely the anteater findings would have any implications for human health. Few of us consort with giant anteaters, which are either endangered or extinct in some regions of the world.

But Hall and others wonder whether, given these findings, there may be undiscovered pools of influenza viruses that circulate among mammals that haven't been identified as natural hosts for flu viruses. If that's the case, might an interplay of viruses among animals species - anteaters to feral pigs, for instance - contribute to the rise of new genetic variations that eventually work their way into humans?

"Clearly they get human influenza so right now we would say that the risk is to the anteaters," says Hall, a research virologist with the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisc., who admits he's no expert on the natural ecology of anteaters.

"But is there an anteater flu out there that we don't know about?"

An avian influenza expert at the University of Minnesota says science assumes viruses from birds and pigs are the major players in the evolution of new flu viruses that make their way into humankind. But Dr. David Halvorson says maybe that's because that's what has been studied.

"So who's to say that maybe we don't have more work to do?" Halvorson says.

"We don't really know how many species of animals are susceptible to these flu viruses. We've only just looked in a few."

06/01/2009: Great Lakes bats threatened by mysterious disease, Great Lakes Echo

(Link to the original article)

A mysterious ailment thats already wiped out more than a million North American bats is headed to critical Great Lakes hibernation sites.

White-nose Syndrome, named for the tufts of fungus growing on the faces and wings of afflicted bats, was first spotted in New York in February 2006. The disease has since spread through New England, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Conservationists worry it could spread as far as Mexico.

06/01/2009: Wild whooping crane chick hatches at Necedah National Wildlife Refuge, Wildlife Extra

(Link to the original article)

June 2009. A whooping crane chick has hatched at Necedah National Wildlife Refuge, Wisconsin, USA. This is only the second time in over a century that a naturally produced whooping crane has hatched in the wild in the Midwest.

The chick is the offspring of whooping cranes from the ultralight-led crane Class of 2002. The behaviour of the pair indicated that the chick hatched on June 14 or 15, but visual confirmation was difficult to obtain until June 18 due to dense vegetation.

This is the second chick to hatch in the wild this year in the eastern migratory population. Another whooping crane pair hatched a chick on June 12 at their nest site in Wood County, Wisconsin. The chick is from a captive produced egg from the International Crane Foundation, placed in the nest after it was determined that the pair's own eggs were infertile.

The first wild whooping crane chicks in this population hatched in 2006 at Necedah NWR. One of their chicks was taken by a predator prior to migration, but the second chick migrated to Florida with her parents in autumn 2006 and has recently completed her third spring migration to Necedah NWR.

90% of nests failed

Both of the chicks that have hatched in the wild this year in Wisconsin are the result of renesting. This spring, 12 breeding pairs of whooping cranes built nests and laid eggs. Eleven of the nests were located on the Necedah NWR, and one nest located on private land. All 12 nests failed earlier this spring and five pairs renested-the three other renests also failed. This nest abandonment pattern is similar to what has been observed in previous years. WCEP is investigating the cause of the abandonments through analysis of data collected throughout the nesting period on crane behaviour, temperature, black fly abundance and distribution, and food availability.

Whooping crane chicks being led on migration by an ultrlight. Credit Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership.

Whooping crane microlight migration

In 2001, WCEP project partner Operation Migration's pilots led the first whooping crane chicks, conditioned to follow their ultralight aircraft surrogates, south from Necedah NWR to Chassahowitzka NWR in Florida. Each subsequent year, WCEP biologists and pilots have conditioned and guided additional groups of juvenile cranes to Florida. Having been shown the way once, the young birds initiate their return migration in the spring, and in subsequent years, continue to migrate on their own.

Second population

In 2008, in addition to wintering at Chassahowitzka NWR, half of the ultralight-led cranes spent the winter at the St. Marks NWR along Florida's Gulf Coast. The decision to split the cohort came after the loss in February 2007 of 17 of the 18 Class of 2006 whooping cranes in a severe storm at Chassahowitzka NWR. WCEP hopes the two wintering locations will help reduce the risk of another catastrophic loss.

Reintroduced chicks

In addition to the ultralight-led birds, biologists from the International Crane Foundation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rear whooping crane chicks at Necedah NWR and release them in the company of older cranes from whom the young birds learn the migration route. This is the fifth year WCEP has used this Direct Autumn Release method.

Whooping cranes that take part in the ultralight and Direct Autumn Release reintroductions are hatched at the U.S. Geological Survey's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Md., and at the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, Wis. Chicks are raised under a strict isolation protocol and to ensure the birds remain wild, handlers adhere to a no-talking rule and wear costumes designed to mask the human form.

In the spring and fall, project staff from the International Crane Foundation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service track and monitor the released cranes in an effort to learn as much as possible about their unassisted journeys and the habitat choices they make both along the way and on their summering and wintering grounds.

Most graduated classes of whooping cranes spend the summer in central Wisconsin, where they use areas on or near the Necedah NWR, as well as other public and private lands.

515 cranes alive, a huge increase.

Whooping cranes were on the verge of extinction in the 1940s. Today, there are only about 515 birds in existence, approximately 360 of them in the wild. Aside from the 80 WCEP birds, the only other migrating population of whooping cranes nests at the Wood Buffalo National Park in the Northwest Territories of Canada and winters at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas Gulf Coast. A non-migrating flock of approximately 30 birds lives year-round in the central Florida Kissimmee region.

Whooping cranes

Whooping cranes, named for their loud and penetrating unison calls, live and breed in wetland areas, where they feed on crabs, clams, frogs and aquatic plants. They are distinctive animals, standing five feet tall, with white bodies, black wing tips and red crowns on their heads.

WCEP asks anyone who encounters a whooping crane in the wild to please give them the respect and distance they need. Do not approach birds on foot within 200 yards; remain in your vehicle; do not approach in a vehicle within 100 yards. Also, please remain concealed and do not speak loudly enough that the birds can hear you. Finally, do not trespass on private property in an attempt to view or photograph whooping cranes.

Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership founding members are the International Crane Foundation, Operation Migration, Inc., Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center and National Wildlife Health Center, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin, and the International Whooping Crane Recovery Team.

Many other flyway states, provinces, private individuals and conservation groups have joined forces with and support WCEP by donating resources, funding and personnel. More than 60 percent of the project's budget comes from private sources in the form of grants, public donations and corporate sponsors.

To report whooping crane sightings, visit the WCEP whooping crane observation webpage at http://www.fws.gov/midwest/whoopingcrane/sightings/sightingform.cfm .

For more information on the project, its partners and how you can help, visit the WCEP website at http://www.bringbackthecranes.org .

05/26/2009: Fungi, From Killer to Dinner Companion, New York Times

(Link to the original article)

By NATALIE ANGIER

Published: May 25, 2009

According to Roman legend, there once was a cruel boy who tortured a fox by tying straw to its tail and then setting the straw ablaze. The god Robigus was so outraged that he punished humanity with wheat rust, a fungal nightmare that leaves crops looking as though they had been burned. For centuries afterward, the Romans sought to appease the deity through annual sacrifices of dogs and cows unlucky enough to have rust-colored fur.

Robigus, Lord of Fungus, is still furiously among us, but these days hes collecting his sacrificial spoils personally. In the eastern United States, thousands of cave-dwelling bats have died of an aggressive fungal disease called white-nose syndrome, and hundreds of thousands if not millions more are at risk of contracting the condition. Frogs and salamanders worldwide are dying in catastrophic numbers, very likely of a fungal disorder called chytridiomycosis, which clogs an amphibians skin and deranges its blood chemistry. Forests along the western and southern coasts of North America are withering as a result of fungal blooms injected into the wood by pine-boring beetles.

We have already lost our majestic American chestnut trees to blight and our favorite shade trees to Dutch elm disease. Cant we just break out a few giant bombs of Ajax and wipe the world clean of its infernal fungus, its allergenic mold and sporulating mildew, its rot and blight, smut and rust, its jock itch and athletes foot that can plague even the most devoted couch morel?

We can never rid the world of its fungus, of course, nor would we want to. Fungi represent a kingdom unto themselves, up there in taxonomic sovereignty with the kingdoms Animalia and Plantae, the bacteria and the protists. Some 100,000 species of fungi have been tallied, and scientists estimate that at least another 1.5 million remain to be discovered.

Fungi are everywhere, on every continent and in every sea, floating in the air, lacing through the soil, resting on your skin, colonizing mucosal cavities within, and festively decorating that long-neglected peach. And though some fungi are pathogenic and will kill the living tissue they have penetrated, the vast majority are benign, and many are essential to the life forms around them.

They are the major decomposers, outdoing even bacteria, worms and maggots in their saprophagic industry, said David J. McLaughlin, a mycologist at the University of Minnesota. If you want true antisepsis, look to the fruits of Robigus.

Fungi also have a talent for symbiosis, for establishing cross-kingdom quid pro quos that keep the fungus fed and happy while lending its partner vast new powers. Maybe 90 percent of all land plants depend on the so-called mycorrhizal fungi that stipple their roots and feed modestly on their plant sugars to in turn supply them with nutrients from the soil like phosphorus and nitrogen. And botanists suspect that plants might never have made the leap onto land some 500 million years ago without their mycorrhizal assistants.

Fungus may well have given rise to human culture, or at least the comedy of human comity. For a loaf of bread to break with old friends and a jug of wine to help forge new ones, we can thank the fungus Saccharomyces, bakers and brewers yeast.

More recently, Saccharomyces has served as an agreeable model organism in the laboratory, an excellent way to explore how genes behave and cells divide and a much cheaper date than a rodent. Fungal cells turn out to be surprisingly similar to animal cells, and researchers recently determined that the fungal and animal lineages didnt split from each other until millions of years after both had branched away from the plants.

The defining traits of a fungus are gustatory and architectural. Whereas animals ingest a meal first and then digest it internally, fungi do the reverse. After latching on to a suitable food source, they release enzymes to break down the substance into a soupy mash of sugars and amino acids, which they can then absorb through the membranes of their filamentous hyphae. Some fungi remain simple, even unicellular, but others can sprout elaborate fruiting bodies packed with billions of microscopic spores, billions of wistful homuncular fungi.

The most familiar fruiting bodies are the mushrooms, with their vivid pigments of inscrutable purpose and their still more inscrutable forms here a swollen pink pincushion or a birds nest filled with eggs, there a protruding black tongue or a batch of bright butter coral. Given sufficient food and room, the filaments of a founding fungus may grow over thousands of acres of soil and persist for centuries or millennia, all the while spawning genetically identical mushrooms above ground, and biologists have argued that such hyphal masses qualify as some of the largest and most ancient organisms on Earth.

Most fungi are adapted to grow in cool or foresty temperatures, maybe 60, 70 degrees Fahrenheit, which is why the pathogens among them tend to prey on plants, or cold-blooded animals like insects, reptiles or amphibians.

Even then, most fungal diseases are not fatal, and the virulent strain that is thought to be involved in todays mass amphibian die-offs may have been introduced into natural populations by frogs used in medical research.

With their hot body temperatures, mammals and birds suffer from few fungal diseases save those confined to the coolish epidermis. Bats are mammals, but the species now afflicted by white-nose syndrome are cave-hibernating bats, and when the bats lapse into their hibernation torpor, said David S. Blehert, a microbiologist with the United States Geological Surveys National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., their core body temperature drops down to just a couple of degrees above cave conditions, as low as 44 degrees.

This pathogen is treating the bats as if they were forgotten tubs of cottage cheese in the back of the refrigerator, Dr. Blehert said. Moreover, the fungus appears to be unusually virulent. Were seeing in excess of 90 percent mortality at some sites, Dr. Blehert added.

Since the disease was first identified west of Albany in March 2007, it has spread to bats in nine states and is on the cusp of reaching bat populations that aggregate in groups 300,000 strong, the largest colonies of hibernating mammals known on the planet, Dr. Blehert said. In an effort to block the pathogens passage, wildlife authorities are closing off caves to human traffic, for now the only measure they can think of to keep the wrath of Robigus at bay.

05/25/2009: The Sixth Extinction? (Includes WNS), The New Yorker

(Link to the original article)

04/30/2009: White Nose Syndrome Affecting Bats and the Environment, WHSV.com (Virginia)

(Link to the original article)

A deadly fungus continues to spread through bat populations across the northeast. White Nose Syndrome has been confirmed in two caves in Virginia and four caves in Pendleton County, West Virginia.

WNS first surfaced in caves near Albany, New York in 2006. Of the bats affected, 99 percent have died.

Experts say the Little Brown Bat populations have had the highest mortality rate, but Eastern Pipistrelles and Northern Long-Eared Bats have also been affected.

Rick Reynolds, Wildlife Diversity Biologist for the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, says there is little known about WNS, so little that they can't even call it a disease.

"White Nose Syndrome is something kind of new to the United States and we've never seen it before here," says Reynolds. "It's something that we're not 100 percent certain whether the fungus is really the causative agent or just more of a secondary agent that is really causing death of these bats."

Experts say bats with WNS wake up more often during their winter hibernation, burning up their stored fat. They leave the caves too early and cannot find insects on which they feed. Eventually, many starve to death.

There are several theories as to how WNS is spread. One is simply from bat to bat. Another is that bats don't immediately die from WNS and may fly to another cave. The final theory comes back to humans, who may travel from cave to cave without properly disinfecting clothes and gear.

Caves with confirmed cases are considered "off limits" to recreational cavers to prevent further spread of the fungus. Cave owners hope that cavers heed the warning.

Reynolds says that less bats in the area mean more insects in the environment.

"Bats are number one nocturnal insect eaters out there and they consume quite a few insects and they consume a number of insects that are really pests to us, both around our home and with agriculture as well," says Reynolds.

Reynolds says that bat populations are crucial to keep pest populations in check.

"If we don't have bats out there, kind of keeping these populations in check, then we're going to have to control them with some other means, which is most likely going to be increased use of insecticides," says Reynolds. "That, of course is costly to farmers and that cost is mostly likely going to be passed on to the consumer."

Craig Stihler, Endangered Species Specialist for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources, says that WNS is now in areas that house endangered species of bats. The two endangered bats that are affected are Indiana Bats and Virginia Big Eared Bats.

Pendleton County has the largest population of Virginia Big Eared Bats in the world, and WNS is within five miles of one of their most densely populated caves.

Stihler also says the loss of bats not only changes the environment outside the cave, but inside it as well.

"There's also problems involved with some of the life in caves, because a lot of caves have a number of invertebrates and small animals that live in the cave and some are found just in one or two caves in the world," says Stihler. "And bats bring organic matter into the caves and that these ecosystems work on. So we could lose a lot of stuff inside the cave too, species that might be found in just one or two caves. Once we lose the bats we may lose them."

With little information at hand, experts are expecting the situation to worsen.

"What we can see, at least with the pattern of the past several years, is that we do expect it to keep moving further south and potentially heading west as well," says Reynolds. "And we're expecting basically the same consequences. This year, we've noticed the symptoms of White Nose in caves. Next year we're probably going to see dead bats showing up on the landscape."

The USGS National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin is currently working on several experiments regarding the fungus. By summer, both Virginia and West Virginia officials are hoping to know how WNS is spread and if it's a primary or secondary illness.

Stihler says labs across the country are working to see if they can stop or slow down the spread of WNS, but a solution has not been found.

WNS is not known to directly affect humans.

04/25/2009: Endless Caverns Bats Suspect, DNRonline.com (Harrisonburg, VA)

(Link to the original article)

Samples of bats found in the Endless Caverns show cave and suspected of having the deadly white-nose syndrome have been sent to a federal testing facility, the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries confirmed Friday.

If the tests come back positive, it will be the first confirmed case in Rockingham County of the mysterious disease that has wiped out hundreds of thousands of bats in the Northeast. The disease showed up in Virginia for the first time earlier this year, but until now, no bats in the central Valley had been suspected of having the illness.

White-nose syndrome is named for the ring of white fungus that typically appears on infected bats' snouts, and sometimes on other body parts such as wings.

Besides the fungus, infected bats typically have low body fat, are dehydrated and demonstrate abnormal behavior, such as searching for food during the winter.

Rick Reynolds, a wildlife biologist with the VDGIF, said Virginia Cave Board members discovered bats showing signs of the disease during a tour of Endless Caverns on Saturday. Endless Caverns is a commercial show cave located near New Market. The caverns, along with several similar caves in the central Valley, are a popular tourist attraction.

Reynolds visited the caverns on Tuesday to take samples of the bats, which he sent to the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., to be tested. The results should come back in two to three weeks, he said.

The bats in Endless Caverns "were probably in the very early stages of showing the fungus," Reynolds said. "It was not as prominent as some of the pictures that you see. It was just kind of spotty on the wings."

Endless Caverns Still Open

04/17/2009: Salmonella outbreak kills birds, Idaho Mountain Express

(Link to the original article)

Fish and Game: keep feeders clean

by DELLA SENTILLES

Reports have surfaced of a small outbreak of salmonella among birds in the Wood River Valley. The affected birds are pine siskins, small creatures that are considered susceptible to salmonella.

Information on the birds' deaths first came from Jeramie Dreyfuss, a Hailey resident and bird enthusiast who said she found some 30 dead birds in her backyard. Dreyfuss sent the birds to Mark Drew, wildlife veterinarian for Idaho Fish and Game's Bureau of Wildlife, who performed an autopsy.

Drew said that the autopsy showed traces of salmonella in the birds. He did not yet know what strain of salmonella killed the birds or what caused the outbreak.

"We don't know the source," he said. "But my thoughts right now are that it's a feeder hygiene situation where there are a lot of feeders out and a lot of contaminated seed that's old and wet."

According to the Centers for Disease Control, salmonellosis is a bacterial disease caused by the bacteria. Many different kinds of salmonella can make people sick. Typical indications include diarrhea, fever, and stomach pain. The symptoms usually go away after one week. But, the diarrhea can become severe or the infection can affect other organs, requiring hospitalization.

Drew recommended people clean their bird feeders and maybe go as far as to stop feeding the birds for the next week or two.

Krysten Schuler, wildlife disease specialist for the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center, agreed.

"We are having national reports of salmonellosis that is specific to birds," Schuler said. "The message to get out about this disease is that it is common to backyard birdfeeders, as they can easily become contaminated. So it's important for people to clean their feeders using a 10 percent bleach solution, and while outbreaks are going on like this, it is better to take down their feeders for about two weeks so the birds don't congregate."

Despite the die-off in Hailey, Schuler and Drew are not particularly concerned.

"This is not a problem that is unanticipated," Drew said. "We've seen the problem before, and it is happening in other places in the country."

In addition, Drew said the death of 30 birds is a very small and localized mortality event.

"Thirty birds out of a said population of 3,000 is very small, even if there may well be other incidents of death," he said.

Drew noted that people should pay attention to hygiene habits in their homes, especially for dogs, cats and young children, who can pick up contaminated seeds or bird feces.

04/17/2009: Woman finds 30 dead birds in her yard, Associated Press

(Link to the original article)

Originally printed at http://www.2news.tv/news/43184502.html

KETCHUM (AP) Idaho Fish and Game wildlife veterinarian Mark Drew says a small outbreak of salmonella is killing birds in the Sun Valley region.

Hailey resident Jeramie Dreyfuss found about 30 dead birds in her backyard and sent them to Drew for an autopsy. Drew says he found traces of the bacteria salmonella in the birds. Drew says they likely got it from dirty bird feeders filled with old, wet seed.

Krysten Schuler, a wildlife disease specialist for the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center, says there have been similar reports nationwide.

Drew recommends that people clean their bird feeders and says they should consider not feeding the birds for the next week or so.

04/11/2009: Mysterious Bat-Killing Disease Found In 2 Va. Caves, The Washington Post

(Link to the original article)

By Brigid Schulte

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, April 11, 2009; A01

First, the frogs began disappearing, with as many as 122 species becoming extinct worldwide since 1980. Then honeybee colonies began to collapse. Scientists fear that bats might be next.

For the past three years, biologists in Virginia have been nervously watching a strange die-off of bats in the Northeast as a mysterious fungus spread rapidly through hibernating bat colonies, leaving caves that once served as safe havens for the hibernating creatures carpeted with the tiny, emaciated carcasses of an estimated 1 million dead bats.

Biologists here were hoping that the fungus would somehow be contained or would burn itself out. Instead, they were shocked last week when researchers confirmed the presence of the fungus, dubbed white nose syndrome for the ring of white fungus that collects on bats' muzzles and wings, in two caves in the state: Breathing Cave in Bath County and Clover Hollow in Giles County, hundreds of miles from the other known infected caves.

"We thought we'd have more time to prepare," said Rick Reynolds, a wildlife biologist with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. But it wouldn't have mattered. "Unfortunately, no one knows what to do about it."

What is known is this: As many as 90 to 100 percent of the bats in infected colonies have died within a year of finding the fungus. And with its spread this far south, there's no reason to think it will stop. Scientists are beginning to whisper the unthinkable: complete annihilation of some species.

Just south of the infected Virginia caves, in Kentucky, Tennessee and northern Alabama, gather some of the largest populations of hibernating bats in the world. And these bats have been tracked flying hundreds of miles from their home caves. They could potentially come into contact with and infect or be infected by any number of other species of bats and the as yet incurable disease could be unstoppable.

"If this continues to spread, we are talking about extinctions," said Thomas Kunz, an ecologist and bat expert at Boston University. "I've studied bats for 44 years. This is unprecedented in my lifetime. It's not alarmist. These are just the facts."

Bats, like the disappearing honeybees and frogs, play a critical role in the delicate balance of nature. A single bat will eat 50 to 100 percent of its body weight in insects in a single night. Kunz conservatively calculates that the million bats that have died would have consumed about 694 tons of insects in one year: the equivalent weight of about 11 Abrams M1 tanks.

"You take these bats away, there are a lot of unknowns," Kunz said. "What are these insects going to do that aren't being eaten? They can cause serious damage to crops, gardens and forests, further upsetting both the natural and human-altered ecosystems."

In one study of eight Texas counties, Kunz said, researchers found that if bats disappeared, farmers would have to spend as much as $1.2 million more on pesticides each year. That means more-expensive food, more chemicals in the food supply and the environment, and who knows what other cascading effects on the animals that depend on bats as a source of food or their guano for nutrition. "Eventually, there's a threshold that's going to be reached," Kunz said. "That's not going to recover."

White nose syndrome does not appear to affect humans. That's a blessing and a curse, Kunz said. "There's been little attention and little sense of urgency about this," he said. "Most of us are doing this research on a shoestring."

The fungus appears to be similar to a cold-loving fungus found in caves in Europe. Hibernating bats there, although their populations are far smaller than those in the United States, have shown signs of infection, but none have died.

Did recreational cavers bring the fungus from Europe to the United States? Did spores travel in the wind? Has an always-present fungus been "activated" by something? "I don't think we can rule anything out," said David Blehert, a microbiologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who is researching the disease. "We just don't know."

Because the fungus appears to have leapfrogged this year from caves in the Northeast to Virginia and West Virginia, in caves better known for their popularity among recreational cavers than for big bat populations, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently issued an advisory closing all caves in 17 states adjacent to the outbreak. No one knows how the disease is spreading -- whether bats are infecting other bats or humans are tracking the fungus into caves on their shoes, scientific survey gear or caving equipment, or some combination of the two. But officials say they want to err on the side of caution. "We're under no delusions that this is going to stop the spread of the disease," said Diana Weaver, a spokeswoman for the Fish and Wildlife Service. "We're just hoping to slow it down enough for science to catch up and find some answers."

In Virginia, site of the most recent outbreak, wildlife biologist Rick Reynolds raced to a school in Cumberland County one morning last week. He'd gotten a call that a bat was flying about in the cold in broad daylight. That was a bad sign. Healthy cave bats are nocturnal and go out only at night during warmer months. They spend the winter hibernating deep inside caves, crevices or old mines. They hang upside down on cave walls in massive clusters, drop their body temperatures, which usually run about 100 degrees, to match the cave's often freezing temperature and fall into a motionless sleep called torpor.

The bat had white spots on its nose and wings. Reynolds's heart sank. He brought the bat back to his office in Verona, stuck it in a bag and shoved it in the office freezer, next to a calzone. He'll ship it to researchers to test for white nose syndrome. If the bat tests positive, it will mean the disease is on the march south.

Later, an hour away, out in Bath County, in the Allegheny Mountains near the West Virginia line, Reynolds met with Rick Lambert of the Virginia Speleological Survey, who has been volunteering to check some of Virginia's 4,500 caves for the fungus. They donned caving gear that had been exposed to the fungus, crammed on helmets and headlamps, and crawled on their bellies through a narrow passage in Breathing Cave to reach a colony of hibernating little brown bats, one of the six bat species that have been found with the fungus.

Their headlamps drew arcs of light on the limestone walls as they surveyed clusters of bats with white fungus around their noses and along their wings. The fungus is little more than a skin irritant, they explain, much like athlete's foot. Scientists aren't sure how it's killing the bats.

The best hypothesis is that the fungus is somehow disturbing the bats, causing them to wake more often than usual. Each time they wake, they use 60 days of the fat reserves they need to make it through the winter. They might be waking up so often that they use up their fat stores and starve to death. That's why infected bats are seen in the daylight, emaciated and searching for food they won't find in the middle of winter. As the two men whispered, some of the fungus-covered bats stirred. Reynolds shook his head. "Nobody expected anything like this."

The two made their counts and took their leave.

"I'd like to give some advice to the southern states," Reynolds said. To him, the spread of the deadly fungus is only a matter of time. "I just don't know what that would be."

He trudged slowly in darkness, up to his waist in dried leaves, toward the weak daylight breaking through the mouth of the cave.

04/10/2009: Are dirty feeders killing the Northland's birds?, South Washington County Bulletin

(Link to the original article)

Redpolls and pine siskins are dying at bird feeders in central and Northeastern Minnesota, and the cause is suspected to be salmonella from spoiled feed.

The first signs came in late February, said Rich Staffon, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources area wildlife manager at Cloquet. Weve had a dramatic increase in inquiries in the last couple of weeks. Huge numbers of birds have built up at peoples feeders, in the hundreds of birds in some cases.

While numbers of these winter finches are high, just a handful of birds are dying, Staffon said.

This happens every few years that we see this kind of die-off, Staffon said. It seems to happen in delayed, damp springs.

A bird in a weakened state usually will sit on the ground with its feathers fluffed up, and it is often not as wary as it normally would be, he said. The bacteria is passed from bird to bird at feeders.

Duluth birders Molly and David Evans have seen apparently sick redpolls at their feeder within the past week, Molly Evans said.

I had one I know for sure I saw, she said. And David came in the other day carrying the feeder and said he had seen several not looking healthy.

David Evans cleaned and disinfected the feeder and put it back up. The birds coming now appear healthy, Molly Evans said. And there are plenty of them.

Maybe not 100, but close to that, she said. Everybodys swamped. Its amazing.

The remedy for an infected feeder is simple. People who observe dead or weakened birds should empty their bird feeders, wash the feeders with hot, soapy water, then disinfect feeders with a 10 percent solution of bleach. Leave feeders without food for a couple of weeks, Staffon said. After that, the feeders can be refilled.

Also, its a good idea to rake up and dispose of discarded feed on the ground beneath the feeder, Duluth birder Koni Sundquist said.

For more information on bird diseases such as a salmonella infection, go to the National Wildlife Health Center Web site at www.nwhc.usgs.gov.

04/03/2009: Virginia Confirms Cases of White-Nose Syndrome in Bats, Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries

(Link to the original article)

Asking Cavers, Owners of Caves to Help by Reducing Cave Traffic

Richmond, VA The Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (VDGIF) has received results from specimens sent for analysis to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, and the news is not good. The results confirm the presence of the fungus associated with white-nose syndrome (WNS) in bats from two caves in Virginia.

While conducting winter surveys of caves where bats hibernate, known as hibernacula, biologists and volunteers from VDGIF, the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Virginia Speleological Survey discovered bats that showed signs of WNS in Breathing Cave in Bath County. Soon after, similar clinical signs were found in bats in Clover Hollow Cave in Giles County.

The impact of white-nose syndrome on bat populations could be highly significant if the condition cannot be controlled and continues to spread. Some WNS caves in New York have experienced declines of more than 90% of the bat populations. Losses in bat populations of this magnitude will cause a substantial ripple effect due to the important role that bats play as insect feeders, as a food source for other animals (hawks, owls, raccoons, skunks, and other animals that prey on bats), and with their contributions to cave ecosystems.

Given these recent findings, VDGIF is emphasizing the request it made last month for recreational cavers to refrain from entering caves. The Department has closed the caves on its wildlife management areas. Because of the potential impact of WNS, the VDGIF urges cavers and cave owners to help Virginia's bat populations by reducing cave traffic until more is learned about this syndrome.

For more information about white-nose syndrome and about the bats of Virginia, visit www.dgif.virginia.gov.

It is the mission of the VDGIF to maintain optimum populations of all species to serve the needs of the Commonwealth; to provide opportunity for all to enjoy wildlife, inland fish, boating and related outdoor recreation and to work diligently to safeguard the rights of the people to hunt, fish and harvest game as provided for in the Constitution of Virginia; to promote safety for persons and property in connection with boating, hunting and fishing; to provide educational outreach programs and materials that foster an awareness of and appreciation for Virginia's fish and wildlife resources, their habitats, and hunting, fishing, and boating opportunities.

04/02/2009: Tracking Wildlife Disease Around the World, Ivanhoe Broadcast News

(Link to the original article)

MADISON, Wisc. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Keeping track of the world's wildlife is a tough job. Scientists believe there are diseases popping up that no one even knows about. Since a growing number of animal viruses can be spread to humans, researchers want to stay on top of the outbreaks as they happen. A new interactive map is keeping man and nature connected.

Nature's beauty is breathtaking. But when disease threatens wild animals, who comes to the rescue?

"It's not like you can take your kid and say, 'Oh, he's not looking good. He may be sick. I'm going to take him to the physician,'" Joshua Dein, V.M.D., a wildlife veterinarian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, Wisc., told Ivanhoe.

At a lab, veterinarians examine animals killed by disease to try to stop it from spreading. They depend on the public to alert them to problems, but a lot goes unnoticed in the wild.

"There's no coordinated method for reporting wildlife diseases in the country or in the world," Dr. Dein said.

That's starting to change thanks to the Global Wildlife Disease News Map. Updated daily, the site tracks where diseases such as West Nile virus, bird flu and monkey pox are making news.

"We do have situations in wildlife where you have hundreds of thousands of deaths occurring where we can step in," Dr. Dein said. "If in fact some of these diseases can be transmitted to people, then we want to know that really soon."

Wildlife disease information is collected from newspapers all over the world. Then, it is sorted by region, date and disease and displayed on a map giving people a bigger picture of the problem.

"Mapping disease outbreaks is important so that maybe the biologist or the person who's seeing events out in the field can then go and look and see, 'Oh, there's other things going on. I should probably report this. It may be important,'" Krysten Schuler, a wildlife ecologist at the United States Geological Survey in Madison, Wisc., told Ivanhoe.

Right now, wildlife ecologists are trying to figure out why a fungus is killing bats in the Northeast and why an exotic kind of lice is wiping out deer populations in the West.

"Try to gain as much info from one particular animal so we can apply it to the greater good," Schuler said.

Researchers say the map would have helped when the West Nile virus first came to the country. There were scattered reports of dead crows, but people didn't know there was a connection until months later. You can access the map by going to

http://wildlifedisease.nbii.gov.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Dr. Josh Dein

Veterinarian

Project Leader

(608) 729-5919

fjdein@wisc.edu

03/29/2009: Connecticut Has Key Role In Search For Cause Of White-Nose Syndrome In Bats, Hartford Courant

(Link to the original article)

The rapid spread from the Northeast to the South of the deadly white-nose syndrome in bats is more than a crisis that once again puts Connecticut at the center of a major outbreak like Lyme disease or West Nile virus.

The race to solve the white-nose mystery before the scourge reaches the large bat populations of the American South has set off a frenzied, CSI-like drama in veterinary and pathology laboratories from Italy to Wisconsin. Connecticut is playing a crucial role by compiling data on the syndrome and sending samples of diseased bats to important university and government diagnostic clinics.

The syndrome, first discovered in New York state in 2006, is a condition in which the heads, legs and wings of hibernating bats are coated with a white fungus that scientists have identified as a rare form of geomyces, a fungus usually found in cold, dry environments, such as the tundra in the Arctic. To fight the physiological effects of the fungus, bats deplete their fat reserves before the winter is over, fleeing from their caves in a futile search for insects to eat. Most of them die after fluttering helplessly in the snow or clinging to the side of barns.

Earlier this month, biologists from the state Department of Environmental Protection confirmed, after visits to bat caves in Litchfield County, that as many as 90 percent of Connecticut's bats have died. The syndrome is not considered a direct threat to human health, but the indirect results for man could be profound. Bats eat as many as 3,000 mosquitoes and insects apiece every night, and the die-off has generated worries about potential damage this year to Connecticut's crop fields and forests.

Related links

Tracking A Killer Of Bats Video

Bats With White-Nose Syndrome Photos

Advisory Issued In Response To Fatal White-Nose Syndrome In Bats

Fungus Kills About 90 Percent Of Connecticut's Bats

Devastating Winter For New England's Bats

Epidemic Strikes Bats

US Fish And Wildlife Service Information Page on White-Nose Syndrome All told, in the four Northeast states where white-nose was first detected, scientists estimate that as many as 1 million bats have died.

Competing Theories

When white-nose was first discovered in a group of bat hibernation caves surrounding Albany three years ago, government and university scientists from throughout the country hurriedly met by phone conference to share bat data. They advanced a number of theories to explain the sudden appearance of the geomyces fungus.

Most of these early hypotheses the impact of global warming, the introduction into the bat food chain of new insecticides used to fight West Nile virus were quickly eliminated after the facts failed to support the theory.

But there are now two competing theories on the cause of white-nose, with scientists from both camps hoping they are only a few months away from identifying what's killing America's bats. One effort is an elaborate, comparative study of the North American and European geomyces fungus, lead by the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis. The other effort focuses on the diets of bats and their ability to metabolize food during hibernation, led by scientists at Indiana State University's Center for North American Bat Research and Conservation.

Al Hicks, a mammal specialist who runs the endangered species program for the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, led the team of field biologists who first discovered white-nose in bats. He considers it telling that the first site where white-nose was found was Howe Caverns in New York's Schoharie County, a popular tourist site where more than 200,000 visitors a year ride elevators down to a deep cave that houses hibernating bats on the far end.

"We've known since 1983 that there is a very similar geomyces fungus on bats in Europe but that it has not killed them in large numbers like here in the U.S.," Hicks said. "Someone from Europe might have carried that fungus into Howe Caverns on their shoes. This might have introduced a fungus from another continent that American bats had not yet developed resistance to."

Hicks pointed out that ecological havoc often results from invasive species or compounds being carried from one land to another the blight of the American chestnut and the fungus attacking North American frogs and toads, he said, both originated overseas.

Over the past year, Hicks has cooperated with laboratories in Europe and the federal wildlife laboratory in Wisconsin, supplying samples of dead bats so that the European and American geomyces can be compared. The federal laboratory is also conducting an experiment to see if the geomyces can be transmitted from bat to bat.

"We are about three weeks away from results on these experiments, which will go a long way toward explaining the problem," Hicks said. "Then we will have to start the serious work of discovering some sort of biological or chemical control that can curtail the growth of the fungus."

A Telltale Enzyme

At Indiana State University, another major study is being led by biologist John Whitaker. He conducted influential studies in the 1990s proving that hibernating bats rely over the winter on chitin, the shell-like exterior of insects that is retained in bat intestines. Whitaker helped discover that a digestive enzyme present in bats, called chitinase, allows them to slowly metabolize the residual insect parts over the winter. This can be detected in bats by the presence of chitinase-producing bacteria.

But bats that died of white-nose syndrome that were sent to his labs last winter, Whitaker said, have significantly lower levels of chitinase-producing bacteria than healthy bats.

"We're still a few months away from proving this, but our experiments could show that the affected bats do not have enough chitinase to process the remains of insects within their intestines," Whitaker said. "That would show us what's happening to these sick bats during hibernation and could lead us to find a solution."

Perhaps by the end of the year in time to curtail the impact of white-nose before it spreads to the large bat populations of the South scientists will have settled on an answer to the riddle of white-nose, whether it's caused by an invasive fungus or a lack of digestive enzymes.

In the meantime, the race to detect the cause of white-nose and find a cure has accelerated scientific knowledge of bats.

"We hardly knew a thing about bat weights until all of this began, and now we have whole new databases on that," Whitaker said.

"And, during the search deep inside these caves for specimens with white-nose, we discovered a species out here in Indiana, the small-footed bat, that was never before found in the state. The small-footed bat is extremely rare, and I've been searching for 50 years to find one in Indiana. Well, now we finally know it's here."

03/27/2009: Testing VA Bats for Possible White-Nose Syndrome, WHSV.com (Richmond, VA)

(Link to the original article)

The Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries is investigating two recent potential occurrences of white-nose syndrome in bats in Virginia.

While conducting winter surveys of caves where bats hibernate, known as hibernacula, biologists and volunteers from VDGIF, the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Virginia Speleological Survey discovered bats that showed signs of WNS in Breathing Cave in Bath County. Soon after, similar symptoms were found in bats in Clover Hollow Cave in Giles County.

According to a release on March 9, specimens were collected and sent to the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin for analysis. It will take from two to three weeks for results to be available.

White-nose syndrome was first found in the winter of 2006-2007, when bats in several caves around Albany, New York displayed a white fungus growing around their muzzles, ears, and wings. By spring 2008, thousands of bats had died and conditions had spread to other sites in New York and adjacent states.

By the winter of 2008-2009, WNS had spread to bats in Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and West Virginia, and is suspected in New Hampshire. Scientists have been alarmed by the rapid and far-reaching spread of the syndrome.

Little is known about WNS, but one common symptom in these cases is the presence of this newly-identified fungus. How the fungus affects bats remains unclear. No known human health issues have been identified.

During the summer and early fall in Virginia, bats feed on insects and build body fat reserves critical for successful hibernation and survival through the winter months. Bat colonies consume thousands of insects in a single night, including mosquitoes and beetles. During hibernation, the metabolism of bats slows dramatically, virtually shutting down, to conserve fat reserves. Bats emerge in the spring ready to consume insects, give birth, raise their young pups, and continue their life cycle.

Bats collected from known WNS caves have depleted fat reserves; some even have appeared to starve to death. Bats suspected of having WNS appear to arouse more often and are more active during the hibernation period. Reports of bats found flying outside of mines or caves, apparently trying to find food, at a time when they should be hibernating, are symptomatic of the syndrome. WNS is almost always fatal to affected bats.

The impact of white-nose syndrome on bat populations could be highly significant if the condition cannot be controlled and continues to spread. Some WNS caves in New York have experienced declines of more than 90 percent of the bat populations.

Losses in bat populations of this magnitude will cause a substantial ripple effect due to the important role that bats play as insect feeders, as a food source for other animals (hawks, owls, raccoons, skunks, and other animals that prey on bats) and with their contributions to cave ecosystems.

How WNS is spread is under investigation, but it is suspected that transmission of the syndrome can occur by both bat and human traffic in caves. Many of the caves where WNS has been confirmed have been popular sites for recreational caving. Huge geographical leaps in WNS occurrences beyond the migration distances of bats, and in popular recreational caves, indicate that people who visit caves may inadvertently play a role.

Due to concerns about spread of WNS, the VDGIF has closed the caves on its wildlife management areas until more is known about the transport of the syndrome. The department will be asking private landowners with caves on their properties to consider closing their caves temporarily. Caving groups and individuals who enjoy caving are being asked to respect this temporary closure of Virginia caves and to suspend recreational and research caving activities until more information about the cause and spread of WNS can be determined.

The USGS National Wildlife Health Center is currently conducting experiments to determine how white-nose syndrome is spread between affected bat colonies and healthy bat colonies. Research is being conducted on soil samples to learn more about the fungus.

The scientific community is well aware that, with the rapid spread of WNS and the high mortality, answers to the mystery of WNS and solutions to address it are of the utmost importance. Because of the potential impact of WNS, the VDGIF urges cavers and cave owners to help Virginia's bat populations by reducing cave traffic until more is learned about this syndrome.

03/18/2009: Peanuts not likely at fault for spike in Salmonella-killed birds, Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy

(Link to the original article)

Robert Roos * News Editor

Mar 18, 2009 (CIDRAP News) Salmonella infections have been killing more wild birds than usual in the US Southeast this winter, but the increase does not seem related to the nationwide human disease outbreak tied to tainted peanut products, according to federal wildlife scientists.

M. Kevin Keel, DVM, PhD, of the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study at the University of Georgia in Athens said testing so far has shown that the birds have been dying of a different Salmonella strain than the one in the human outbreak.

"It is Salmonella Typhimurium, and we see outbreaks of this type in birds every year, but usually not to this extent," Keel told CIDRAP News. Salmonella Typhimurium is also the serotype involved in the human outbreak, but the bird strain does not match genetically with the human cases, he said.

"We did do some strain typing, and our preliminary data indicate no relation" to the strain involved in the human outbreak, said Keel, who supervises the diagnostic service for the ongoing wildlife study.

Bird feed recall

Burkmann Feeds, a Kentucky company, recently recalled 150 bags of bird feed after the North Carolina Department of Agriculture found Salmonella in one sample. In a statement, Burkmann said one of its peanut suppliers had sold the company some peanuts that were subject to a recall and had not informed the company.

Burkmann makes bird feed for Wild Birds Unlimited (WBU) franchise stores in the Southeast. The recalled peanuts were used in certain lots of Burkmann's WBU Wildlife Blend and WBU Woodpecker Blend, the company said. The firm said it had recalled those lots and informed all the customers who bought the products.

In a Mar 11 press release about the recall, Wild Birds Unlimited said, "Initial tests have found no correlation between any bird deaths and the recalled food; a different strain of Salmonella was found in deceased birds in North Carolina than what we detected in the recalled food."

Western Trade Group Inc. of Port Angeles, Wash., recalled roasted peanuts in February because they contained peanuts from Peanut Corp. of America, the firm blamed for the nationwide outbreak. The firm's recall notice said the feed-grade peanuts had been sold to makers of livestock and bird feed in Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Dakota.

Pine siskins predominate

Keel said most of the Salmonella-infected dead birds have been pine siskins and goldfinches, though some cardinals and other birds have died of salmonellosis as well.

"We don't regularly get pine siskins; they're typically a more northerly bird. Periodically they come down here. They move down in extremely dense flocks. It's not uncommon to see Salmonella outbreaks among them," he said.

Keel said his lab tests birds that people find dead around their feeders and send in. The lab has tested "a couple hundred" since Januaryfar more than the four or five that are sent in for testing in a typical year.

Salmonella is not uncommon in birds found dead around feeders. But this year it's "really widespread," and it's not clear why, Keel said.

"We really don't know why this year has been much more extreme," he said. "If it hadn't occurred till the pine siskins arrived, we'd have thought it was them, but some cases occurred before they got here. They certainly are the dominant species affected now."

He said he has no suspicion that the rash of dead birds is related to the human outbreak.

A cyclical phenomenon?

Nathan Ramsay of the US Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center (NWHC) in Madison, Wis., said his center also has been seeing an increase in bird deaths related to Salmonella in the Southeast.

"It seems from probably around Maryland down through Appalachia we've been seeing an increase in Salmonella," he said.

Like Keel, Ramsay said the reasons are unclear. "It seems like it's a cyclical thing. Back in 1998 we had a large peak also, not only on the East Coast but also in the Midwest. It seems like every once in a while we get outbreaks that occur over a large area and in large numbers. We're not exactly sure what causes that as yet."

Ramsay, who is the lead necropsy technician at the NWHC, said the center has not run genetic tests on Salmonella isolates from birds this winter, but said "there doesn't seem to be any connection" with the human outbreak.

He said he was not aware of an unusual level of Salmonella-related bird deaths in regions other than the Southeast, with the possible exception of Washington state.

Salmonellosis is a common cause of death in birds at bird feeders, according to the NWHC. The pathogen can spread from bird to bird through direct contact or through food or water contaminated with feces from an infected bird or mammal. Infected birds may appear healthy but can shed the organism in their feces.

To reduce the spread of Salmonella, the NWHC recommends cleaning feeders with a 10% solution of bleach in water, changing feeder locations regularly, and adding more feeders to reduce crowding.

See also:

Burkmann Feeds recall news release

http://www.burkmannfeeds.com/index.php?tpl=recall

Mar 11 Wild Birds Unlimited recall news release

http://www.wbu.com/news/pressreleases/2009_0311_recall.pdf

Western Trade Group Inc. recall notice

http://www.fda.gov/oc/po/firmrecalls/westerntrade02_09.html

NWHC information on salmonellosis in birds

http://www.nwhc.usgs.gov/disease_information/other_diseases/salmonellosis.jsp

03/06/2009: Warmer caves may save bats from deadly fungus, Nature News

(Link to the original article)

Shivering bats need help to fight off white-nose syndrome.

Hannah Hoag

Little brown bats have suffered most from white-nose syndrome.AlamyResearchers are hoping that heated bat boxes can curtail the number of bats dying from white-nose syndrome a condition that has decimated hibernating bats across the northeastern United States.

As many as half a million bats have died from the poorly understood ailment since it was discovered in New York state in 2006. Because the bodies of emaciated bats are often found strewn around the entrances of affected caves, scientists have hypothesized that the bats are starving to death during hibernation. Now, a pair of ecologists has created a mathematical model that suggests the bats' hibernation patterns are being altered, forcing them to burn through their fat reserves to warm up1. Furthermore, they propose placing heated huts within affected caves for the bats to move into, allowing them to conserve energy and survive.

"White-nose syndrome appears to be an energy-balance issue," says Justin Boyles, a PhD student at the Center for North American Bat Research and Conservation at Indiana State University in Terre Haute. "If the heater idea works it could be an important way to stave off starvation and increase survival, and keep the populations around until we get a cure, whatever that may be."

Big chill

A cave-dwelling bat will hibernate for about 200 days, from late September until early May, dropping its body temperature to 28C and slowing its metabolic rate. But it will stir roughly every 30 days for a few hours at a time, spiking its body temperature and metabolism. It will often seek out warmer air pockets when awake.

Click for a larger image.

Boyles and his co-author Craig Willis, a biologist at the University of Winnipeg, Canada, used a mathematical model to reproduce the white-nose syndrome mortality patterns (75-80%) observed in New York by reducing the bats' torpor spells from 800 hours to 200 hours, and increasing the duration of their arousals from 3 hours to 18 hours. In the simulation, the bats woke up 24 times during the winter instead of 6; they spent too much time out of hibernation and used up their fat reserves. But when the authors modelled the effects of adding heated boxes for the bats to gather in during the arousal periods, only around 8% of the bats died.

"The idea is based on an existing phenomenon that bats are known to exploit," says David Blehert, head of diagnostic microbiology at the US Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin. "If they learn how to use the boxes it may be a way to preserve their fat reserves and give them a chance to survive."

Boyles and Willis are preparing to test their idea in a series of bat caves so far untouched by the disease in Manitoba province in Canada, using insulated boxes warmed by battery-powered heaters that are recharged with solar panels. "It's an unorthodox idea, but white-nose syndrome is a big enough deal that unorthodox ideas have become necessary," says Boyles.

Fungal onslaught

The ailment was dubbed white-nose syndrome when it was first discovered because it appears as a pale fuzzy growth on the heads and wings of affected bats. Then, in October 2008, Blehert and his colleagues reported the isolation of a previously undescribed species of Geomyces fungus2 that thrives at low temperatures. Although they have yet to show that the fungus causes white-nose syndrome, experiments to test this are underway and it remains the leading hypothesis, Blehert says.

ADVERTISEMENT

White-nose syndrome has spread to nearly 50 sites in seven states across the northeast, from Vermont to West Virginia, says Susi von Oettingen, a biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service who works on endangered species.Evidence of the disease has been seen in two other states New Hampshire and Virginia but this has yet to be confirmed.

The little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) has suffered the most, but also affected are the northeast's five other species of hibernating bats, including the Indiana bat (Myotis sodalis), which is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

"People are working day-in and day-out to try and find an answer," says Scott Darling, a wildlife biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. "If not for the bats in Vermont and New York, then to prevent those in Kentucky and Tennessee from getting it."

References

Boyles, J. G. & Willis, C. K. R. Front. Ecol. Environ. advance online publication doi:10.1890/080187 (2009).

Blehert, D. et al. Science 323, 227 (2009). | Article | ChemPort |

03/06/2009: Heaters might stave off doom for bats: researchers, Associated Press

(Link to the original article)

By MICHAEL HILL 23 hours ago

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) Bats afflicted with a mysterious and deadly disorder might be able to make it through winter with the help of heated boxes placed in hibernation caves, a pair of researchers say.

The biologists stress that the boxes being tested this winter are not intended to cure "white-nose syndrome," which has killed upward of a half million bats in three winters from New England to West Virginia.

But, in an article published online Thursday in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, they suggest the little heated havens could help stricken bats preserve enough precious energy to survive hibernation season.

White-nose syndrome, named for the white smudges of fungus on the noses and wings of hibernating bats, has alarmed scientists by spreading from a few caves in upstate New York two winters ago to at least 55 caves in seven states. White-nose bats appear to starve to death, running through their winter fat stores before spring.

Researchers worry about the fate of bats, which play an important role in controlling the populations of insects that can damage wheat, apples and dozens of other crops.

As scientists try to definitively establish whether the fungus is the cause, as suspected, or a symptom of white nose, researchers Justin Boyles and Craig Willis considered a way to manage it based on computer modeling of the energy expended by bats.

Based on the theory that afflicted bats rouse from hibernation more often than normal bats and thus burn more fat to stay warm, they suggest that small bat boxes with battery-powered heating coils could create warm refuges for the creatures.

"It would be sort of a stopgap measure," said Willis, a biology professor at the University of Winnipeg. Boyles, the lead author, is a graduate student in biology at Indiana State University.

Hibernating bats will seek warmer parts of caves during bouts of activity. The pair will test whether healthy bats will use heated boxes instead during a test in the coming months in a cave in Manitoba, Canada. The pilot study is funded with a $28,000 grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

There are potential problems with a mass deployment of heaters that go beyond the logistics and cost. Willis concedes that such an intervention could backfire if white nose is spread from bat to bat in the summer, since it would prolong the survival of infected bats.

But David Blehert, who identified the white-nose fungus as head of microbiology at the U.S. Geological Survey's Wildlife Health Center, said summer spreading is not a concern with this fungus, which needs cold to thrive. Blehert and other researchers said that given the magnitude of the problem, it makes sense to at least test the hypothesis.

"It's not a magic silver bullet," Blehert said, "but it might provide some percentage of bats with a fighting chance to survive hibernation."

03/02/2009: Disease taking a bite out of bat population, Press of Atlantic City

(Link to the original article)

When Mick Valent ventured earlier this year into the caves of Morris County, where thousands of bats come to hibernate, the scene was quite different from years past.

Bats that should have been completely motionless were flying around outdoors. Dead bats were strewn about, many of them with little or no body fat left. And many of them had splotches of white on their wings and at the tips of their noses. As the principal zoologist with the state's Division of Fish and Wildlife, Valent knew exactly what was happening.

"We found everything that described white nose syndrome," Valent said.

White nose syndrome was named after the white fungus that appears on the ends of the bat's noses. It is one of the characteristic symptoms of a mysterious disease with no known cause that has spread quickly, from a single cave in New York in 2006 to nearly 30 sites spread over six states across the northeastern United States.

Researchers know there is a serious problem - hundreds of thousands of bats have died as a result - but they are still baffled by the disease. The fungus is clearly associated with white nose syndrome, but scientists still do not know whether it is causing the disease or simply a symptom of a virus that has yet to be identified.

David Blehert, a microbiologist with the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., explained that the dead bats are found only at caves where bats hibernate. Bats tend to stay in hibernation through the end of April, so researchers need to use the next two months to collect whatever information they can.

What is more troubling to Blehert is the disease's ability to spread. Imagine a contaminated cave being the center of a bull's eye. The target itself would extend about 150 miles in all directions from the cave.

No solutions to the problem exist. Getting rid of all infected bats is not only the wrong approach from a humanitarian standpoint, but it would do very little to prevent other bats from being affected by the mysterious disease.

"Even if you got rid of the bats, the fungus would remain," Blehert said.

While white nose syndrome has not been identified in southern New Jersey, the effects will more likely be felt during the summer. The bats that call the southern part of the state home during the summer are the same bats that are hibernating in the northern New Jersey caves this winter.

And while there may be fewer bats, there also may be more pesky bugs around this summer. That is because insects make up most of a bat's diet. A single bat can eat as many as 3,000 insects in a single night's feeding.

It is hard for researchers to predict exactly how fewer bats would affect insect populations, but Peter Morin, a professor in the department of ecology, evolution and natural resources at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, said, based on diet, bugs that congregate in the evening and near water are the most likely to spike in the absence of bats.

"The bats are not going after things that people view as pests, like mosquitoes," Morin said. Moths and beetles, staples of a night-feeding bat's diet, could become more noticeable with fewer bats, according to Morin.

Whatever the case, time is of the essence to these researchers to get more information on the disease so that something can be done.

"This is an ecological catastrophe," Blehert said.

E-mail Ben Leach:

BLeach@pressofac.com

02/03/2009: White-Nose Kills Hundreds of Bats in Lackawanna County, Wall Street Journal

(Link to the original article)

White-Nose Kills Hundreds of Bats in Lackawanna County

HARRISBURG, Pa., Feb 03, 2009 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Stricken bats die in and around their hibernation quarters at two abandoned mines.

Game Commission seeks public's help in identifying other sites.

The following was written by Joe Kosack, Wildlife Conservation Education Specialist, Pennsylvania Game Commission:

Several hundred little brown bats are dead from White-Nose Syndrome (WNS) in Lackawanna County, and the Pennsylvania Game Commission is looking to residents for help uncovering other sites where this deadly disorder may have surfaced.

Game Commission biologists had been uncovering signs of what appeared to be an impending WNS outbreak in Pennsylvania since last spring. Over the past two years, the disorder has killed more than 90 percent of some wintering bat colonies where it first surfaced in New York and spread through New England. Its confirmation in Pennsylvania and New Jersey came in the past two weeks, but Pennsylvania had a surprisingly unique distinction among the states where WNS has been documented; Pennsylvania bats were not leaving their wintering quarters - caves and mines - and weren't dying. Unfortunately, that no longer can be said.

Last week, bats were found dead outside of an abandoned mine near Carbondale by a citizen who later reported the findings to the agency. Game Commission Wildlife Conservation Officer Chris Skipper visited the site immediately and confirmed the findings. Bats were dead on the ground; flying from the mine; dropping from the sky. Then on Groundhog Day, agency biologist Greg Turner found bats flying from another Lackawanna County mine near Throop. They shouldn't have been emerging for another six weeks.

"Roughly 50 percent of the bats in the mine near Carbondale displayed the characteristic white fungus," said Kevin Wenner, an agency biologist stationed at the agency's Northeast Region office in Dallas. "Bats have been and are staging close to the entrance of the mine; some dying in the mine while others were flying around and dying outside on top of the snow. The bases of several trees near the mine entrance had piles of dead bats around them. Hundreds were visible on top of the most recent snow, so I suspect there are thousands of dead bats."

The findings in Lackawanna County are not unexpected, according to Game Commission Executive Director Carl G. Roe. But they do portend a disturbing and uncertain future for cave bats east of the Mississippi River and quite possibly beyond.

"The Game Commission has worked hard to stay abreast of White-Nose's escalating presence in Pennsylvania," Roe said. "Our bat biologists have been actively involved in field monitoring and research and are working closely with some of this country's best and brightest minds in biology and epidemiology in their pursuit of clues. But a year later, there are just as many questions about WNS, and more dead bats."

A couple weeks ago, the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, informed the Game Commission that bats it submitted from an old iron mine in Mifflin County had tested positive for a cold-loving fungi found on many bats diagnosed with WNS. The bats were discovered by Dr. DeeAnn Reeder, a biologist with Bucknell University, and Turner during ongoing field investigations into bat hibernation patterns that included weekly monitoring for the disorder's presence in several Pennsylvania hibernacula. During this work, dozens of bats had a fungus appear around their muzzles and on wing membranes, while many others relocated from warmer, deeper areas of their hibernacula to areas close to the entrance, or failed to arouse during hibernacula disturbances.

Turner reported that he found the health of hibernating bats deteriorating in the abandoned Mifflin County iron mine near Shindle during his weekly visit with Dr. Reeder. Fungus was advancing on bats that had it and appearing on more bats - now about 50 percent of the colony. But, more important, dead bats were found in the water that flows through the mine.

"This mine may be the next hibernaculum where bats 'fly and die,'" Turner said. "There's a good chance bats are leaving other hibernacula instate and dying on the landscape, but we haven't found them yet. That is why we are asking for the public's help."

Currently, researchers still are unsure exactly how bats contract WNS and how it initially and, ultimately, affects a bat's body. They cannot confirm whether the fungus appearing on some bats is a cause or a symptom of the disorder. New York and New England have lost tens -maybe even hundreds - of thousands of bats to WNS over the past two years.

Lisa Williams, Game Commission biologist, said the public can help the agency better understand the distribution of WNS by reporting sick-acting or dead bats they find while out and about this winter.

"We're not asking people to go out of their way to help, but if you hike or walk or drive along back roads, and encounter dead or dying bats, we'd really like to hear from you," Williams said. "Please don't go in caves or mines or underground. And do not handle bats - dead or alive - and keep children and pets away from grounded bats. Even though there currently are no known human health implications associated with WNS, the Game Commission would prefer that people not handle any bats; we'll take care of all of that. We just need residents to let us know if they find something suspicious."

There are two quick and easy ways to report sick-acting or dead bats this winter. The first is by calling the nearest Game Commission region office. The second is by using the Game Commission's "Report Sick Bats" form that can be accessed in the left-hand column of the agency's homepage ( www.pgc.state.pa.us).

Wenner also reported another interesting finding while investigating the state's latest WNS site on Monday.

"It's important to realize that once the bats leave the mine, the fungus is not very visible as moisture and flight seem to wear it off the bat," Wenner said. "So, simply looking at a bat for white fungus will not necessarily confirm whether it is a clean, WNS-free bat. That's why all bats should be left where found and reported to the Game Commission."

For Region Office contact information, as well as a listing of counties each serves, please visit the agency's website ( www.pgc.state.pa.us), and click on "Contact Us" in the left-hand column and scroll down to the region listings.

For more information on bats, visit the Game Commission's website ( www.pgc.state.pa.us), select "Wildlife" and then click on the bat photo. To learn more about WNS, visit the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's website at www.fws.gov/northeast/white_nose.html.

NOTE: For a series of photos to accompany this news release, please visit the Game Commission's website ( www.pgc.state.pa.us), click on "News Releases" and choose "Release #019-09."

Note to Editors: If you would like to receive Game Commission news releases via e-mail, please send a note with your name, address, telephone number and the name of the organization you represent to: PGCNews@state.pa.us

For Information Contact:

Jerry Feaser

717-705-6541

PGCNews@state.pa.us

02/03/2009: Bat-killing syndrome spreads in Northeast, Chron.com

(Link to the original article)

Bat-killing syndrome spreads in Northeast

By MICHAEL HILL Associated Press Writer 2009 The Associated Press

Feb. 3, 2009, 11:58PM

ROSENDALE, N.Y. A mysterious and deadly bat disorder discovered just two winters ago in a few New York caves has now spread to at least six northeastern states, and scientists are scrambling to find solutions before it spreads across the country.

White-nose syndrome poses no health threat to people, but some scientists say that if bat populations diminish too much, the insects and crop pests they eat could flourish. Researchers recently identified the fungus that creates the syndrome's distinctive white smudges on the noses and wings of hibernating bats, but they don't yet know how to stop the disorder from killing off caves full of the ecologically important animals.

"The cause for concern is that this is going to race across the country faster than we can come up with a solution," said Alan Hicks, a wildlife biologist with New York state's Department of Environmental Conservation.

"Now that is entirely possible."

Bats with white-nose burn through their fat stores before spring, driving some to rouse early from hibernation in a futile search for food. Many die as they hunt fruitlessly for insects.

White-nose syndrome spread fast last winter to dozens of caves in New York and southern New England, within a roughly 150-mile radius of the caves west of Albany, N.Y., where it was first found. Early observations show it has reached farther still this winter, even before cave inspections and bat counts begin in earnest this month.

Bats with white-nose syndrome were found recently in northern New Jersey's Morris County and in an old iron mine in Shindle, Pa., more than 200 miles away from the outbreak's epicenter. In addition, the Pennsylvania Game Commission on Tuesday said that hundreds of little brown bats, a species devastated by white-nose syndrome, were found dead from the disorder outside two mines in the northeastern part of the state.

The syndrome may have spread as far as 450 miles from the epicenter, to the John Guilday Caves Nature Preserve in West Virginia. The National Speleological Society has temporarily shut down the preserve as a possible white-nose sighting is investigated.

So far, there are 40 confirmed white-nose sites in the Northeast, said Jeremy Coleman, who is tracking the disorder for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Cortland, N.Y.

Death tolls for the tiny creatures are hard to pinpoint, but some estimates run into the hundreds of thousands.

The news was grim on a recent day when more than a dozen researchers lowered themselves by rope into a sprawling old limestone mine in New York's Hudson Valley, about 80 miles north of New York City.

Bat counter Ryan von Linden's headlamp swept across isolated clusters of the mammals hanging off the rock ceiling. A chorus of squeaks echoed in the blackness.

"There are not as many as there are supposed to be," von Linden whispered. "Not even close."

With a precise total pending, Hicks estimated the cave's count of Indiana bats, an endangered species, was down 15 to 35 percent from last year's roughly 19,000. Researchers said the number of little brown bats also appeared to be down, although they didn't have enough specifics from prior years to measure the drop exactly.

Hoping to glean more information on the syndrome, the researchers plucked 14 groggy little brown bats from the rock, weighed them, measured them, snipped a bit of their hair and stuck tiny radio transmitters to them to track their activity levels.

Bats' nocturnal habits and some species' ability to carry rabies can give the flying mammals a fearsome image. But they can pollinate plants and play an important role in checking the populations of mosquitoes and insects that can damage wheat, apples and dozens of other crops.

Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey's Wildlife Health Center this fall established that the sugary smudges on infected bats are a previously undescribed fungus that thrives in the refrigerator-like cold of winter caves. The center is still working to determine whether the fungus causes the disorder, but biologists are already focusing on potential ways to combat the fungus.

Since the fungus grows in the cold and damp, they could try to lower humidity levels in at least some crucial caves, though that could create other problems for those ecosystems.

Researchers also are looking at the possibility of a fungicide or even fungus-killing bacteria that could spread from bat to bat. Ward Stone, New York state's wildlife pathologist, said he has been able to culture bacteria that live on big brown bats and kill the white-nose fungus in a lab.

Tests need to be performed to see whether any of the options are realistic. And time is "our biggest enemy," said David Blehert, head of microbiology at the USGS center in Madison, Wis.

01/28/2009: Salt Plains refuge personnel to scare off sandhill cranes with propane cannons, The Enid News

(Link to the original article)

Salt Plains refuge personnel to scare off sandhill cranes with propane cannons

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service personnel from Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge have set up propane cannons to scare sandhill cranes away from fields where more than 150 of the birds have died after eating moldy peanuts.

There have been two incidents they have been investigated.

The first happened Dec. 29, when U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service personnel were asked to investigate a sandhill crane die-off on peanut fields near Ringwood. Around 30 dead cranes were found southwest of Ringwood. Peanuts left in the field after harvest had molded, becoming a hazard to wildlife, according to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service news release.

Some peanuts normally are left on fields after harvest, but due to wet weather conditions last fall, peanuts and other grains became affected by mold. A random sampling of cranes was sent into the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis.

An examination showed the cranes died from fusariotoxin poisoning, a form of mycotoxicosis. Myco-toxicosis is a non-infectious disease that is caused when mycotoxins, toxins produced by molds, are ingested, according to the news release. Symptoms of mycotoxicosis include difficulty in keeping balance, flaccid paralysis or weakness of the neck and wing muscles, feed refusal and vomiting. Birds tend to show the most common symptom of neck and wing weakness.

The other incident happened Jan. 13 when Major County game warden Frank Hubert received a call about dead and dying birds on peanut fields two miles from the first incident. Salt Plains personnel responded with Hubert.

They found 122 dead or dying cranes spread out over peanut fields. Refuge personnel transported the dead cranes back to the refuge, where they could be incinerated as a precaution. Some were sent to the National Wildlife Health Center for examination. Examination results are pending.

The propane cannons that have been set up are used to scare cranes and other wildlife from using the peanut fields as a roosting or feeding site. This is done to protect other migratory birds, especially the endangered whooping crane, from landing on fields where mycotoxins may be present, according to the news release. Whooping cranes, a highly endangered species with only about 260 birds remaining in the wild and less than 500 birds remaining in the world, will migrate through Okla-homa in April.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Natural Resource Conservation Service and Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation urge farmers to till under their fields in the fall after peanuts are harvested. People also are asked to notify Oklahoma Depart-ment of Wildlife Conservation or U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service if they notice dead or sick cranes or other migratory birds. Contact ODWC regional biologist Steve Conrady, (580) 541-5346; Major County game warden Frank Hubert, (580) 227-0393; or U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge, (580) 626-4794.

01/27/2009: White nose syndrome now threatening Pennsylvania bats, Pittsburgh Post Gazette

(Link to the original article)

White nose syndrome now threatening Pennsylvania bats

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

By John Hayes, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

After nine months of research, biologists have confirmed the presence of a mysterious disease that has killed hundreds of thousands of bats in the northeastern United States.

White nose syndrome, so called for the fungus found around the faces and wings of many afflicted bats, isn't contagious to humans, household pets or other animals. But its sudden appearance, unknown pathology and potential to seriously harm the population of an environmentally vital mammal have scientists concerned.

Previously confirmed in New York, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey, conclusive evidence of white nose syndrome in Pennsylvania was discovered in late December at an old iron mine near Shindle, Mifflin County, according to the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the state agency responsible for wildlife management.

DeeAnn Reeder, a biologist with Bucknell University, and Greg Turner, a biologist with the Game Commission's Wildlife Diversity Section, found the curious fungus during weekly field studies of three known Pennsylvania hibernation caves. The research is part of a multistate effort in Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Michigan and Kentucky funded primarily by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

After weeks with no changes among bats in the Mifflin County mine, on Dec. 20 Reeder and Turner noticed bats waking from hibernation and moving toward the mine's gated entrance -- unusual December behavior. A small amount of white fungus was detected on some. On Dec. 29, about 150 of the mine's 2,200 wintering bats appeared to be affected, Reeder and Turner said. By Jan. 5, about 45 percent of the colony had moved toward the mine's entrance. Dozens of bats suddenly developed the fungus around their muzzles and wing membranes, while others displayed additional symptoms.

Several of the bats were sent to the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., which reported last week that preliminary tests were positive for white nose syndrome.

"The visible fungus appears on some, but not all, afflicted bats, and a significant percentage of bats in affected hibernacula move closer to the entrance," said Turner. "The bats eventually leave their hibernacula -- often in daylight, which is unnatural."

Most of the prematurely exiting bats die, but some may return to the cavern.

"We cannot determine what the bats are searching for, or if they're hunting for anything," said Turner. "Most bats found dead on the landscape have depleted their fat reserves."

The outbreak has impacted recreational caving. Last year, the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources closed Barton Cave, a popular Fayette County spelunking site, for one year as a precaution. And the National Speleological Society, which owns or manages 13 cave preserves nationwide, has banned spelunkers from five of its sites -- including Tytoona Cave Nature Preserve in Blair County -- until more is known.

The little brown bat has been hardest hit by white nose syndrome, but deaths have been reported among other species including northern myotis, Eastern small-footed myotis, long-eared Eastern pipistrelle and the endangered Indiana bat.

Researchers admit they're in the first stages of understanding the outbreak. While infection seems to spread from bat to bat, they don't know whether the fungus is a cause or symptom of the disorder. Afflicted bats are found emaciated and seem to have starved to death. Most troubling is that the impacted geographic area is expanding. First noticed in bat colonies in New York in 2006, white nose syndrome has spread to some, though not all, hibernacula in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Jersey and now Pennsylvania.

Hardy mammals that have survived for about 50 million years, bats play an important ecological role in the environment. A bat can consume 25 percent of its body weight in flying insects during a night's feeding. In Pennsylvania alone, bats collectively eat tons of insects each night, impacting agriculture and the spread of insect-borne disease, not to mention backyard comfort.

Game Commission biologist Lisa Williams said the sudden appearance and rapid expansion of white nose disease has been frustrating for scientists and wildlife agencies.

John Hayes can be reached at jhayes@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1991.

01/08/2009: Fish and Wildlife warns of sick bats around state, The Times Argus

(Link to the original article)

Fish and Wildlife warns of sick bats around state

By Patrick McArdle Rutland Herald - Published: January 8, 2009

DORSET The Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department is warning resident that bats may be seen during the day and acting unusually over the next few weeks, as the effects of "white nose syndrome" continue to be felt. However new reporting tools may help wildlife biologists track the disease.

The exact cause of white nose syndrome has not been determined but bats afflicted with the disease leave their hibernacula to look for food. While the bats seem to present no health risk for human beings or pets, according to state wildlife biologist Scott Darling, white nose syndrome seems to have been killing bats.

The syndrome was affecting bats last winter as well but Darling said it may be causing bats to leave hibernation even earlier this year, possibly because the syndrome had compromised the health of the bat population further.

People who live near bat habitats may find dead bats on their porches or screen windows or find bats in their homes. White nose syndrome cause the bat to leave its habitat in search of food but the animal will then look for shelter to get away from the cold temperatures.

White nose syndrome had already been found in bats throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut and Pennsylvania and Darling said there was some evidence it had spread to Pennsylvania as well.

In Vermont, bats with white nose syndrome have been found in caves in Dorset, Manchester and Pownal.

"Late last year, it was identified in Strafford (in Orange County). That represented a significant leap to us in a way because it meant the disease had gone up and over the Green Mountain," Darling said.

In 2007, white nose syndrome killed 8,000 to 11,000 bats in New York, the largest number of disease-related bat deaths ever recorded in North America.

To track the disease's progress, the state is asking that residents report sightings of dead bats, bats that appear to be dying or bats flying during the day by visiting the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department's Web site at www.vtfishandwildlife.com.

Once at the site, residents can click on a photo labeled "Report Sick Acting Bats" to provide information. Sightings can also be reported by phone at 786-0055.

Meanwhile the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., has identified a fungus that only grows in temperatures less than 70 degrees which Darling said appears to be tied to white nose syndrome.

"Whether the fungus is the cause of the syndrome or a symptom remains to be seen," Darling said.

According to Darling, a bat population survey is scheduled to be conducted in about a month which is expected to provide more information about how white nose syndrome has affected the state's bat population.

White nose syndrome may have spread to other areas of the state, Darling said, but it's hard to be certain yet because tracking the disease has lead researchers to find bat populations in areas they weren't even aware were active hibernacula.

Darling reminded people who find dead or dying bats that they should not handle the bats unless necessary and, in those instances, with gloves or tools if possible. Children should also be warned not to touch bats.

Vermont has received money from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct research on the state's bat population.

Contact Patrick McArdle at patrick.mcardle@ rutlandherald.com.

12/05/2008: Strong evidence found linking mycobacteriosis to striped bass mortality, Bay Journal

(Link to the original article)

Strong evidence found linking mycobacteriosis to striped bass mortality

Older, female fish appear to be the most affected

By Karl Blankenship

A new study provides the strongest indication to date that mycobacteriosis, a disease that has plagued Chesapeake Bay striped bass for more than a decade, likely results in the death of substantial numbers of rockfish.

Mycobacteriosis is a chronic wasting disease, distantly related to tuberculosis in humans, which was first discovered in the Bay's striped bass population in 1997. It can cause extensive tumor-like growths inside the fish, and is sometimes associated with ugly external lesions on the outside.

The disease infects the majority of rockfish by the time they are 3 years old, but scientists studying the infections have lacked any smoking gun evidence to answer one of their most basic questions: whether the infections are lethal to fish.

The new study, published in the October issue of Ecological Applications, used a computer model that drew on an extensive set of monitoring data to construct a strong circumstantial case that the disease leads to death, especially in older female fish.

"Based upon our best knowledge of the biology of this disease in fishes, the models are consistent with disease-associated mortality occurring," said David Gauthier, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Old Dominion University and lead author of the study. "This is really one of the first attempts to figure out what a chronic disease is doing in a wild, migratory finfish population."

It is difficult to track the fate of individual diseased fish in the wild, as the disease likely take months, if not years, to kill them, so the fish die one-by-one over time. As a result, the ability of scientists to prove the ultimate fate of the fish is problematic.

"It's not like a big fish kill where you wake up one day and there is a big pile of them washed up on the beach; these slowly die," said Rob Latour, associate professor of fisheries science at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, and a co-author of the paper. "It is very difficult to observe these deaths."

The study overcame that problem by using information gathered from 1,420 striped bass collected from 2003 through 2005 by the Chesapeake Bay Multispecies Monitoring and Assessment Program, an ongoing VIMS program aimed at unraveling the Bay's complex food web.

Scientists examined each fish to determine whether it was infected. The results showed an increasing rate of infection for striped bass from age 1, when about one in four females and one in eight males was infected, to age 5, when about 80 percent of the males and 90 percent of the females had the disease.

After age 6, the prevalence rate stayed roughly the same for males, but dropped in half-to about 40 percent-for females.

That information was used in a model designed to help predict the impact of disease on aquatic populations that was recently developed by Dennis Heisey of the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin, a co-author of the paper.

After a series of analyses using the model, the scientists found that data best fit a scenario in which the odds of survival among infected fish was greatly reduced.

In any given year, a female striped bass infected with mycobacteriosis has a 49 percent chance of surviving compared with a non-diseased fish, according to the model. Males also appeared to have a lower survival rate, although the model was less definitive about that.

"The model is interpreting the low disease prevalence in older animals as being indicative of mortality," Latour said. "If prevalence is going down, that means that more diseased animals are dying. So when you take a sample, you get fewer infected fish because they are already dead."

The model hinges on the assumption that fish infected by the disease will ultimately die. The paper notes that there is no evidence that fish can heal themselves. Studies of mycobacteriosis in other fish have indicated the disease is progressive, and ultimately fatal. Lab studies have also shown that with striped bass.

Nonetheless, some have have suggested that striped bass may recover because of the appearance that external lesions have healed on some fish. But Gauthier said that when those fish are examined, active disease is still present inside.

"The fish is not cured, at least as far as we know," Gauthier said. "There really is no evidence for regression of the disease."

The suggestion that females are more likely to succumb than males is a bit of a surprise. Females typically leave the Bay when they are 3 or 4 years old to migrate along the coast until they return to spawn, usually starting at about age 5. Because the prevalence of disease appears to be focused in the Chesapeake, some biologists had thought the females would have fared better because they leave the Bay.

But if the disease is still progressing inside the fish, then the added stress females face when returning to the Chesapeake may result in their deaths, Latour said. "You could argue that the combined stress of migration with spawning makes their mortality rates different from that of males," he said.

The scientists said it's unclear whether the disease kills the fish directly, or makes them more susceptible to death by other causes, such as predation, or stress.

Another question that remains unanswered is whether the mortality rate is great enough to affect the overall striped bass population.

There is some evidence that that could be happening. An analysis of fish tagging data published last year by Hongua Jiang, of North Carolina State University, found evidence that natural (non-fishing) mortality has increased among striped bass in Maryland since the late 1990s. That study did not indicate why natural mortality might be increasing, but noted that the increase began shortly after scientists began detecting mycobacteriosis in striped bass.

Stock assessment models used by scientists to estimate fish abundance and in turn, provide the basis for fishery regulations, assume natural mortality remains constant over time. If a disease is changing that, it could have implications for the overall stock. On the other hand, if most of the mortality is taking place after many fish have reproduced, the effect may be minimal.

One of the next steps would be finding a way to incorporate disease impacts into stock assessment models, Gauthier said.

"We have demonstrated now that we do have this disease-associated component within the system," he said. "Now we need to build this into fisheries models in order to try to estimate what the effects on the population could be."

Although the paper states that it provides the most definitive evidence to date that mycobacteriosis is causing "significant disease-related mortality" in the Bay, it said that further research should be aimed at validating the assumption used in the model.

"We intend this to drive future research directions," Gauthier said. "We've demonstrated that it looks like we've got something very significant going on in older female fish. So this is a portion of the population we really need to take a careful look at."

Other authors of the paper include Chris Bonzak, Jim Gartland and Wolfgang Vogelbein at VIMS, and Erin Burge of Coastal Carolina University.

Karl is the Editor of the Bay Journal

11/29/2008: Commentary: Crimes hurt essence of hunting, The Houston Chronicle

(Link to the original article)

Commentary: Crimes hurt essence of hunting

By SHANNON TOMPKINS Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

Nov. 29, 2008, 8:30PM

Two incidents this past week shine a light on the troubling way some value white-tailed deer.

Both underscore the effects of seeing white-tailed deer simply as objects or commodities and not as wildlife with deep, multifaceted intrinsic values.

One involved the criminal killing of a single deer simply for its antlers. The other potentially put Texas entire deer herd at risk. The common denominators were greed and an absence of understanding or maybe even caring of the incredible significance of how and why the average person chooses to hunt and perhaps take the life of a deer .

This past Monday night, a poacher or poachers killed and decapitated a tame white-tailed buck that lived in a small enclosure on Bear Creek Pioneers Park in western Harris County.

That only the head was taken shows the motive. The criminal wanted the antlers. And Mr. Buck, the naive deer in the pen, had an impressive set. High-sweeping main beams and abnormally long-brow tines made him a target.

Had the tame deer worn a pair of short, thin-spike antlers, it almost certainly would not have been a victim.

That someone would slaughter the deer simply to possess its antlers is telling.

Antler size always has been one of the characteristics hunters use to place personal value on a buck. But it was (and still is with most hunters) only a part of a tally that considers how the deer was hunted, the place it was hunted, the effort, skills and knowledge the hunter used pursuing it and, finally, getting the opportunity to make the animal his.

Today, sadly, antler dimensions (down to the eight-of-an-inch detail) too often are the only characteristic by which some gauge the value of a deer. How and why the deer was taken the whole of the hunting experience doesnt matter to some. From that attitude you get people who will cut into a tiny pen and decapitate a deer that had lost all natural wariness.

Ignorance spreads

The second incident is more complicated but, at its heart, reflects the same perverted valuing of deer.

Federal District Judge Richard Schell this past week sentenced Robert L. Eichenour of Bedias to 18 months in federal prison and a $50,000 fine and Brian Becker of Madelia, Minn., to 33 months in federal prison for felon violations of the Lacey Act, which makes the transporting of wildlife across state lines in violation of state laws a federal offense.

Both men had pleaded guilty to the charges earlier this year.

Eichenour, owner of Circle E Ranch in Grimes County, a fenced game-shooting business that charges clients fees based on the antler dimensions of the deer they take, and Becker, who has previous convictions for wildlife violations, were apprehended in an October 2006 undercover operation conducted by Texas Parks and Wildlife Departments special operations unit and agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The pair were caught illegally transporting 14 white-tailed bucks from Minnesota to Texas, where the deer were headed for the Circle E Ranchs operation.

The investigation determined the pair had, over a four-year period, smuggled deer valued at $300,000 into Texas.

While the shooting of deer inside an enclosure is legal in Texas, bringing deer into the state for any reason is illegal. And the reason is a contagious, invariably fatal affliction called Chronic Wasting Disease.

The hideous illness can be latent in animals for years, transmitted to other deer by contact or by contaminated soil.

CWD was first documented in Colorado in the 1970s in a compound that held captive deer and elk. It had spread to wild populations by the early 1980s.

Today, CWD has been documented in wild deer/elk populations in 11 states and two Canadian provinces and in captive deer (or deer farms) in 10 states and two provinces. Minnesota is one of those states.

For the love of money

Transporting and releasing captive-farmed deer from an infected herd is seen as one of the main methods of the diseases expansion. And getting rid of it is impossible.

CWD is forever, said Bryan Richards, Chronic Wasting Disease Project Leader at USGS National Wildlife Health Center. Once it is established in a wild population, there has never been an instance of eradicating it.

Wisconsin is trying, having spent more $6 million a year in the effort one that includes depopulating wild herds found to be carrying CWD.

The disease has not been documented in Texas, and the state wants to keep it that way. State law prohibits bringing any live deer into Texas.

But night hauling smuggling captive-raised deer into the state for use in drop-and-pop shooting preserves happens. Theres too much money to be made. Never mind that any one of those deer could be carrying CWD.

Its a crime of greed, said Shamoil Shipchandler, assistant U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the Eichenour/Becker cases. Deer and deer hunting are a multibillion dollar industry in Texas, and its all risked by this kind of conduct.

Listen to that

TPWD has made several cases over the past couple of years involving the smuggling of deer, including one near Goldthwaite this past month, said David Sinclair of TPWDs law enforcement division.

There seems to be more going on that you might imagine, Sinclair said.

One problem has been Texas lax laws on those caught smuggling deer. Under Texas law, illegally transporting live deer is a Class C misdemeanor.

But the federal Lacey Act can turn that misdemeanor and $500 fine into a federal felony case and potential prison time.

The sentencing of Eichenour and Becker to prison for deer smuggling is the first time Sinclair can recall deer smugglers being sent to jail.

This ought to get somebodys attention, he said.

shannon.tompkins@chron.com

11/21/2008: Researchers tackle fatal brain disease, Wyoming Public Radio

(Link to the original article)

WYOMING (2008-11-21) Peter O'Dowd reports on the efforts in Wyoming and around the country to manage Chronic Wasting Disease.

11/14/2008: FOR KIDS: White fuzzy mold not as friendly as it looks, Science News

(Link to the original article)

FOR KIDS: White fuzzy mold not as friendly as it looks

By Dina Fine Maron

Web edition : Friday, November 14th, 2008

New type of mold may be a bat killer

When you think of things that are white and fuzzy, usually you think of something cute or nice. But a newly discovered fuzzy, white mold may be making bats in the Northeast U.S. sick. The illness and mold strike during hibernation, bats long wintertime sleep.

The mold was first spotted by a cave explorer two years ago. The fuzzy fungus was growing on hibernating bats noses and wings. Bats with the mold often grew thin, weak and died. Scientists named this phenomenon white-nose syndrome after the mold found on the bats noses.

Since that first sighting, thousands of bats in the Northeast have died. Scientists now wonder if the mystery fungus may be the killer. Once the mold hits caves or mines where bats are hibernating, between 80 and 100 percent of the bats usually die, says Marianne Moore, a bat researcher at Boston University.

Northeastern bats hunt insects, including some that are pests. So a lack of bats could be a huge problem, Moore says.

Scientists still arent sure if the white fuzz is the killer. The mold may just attack bats when they are already sick and more likely to get other illnesses. But, identifying the fungus may help scientists find out if its the killer.

To figure out what the fungus was, scientists studied it in a lab. They took samples of the mold from sick bats. Then the scientists brought the samples to a lab, where they could grow and be compared to other molds.

At room temperature, the scientists efforts were thwarted samples of this mystery mold wouldnt develop. Frustrated, the scientists finally tried putting the samples in the refrigerator. This cooled the samples down to temperatures found in bat caves during the winter. Sure enough, when the lab samples were chilly, an unfamiliar form of mold began to grow. The scientists think it may be an entirely new species, or type, of mold or a new form of an existing species.

Whats unusual about the new mold is that it wont survive in higher temperatures, says David Blehert of the U.S. Geological Surveys National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisc. He and colleagues were part of the study that tried to grow and identify the mold in the lab.

Human noses, for example, are way too warm for the fungus.

In hibernation, a bat for all practical purposes is almost dead says Blehert. The heart of an active bat beats hundreds of times per minute. This can drop as low as about four beats per minute during hibernation. And a bats body during this time chills to only a few degrees above the caves temperature. The cold temperature of bat caves in New England makes for a perfect home for the mold.

This is good news for bats that fly to the warm south in the winter or live in warm, dry places year-round. Their caves will be too warm to host the white fuzz.

But the sickness has already hammered at least six species of bats in the Northeast. Two of these bats are the little brown bat and the endangered Indiana bat.

11/05/2008: Pesky raccoons can spread the flu, Niagara Falls Review

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Pesky raccoons can spread the flu

Posted By THE CANADIAN PRESS

(The Canadian Press)-Who knew? Pesky raccoons can catch the flu.

New research shows the pesky critters -called the "Typhoid Marys" of disease by the study's lead author -can catch and spread both human and avian strains of flu.

Virologist Jeffrey Hall found blood samples taken from raccoons in a variety of parts of the United States tested positive for antibodies to various avian flu viruses.

So, Hall and some colleagues tried infecting captured raccoons with human and avian flu viruses, and then exposed healthy animals to the ones they deliberately infected.

Testing showed the infected animals gave off flu viruses, though they didn't seem to be visibly sick.

And one of the healthy raccoons placed near the sick animals also caught the bug.

Hall, who is with the U. S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., says the fact raccoons can be infected with both bird and human flu viruses suggests the animals could play a role in generating and spreading new flu viruses.

The study will be published in the December issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

11/05/2008: Achoo! Who knew? Pesky raccoons can catch and spread the flu, The Canadian Press

(Link to the original article)

Achoo! Who knew? Pesky raccoons can catch and spread the flu

TORONTO Who knew? Raccoons can catch the flu.

New research shows the pesky critters - called the animal world's "Typhoid Mary" by one of the study's authors - can catch and spread both human and avian strains of influenza. Lead author Jeffrey Hall isn't suggesting the raccoon you have to shoo away from your garbage bin is likely to infect you with the flu.

But his findings point to the possibility that raccoons play a role in the emergence of new strains of influenza, helping bird viruses adapt to be able to infect mammals. That process, which involves the swapping of genes among viruses, is called reassortment and it is one of the ways a strain capable of causing a flu pandemic could arise.

"I wouldn't be afraid that I would get flu from a raccoon," said Hall, a research virologist with the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis.

"No one cares if the raccoon has flu. But the risk is that they're going to generate something that we're not ready for. That's my personal take on the whole issue."

The study will be published in the December issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

A separate study in the same issue reports that red foxes can be infected with the H5N1 avian flu virus, although the Dutch researchers who did the work did not show that deliberately infected foxes could pass the virus to nearby healthy ones.

But both studies serve as a reminder that there is much left to be learned about how influenza strains evolve, which species are susceptible to them and how viruses designed by nature to infect the guts of water birds evolve to infect the respiratory tracts of horses, dogs, pigs, cats, seals, humans and now clearly some small scavenger mammals.

"We've finding out how little we know about the natural ecology of this virus," said Dr. David Halvorson, a veterinarian and avian flu expert at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

"It makes it fun to see these studies come out. Because it tells you that a lot of our assumptions from 20 years ago are totally false. Or partially false."

In the raccoon study Hall took blood samples that were gathered from a variety of parts of the U.S. and tested them to see if there was evidence of antibodies to flu.

The blood samples had been gathered for an earlier study designed to see if raccoons were susceptible to West Nile virus. (They were.) Testing showed evidence of previous infection with several avian flu viruses among a percentage of the raccoons, though that percentage ranged from zero in Texas and California to 12.8 per cent in Colorado and 25 per cent in Wyoming.

"I actually was not surprised," Hall admitted. "It turns out raccoons are like the Typhoid Mary of wild animals."

"More diseases have been found in raccoons than pretty much any other wild animals. ... You name it, raccoons get it. But they're tough as nails."

So the researchers deliberately infected eight wild raccoons trapped especially for the experiment. Eight were infected with an avian virus of the H4N8 subtype and four were infected with human H3N2 viruses. Two other animals were housed in cages nearby to see if the infected raccoons would spread disease to the healthy ones.

Testing showed the infected raccoons were shedding flu viruses - meaning they were infected - but the animals showed no signs of being ill. One of the nearby raccoons was infected with the avian virus as well.

The researchers also looked at tissue from the respiratory tract of five adult raccoons that had been euthanized for another study and found they contained receptors - sites to which viruses can attach - for both avian and human flu viruses.

The fact that raccoons can be infected with both bird and human flu viruses suggests in theory they could be infected with both at the same time, giving rise to a hybrid virus new enough to humans to cause widespread disease and even a pandemic, Hall and Halvorson said.

"I think it's extremely interesting. It still doesn't really say that they play a role. But I would say that it certainly is an interesting finding. And it raises possibilities of something that might be going on here," Halvorson said.

It has long been thought that pigs play the pivotal role in developing hybrid flu viruses. In the language of the flu world, pigs are called "the mixing vessel" for the emergence of reassorted pandemic strains.

But Hall said this work suggests there may be other mixing vessels in the animal kingdom. "It turns out that raccoons are just like pigs in that regard. They have the same receptors as pigs do in terms of avian and human viruses."

He said more study should be done on raccoons and other types of small-to mid-sized wild mammals - animals like skunks and minks - that potentially have contact with waterfowl or ponds visited by waterfowl to see if they too catch flu.

"Clearly the ecology of influenza in the wild, out there in the fields and marshes, is complicated," Hall said.

"And the focus on waterfowl and shore birds as reservoirs is important, but there's another side of the story that I think needs to be examined. Raccoons being a potential mixing vessel just underscores that other species need to be looked at."

11/03/2008: CWD changing hunting landscape, Burlington Free Press

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CWD changing hunting landscape

By Lawrence Pynes November 2, 2008

Buzz up! If you love to hunt deer, there's something to be said for living in a small state like Vermont.

The border is never that far away, which means if you cannot wait for deer season to open or simply want to try something different, you have lots of options in neighboring states.

Chief among these is New York. The Empire State offers a veritable smorgasbord of bow, firearm and muzzleloader hunts, and the state line is only minutes away for tens of thousands of Vermont hunters from Swanton to Bennington.

Many Vermonters hunt New York on a day-trip basis from their homes, sometimes literally within shooting distance of the border. A friend has a stand on the New York side of the Poultney River, where he regularly sees deer cross a shallow ford as they travel between feeding areas in West Haven and bedding areas in Whitehall, N.Y.

It has long been one of his favorite places to bow hunt during the lull between the archery and rifle seasons in Vermont, and over the years he has brought many deer back across the river with him. But no more.

The bloom came off New York's rose in 2005, when chronic wasting disease -- a fatal, contagious neurological disease of deer and elk that is similar to mad cow disease -- was discovered in two captive deer herds in Oneida County in the center of the state.

Intensive testing subsequently discovered CWD in two free-ranging deer near the contaminated farms, and Vermont promptly added New York to the list of states and provinces from which hunters may not import intact deer carcasses.

Because the infectious agents that cause CWD are found primarily in the brain and spinal cord of contaminated animals, only boneless meat, and hides and antlers that have no tissue attached, may be imported into Vermont from New York and every other state with even so much as one case of CWD. That now also includes Michigan -- where CWD was discovered in a captive deer herd in August -- along with Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Saskatchewan and Alberta.

If that's what it takes to keep CWD out of Vermont, so be it. But if you have never tried boning out a deer in the dark at the back of your truck, without benefit of a game hoist or table, when you're cold, wet and hungry after a long day afield, I can assure you it's absolutely no fun.

If you make it home with your fingers intact, you've done well.

The good news is that more than 20,000 wild deer have been tested in New York since 2005 and no new cases of CWD have been discovered. But don't expect Vermont officials to relax the ban on importing deer carcasses any time soon.

Instead, Vermont Fish and Wildlife Commissioner Wayne Laroche points to Maine as an example of what the future might hold. The Pine Tree State prohibits the importation of all deer carcasses, even from states with no confirmed cases of CWD.

But to its greater credit, Maine, along with 22 other states, also prohibits the importation of all live deer and elk, regardless of whether they are destined for game farms or high-fence captive hunting operations.

And in this regard, Vermont has dropped the ball.

Vermonters cannot bring home a deer carcass from neighboring towns in New York, yet a moratorium on importing captive deer and elk in Vermont was allowed to expire last year. This despite the fact that transporting captive deer and elk has a long track record of spreading CWD, and there is no fool-proof way to determine if even an ostensibly healthy deer has the disease.

"If you were to ask 10 experts on CWD, 'Which poses the greater risk, moving dead deer or moving live deer?', 10 out of 10 would say live deer," said Bryan Richards, CWD project leader for the National Wildlife Health Center.

"That's not to say CWD can't be spread by moving carcasses, we believe it can," he added. "But the captive (deer and elk) industry has a proven history of introducing CWD into new areas. We've seen it time and again."

In fact, Richards noted, the most recent outbreaks of CWD have been associated exclusively with captive herds, and many outbreaks in wild deer have been directly linked to "leakage across the fence" from contaminated game farms and so-called hunting preserves.

The Vermont Fish and Wildlife Board is currently considering a proposed rule that would regulate the possession of animals used for canned hunts. Yet it would neither prohibit bringing additional captive deer into Vermont nor prevent new facilities from being created.

No doubt there are people who think the proposed rule is unnecessary. The real question should be, does it go far enough?

"Each state has to make its own risk assessment based on the values it places on its wild deer resources," Richards said. "The risk of any one animal spreading CWD is very, very low, but once CWD is out on the landscape, it's forever. That's why so many states are putting in risk-reduction measures that seem onerous, but on closer inspection are prudent.

"The consequences of being wrong are gargantuan."

Lawrence Pyne writes about the outdoors from his home in Cornwall. He can be reached at PyneOutdoors@shoreham.net.

10/31/2008: Bat Disease Fungus Identified, The New York Times

(Link to the original article)

Bat Disease Fungus Identified

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

Published: October 31, 2008

Something is killing the little brown bats of the Northeast, and researchers may have fingered the culprit: a fungus.

Bat White-Nose Syndrome: An Emerging Fungal Pathogen? (Science)David S. Blehert of the United States Geological Surveys National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin and colleagues identified a fungus linked to white-nose syndrome, a condition that has affected bats in recent winters in upstate New York, Vermont and Massachusetts. The fungus, newly described, is unusual in that it grows in the cold, dotting areas of the bats skin with white strands. It penetrates the skin through hair follicles and sweat glands and may cause the bats to starve while they are hibernating, the researchers said.

We do have good circumstantial evidence that this could be the primary pathogen causing the deaths of large percentages of populations of little browns and other bats in caves in the region, Dr. Blehert said. The die-offs are one of the worst calamities to hit bat populations in the United States.

It had been thought that the fungus was a secondary symptom of whatever was killing the animals a virus or a toxin like an environmental contaminant. But the fact that the identical organism was found in bats from several caves kind of rules out the possibility that there are all kinds of fungi out there and that opportunistically they are infecting the animals, said Alan C. Hicks of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, a co-author of a paper on the fungus published online by Science.

Dr. Blehert said that the infection could have led to starvation because of the way bats hibernate they cycle through two-week stages of deep torpor interrupted by brief wakeful periods. The fungal infection may make the bats wake up more often, and since each period of wakefulness uses up vast stores of fat, the bats may deplete their energy reserves much sooner than normal.

More research is needed to determine how to combat the die-offs, but one thing is clear, Dr. Blehert said just spraying a cave with fungicide could do more harm than good. Wiping out all the fungal organisms in a cave probably would be a bad idea, he said.

10/31/2008: Mysterious bat killer found, Cosmos Magazine

(Link to the original article)

Mysterious bat killer found

Friday, 31 October 2008

by Melanie Macfarlane

SYDNEY: Experts report in the U.S. journal Science that they may have discovered the mysterious bat killer which has ripped through hibernating colonies in the northeastern states of the USA.

White-nose syndrome (WNS), as the disease is known, has killed 200,000 bats since it was discovered in 2006.

Wildlife scientists who first found the malady were baffled by the sharp decline of bats, and an unknown white substance found on their muzzles, ears and wings.

Previously unknown fungus

The condition has now wiped out over 75 per cent of many bat colonies in the states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Vermont.

But now researchers, led by microbiologist David Blehert, with the USGS National Wildlife Centre in Madison, Wisconsin, have identified the white substance found on the skin and fur of afflicted bats as a previously undescribed fungus of the genus Geomyces.

Co-worker Melissa Behr, a veterinary pathologist at the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Lab says the fungus was the only point of difference between affected and non-affected bats.

Finding the fungus is the first step in understanding the epidemic, said Blehert, who added that "we can now address more specific questions, such as whether the fungus we identified causes WNS by itself or whether there are other factors involved."

The scientists cautioned, though, that even if this fungus is proved to be the killer, treating it may not be simple.

Difficult to treat

"Usually, once a disease has been characterised, we get to work on a cure. In case of a fungus, there are many topical and systemic antifungal drugs that can be used," said Behr. "However, it's very impractical to think of using such drugs on a large wild animal population."

"The challenge would be to develop a treatment effective at the level of the entire northeastern U.S. bat population," agreed Blehert. Though most wildlife epidemics are left to run their course naturally, he said, one possible treatment, could simply be to keep infected bats warm. "The fungus only actively grows in the cold so a cure may be as simple as warming them up."

The biggest victim of the syndrome is the little brown bat Myotis lucifugus, but many species have been affected.

10/31/2008: Die-off of bats is linked to new fungus, Los Angeles Times

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Die-off of bats is linked to new fungus

10:09 AM, October 31, 2008

Researchers have found a clue in the mysterious die-off of bats that has struck the Northeast -- a new fungus that so far seems to be present only in bats and in caves where the die-off has occurred. Times staff writer Thomas H. Maugh II reports:

"The fungus is in some way involved in causing the bats to starve to death," said biologist Thomas Tomasi of Missouri State University in Springfield. "They are burning up too many calories, at a rate faster than they can sustain."

Bat experts are not yet sure, however, whether the fungus is the cause of the widespread deaths or is simply an opportunistic microorganism infecting animals that have already been weakened by some unknown threat.

"Whether it is the primary cause or not, we still have to find out whether it is newly introduced or if there are other factors that need to be addressed," said biologist Merlin Tuttle, founder and president of Bat Conservation International.

The disease, which bears many similarities to the colony collapse disorder that has decimated honeybee colonies across the country, first appeared in a cave near Albany, N.Y., in the winter of 2006. It has since spread to at least three other states in the region.

The most obvious symptom is the presence of a visible halo of white fungus around the faces of afflicted animals -- hence the common name, white-nose syndrome. The affected animals become severely emaciated, often emerging from their hibernation caves in the dead of winter in a futile search for food.

In some bat caves, more than 90% of the inhabitants died last winter. Overall populations have declined about 75% in the affected areas....

Bats represent about a quarter of all mammalian species and are voracious eaters of insects that attack crops and carry diseases. A single bat can eat more than 100% of its body weight in bugs each night.

10/31/2008: Experts Identify Fungus Suspected In Bat Die-Off, National Public Radio

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Experts Identify Fungus Suspected In Bat Die-Off

by Dan Charles

Morning Edition, October 31, 2008 In the northeastern United States, bats have been dying by the thousands, struck down by a strange ailment called "white-nose syndrome." A mysterious, fuzzy white fungus appears on the noses and skin of afflicted hibernating bats, which then often starve to death.

Alan Hicks, a bat specialist with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, alerted the world to white-nose syndrome in early 2007 after hearing reports of dead bats in caves near Albany.

Now, researchers have identified the mold they consider a possible cause of the disease, reporting their findings Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science. It's a fragile, unusual form of Geomyces fungi, which usually live in cold places such as Antarctica, says David Blehert, lead author of the study. He's head of diagnostic microbiology at the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis.

Blehert can't say for certain that the fungus is killing the bats. "Fungi usually don't kill otherwise healthy animals all on their own," he explains. He says the infection may make a bat wake up too often during hibernation, so that it burns up its reserves of fat too quickly.

A Fragile Fungus

Blehert's lab got involved in the research about a year ago, after Hicks had collected ailing bats with the syndrome and taken them to Melissa Behr, an animal disease specialist at the New York State Department of Health. She couldn't figure out what the problem was.

Hicks "would bring a bunch of bats, and we would triage them over the course of the evening, and I would wonder where the white stuff had gone," Behr said.

The white material was so fragile that it disappeared at the slightest touch. So she moved her operation closer to the bats: inside two abandoned mines.

"I got so I could grab a little bat, stabilize his little head, grab the fungus and put it on a slide," Behr said.

The slides went under a microscope. Behr took photos and sent them to experts such as Blehert, who said, "The mission of my lab suddenly became: What is this white stuff?"

No one had ever seen a fungus like this one. But Blehert and his colleagues retrieved sections of its genetic code and found that it resembled DNA of other cold-loving fungi. The fungus found on the noses, ears, wings and skin of the infected bats flourishes at temperatures between 41 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Seeking Clues To Syndrome's Source

Now that scientists have a sample of the fungus's genetic code, they can test for it in other places. They want to know its source, because that might provide a clue to how the epidemic started. Right now, they think something maybe a person, maybe an animal carried a trace of this fungus into Howes Cave in upstate New York, 30 miles west of Albany.

That's where someone first took a picture of a white-nosed bat in February 2006. The following year, Blehert said, bats were found dying in five caves all within 10 miles of Howes Cave. "And by last winter, it was present at 33 sites, out to a 210-kilometer radius," he said.

Hicks, the bat specialist, went looking for evidence of the ailment again this week along with reporter Brian Mann of North Country Public Radio in an abandoned iron mine near Port Henry, a village in northeastern New York.

The bats were just settling in for the winter, squealing softly. Hicks collected a few, dropping them into paper lunch bags after checking for marks of the epidemic. Good news: There was no sign of white fuzz.

But the bats are getting wiped out completely in some caves nearby. "I'll be surprised if some of the sites we visited last year aren't at zero, or very near zero, this winter," he whispered to avoid disturbing the bats.

In two sites that scientists have monitored most closely, 78 percent and 97 percent of the bats have died. Nobody knows where the plague will end.

10/31/2008: Bat Die-Offs Linked to Recently Identified Fungus, eFluxMedia

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Bat Die-Offs Linked to Recently Identified Fungus

By Jenny Huntington

22:17, October 30th 2008

Thursday, David Blehert of the United States Geological Surveys National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, along with his colleagues, reported that a new form of a Geomyces fungus could have caused the bat die-offs in New England. The report, which was published in the online issue of Science, revealed that the white-nose syndrome, a malady associated with the deaths of thousands of bats, was a fungus-related condition.

Researchers gathered samples from the dead bats and, after the culture showed no microorganisms that could have been linked to the die-offs, they decided to refrigerate the lab samples. Only then were they able to spot the Geomyces fungus, which apparently does not tolerate higher than 10 degrees Celsius temperatures.

During their winter hibernation, the bats cuddle against cave walls and, as a result of their exposure to a type of mold, they develop a ring of fungal growth around the muzzles and on the wings, which eventually kills them.

The white-nose syndrome was only discovered two years ago, when a recreational explorer took a picture inside the Howes Cave west of Albany, New York, which showed the aforementioned fungal growth that affected bats.

By 2007, the syndrome had been recorded in thirty-three states and it has been reported to have already hit six species, including the little brown bat and the Indiana bat, which is endangered species.

Marianne Moore of Boston University, who specializes in bat immunology, has informed that the white-nose syndrome caused, on average, the death of 80 to 100 percent of the bats in hibernation sites.

10/31/2008: Researchers identify fungus linked to bat die-off, Newsday

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Researchers identify fungus linked to bat die-offOctober 30, 2008

ALBANY, N.Y. - Researchers have identified the fungus found on bats with "white-nose syndrome," a step toward determining why populations across the Northeast are being decimated as they hibernate.

David Blehert (BLAY-ert) of the federal National Wildlife Health Center stressed that his research does not establish whether the fungus is definitely the cause of the mass die-offs. But the research, published in Science, establishes that the sugary-looking smudges on the noses and wings of affected bats are a previously undescribed type of Geomyces fungus that thrives in the cold.

White nose has been identified in 33 sites in New York, Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut over the past two winters. It has killed more than 100,000 bats.

Blehert is head of diagnostic microbiology at the Madison, Wis. lab.

10/31/2008: Deadly Bat Disease Linked to Cold-Loving Fungus, National Geographic

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Deadly Bat Disease Linked to Cold-Loving Fungus

Brian Handwerk

for National Geographic News

October 31, 2008

Scientists have pinpointed the fungus linked to white-nose syndrome, the mysterious ailment that has wiped out large populations of bats in the northeastern United States.

The fungus, found on the wings, ears, and muzzles of infected bats, is a member of the Geomyces genus.

"It's a cold-loving fungus known to be associated with Arctic permafrost soils," said study co-author David Blehert, a microbiologist at the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin.

Northeastern U.S. caves maintain year-round temperatures between 35 and 59 degrees Fahrenheit (2 and 15 degrees Celsius)well within the fungus's reproductive range.

Since the winter of 2006 to 2007, white-nose syndrome has caused 80- to 97-percent-mortality rates in some large hibernation colonies, putting some species at serious risk.

The situation has experts worried, since a single bat can eat more than its body weight in bugs each night, aiding the fight against crop damage and disease.

Why Do They Die?

Scientists don't yet know if the fungus is actually causing the bats to die.

The organism doesn't look like other known Geomyces, despite its close genetic relationship.

"In one sense it looks like it could have been a recently introduced fungus that's spreading," Blehert said.

On the other hand, it may simply be one of the many fungi species that scientists hadn't noticed because it had no obvious impact on bats.

"Bats have evolved to live in cool, dank environments just loaded with fungi, and this problem hasn't been reported before. They must have some mechanism that prevents them from getting moldy when hibernating," he said.

Bats are generally considered to have hardy immune systemsthey are, for instance, carriers the rabies virus but don't themselves get sick from it.

"Is there something that's been perturbing the bats' immune systems?" Blehert asked.

Other pathogens or diet deficienciesperhaps pesticide-drivencould make bats newly susceptible to even familiar fungi, scientists say.

Now that the white-nose fungus has been identified, its possible role in killing the small mammals may soon become clear.

Blehert's team will run trials to see if the fungus alone can cause the syndrome in otherwise healthy bats.

Identifying the problem represents progress toward a solution, but easy fixes may be elusive, added study co-author Al Hicks, a bat expert with New York's Department of Environmental Conservation.

"We all hope it isn't just the fungus," he said. "I don't believe the fungus is something that we can address very easily."

(Related: "Amphibian Bacteria Fights Off Deadly Fungus, Study Says" May 29, 2007.)

Emaciated and Starving

John Hermanson, of Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine, said the fungus could prove physically devastating even if it's not highly toxic.

For one, infected bats are emaciated, dehydrated, and starving, conditions that interrupt their winter hibernation cycles. The animals also likely have only enough fat reserves to survive hibernation.

"After a bad night's sleep we feel pretty bad," said Hermanson, who was not involved in the research.

"Imagine if you were supposed to sleep for four-and-a-half months" and kept having to wake up, he said.

"If they are waking up almost daily because of the effects of the fungus, that could really be the cause of major problems."

10/30/2008: What's Causing Bats to Drop Like Flies?, Scientific American

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What's Causing Bats to Drop Like Flies?

Researchers look beyond white-nose syndrome as the prime suspect in the mysterious deaths of bats in the U.S. Northeast

By Larry Greenemeier

WHITE-NOSE SYNDROME: Little brown bats photographed in a New York hibernation cave. Most of the bats exhibit fungal growth on their muzzles.

Courtesy of Nancy Heaslip, N.Y. Department of Environmental Conservation

People near Albany, N.Y., began noticing the strange bat behavior at least two years ago: Droves of the normally nocturnal mammals were seen flying around on brisk winter days when they should have been hibernating in caves for the season. The state's Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) teamed up with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to investigate and made an alarming discovery: Bat populations throughout northeastern New York State, Connecticut, Maine and Vermont had thinned by as much as 97 percent in area bat caves and emaciated survivors were found hanging near cave entrances where it is typically too cold for them to stay the entire winter. The only clue to the mysterious phenom was a white, powdery organism on the muzzles, ears and wings of the dead and dying bats.

Scientists have since linked the deaths of more than 100,000 of the smaller species of brown bats, northern bats, tricolored bats, Indiana bats and small-footed Myotis, along with larger brown bats in the U.S. Northeast to a condition they dubbed "white-nose syndrome." These researchers suspect that, since the winter of 2006, the ailment may have contributed to a steep decline in the bat populations at many caves in the affected states; in the most extreme case, about 1,750 of 1,800 of the flying mammals were found dead. Bat declines at many surveyed hibernation caves exceeded 75 percent.

"If you apply this across the northeastern U.S. there could be 200,000 dead bats and possibly even more," says David Blehert, a USGS microbiologist and lead author of a paper on the syndrome published today in Science.

USGS scientists are working with New York State environmental and health officials to pinpoint the exact cause and consequences of the fatalities. A breakthrough came in April when Blehert identified the white organism on the critters' noses as a type of geomyces fungus, one of a group of organisms that live in soil, water and air and reproduce at refrigerator temperatures of 39 degrees Fahrenheit (four degrees Celsius), the temp in most bat caves.

"When bats are torpid in a hibernating state, they drop their temperatures down to the ambient temperatures of the caves," Blehert says. This makes the dormant bats susceptible to infection by this fungus.

But researchers are in the dark about the source of geomyces. They don't know if its spores were carried to the bat caves by animals or the wind or if it was in these caves all along and recently spread to spots where the bats hibernate.

It is also unclear whether the fungus is killing the bats or is a contributing factor in their deaths. Most of the victims were also rail-thin and some were found outside of their caves, indicating they may have starved to death after an apparently futile attempt to find food (insects, primarily) in the winter.

"Fungi are opportunistic pathogens," Blehert says, "they don't usually attack and kill otherwise healthy animals."

One thing is certain, Blehert says, "Before the identification of white-nose syndrome, mass mortality events in bats as a result of disease were very rare."

Blehert and his colleagues are now attempting to determine whether the dead bats went into hibernation emaciated or filled with enough food to sustain them throughout the winter. "If they're entering with less than a full tank of gas," he notes, "we have to consider whether the insect populations that they feed on are down." Bats are meant to remain in a torpid state throughout the hibernation period, rousing only every two weeks or so to groom or drink water.

Another possibility, he says, is that the fungus killed them indirectly by causing so much skin irritation it prevented them from getting enough sleep. The longer they are awake during hibernation, the more fat they burn, which gives them less time to sustain their bodies without refueling.

Thomas Kunz, a biology professor and director Boston University's Center for Ecology and Conservation Biology, is also studying the mysterious bat deaths. "The mortality is unprecedented in my experience," he says, "and I've been working with bats for 40 years."

Blehert's work is groundbreaking, Kunz says, in that it has provided researchers with an understanding of the fungus, although the syndrome is most likely a secondary effect of some other underlying cause for the deaths. "This is serious in the sense that we're dealing with an unknown," he says, but he does not believe that the fungus itself is the pathogen.

Kunz and his team are approaching the mystery from three different angles: The first is to study the body weights of hibernating bats in different geographic areas by collecting samples of the creatures from three caves in the affected areas and from three caves in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where white-nose syndrome does not appear to have struck. Similar to Blehert's approach, this will inform Kunz and his team of whether the bats in the areas hit by the syndrome are beginning hibernation with the right amount of stored fat. If not, this might signal that pesticides are diminishing local insect populations, possibly choking off a primary food source for the bats.

The second angle is to determine whether the animals are storing the right type of fat (unsaturated fatty acids obtained by eating insects) for their dormancy, Kunz says. A lack of unsaturated fatty acids could again lead the scientists back to suspect declining local insect populations from insecticide use. A third area to investigate is whether the bats' immune systems are being suppressed for some reason, making them more susceptible to fungal infection. "There's no smoking gun at this point," Kunz says, but he and his colleagues are collecting bat samples at this time and hope to have some results by December.

In addition to the role bats play in vampire lore, these creatures of the night are indispensable to insect control, plant pollination and seed dissemination. White-nose syndrome's impact on the bat community is difficult to determine, Blehert says, because of the difficulty of keeping accurate population counts. (They tend to spend a good portion of their lives tucked away in caves inaccessible to people.)

Researchers have been able to count as many as 500,000 hibernating bats throughout the states were white-nose syndrome has been found, but Blehert says there are probably more than that. He likens the demise of the bats to the disappearance of amphibians worldwide over the past three decades that was ultimately traced to a lethal fungal skin infectionchytridiomycosiswhich has wiped out entire populations

One possible bright spot is that some of the lesions on dead bats that Blehert and his colleagues examined had begun to heal before the bats died, which indicates that the bats are capable of fighting the infection to some extent. The researchers plan to spend this winter studying the effect of this fungus on healthy bats in the lab. Blehert says he will be surprised if the fungus alone was the sole culprit behind the plummeting bat population. "I'm not sure a fungus," he says, "can kill an otherwise healthy animal."

10/30/2008: Bats Are Dying From White Nose Mold, But Researchers Dont Know Why, Discover Magazine Blog

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Bats Are Dying From White Nose Mold, But Researchers Dont Know Why

Researchers have gathered some clues to solve the mystery of whats killing off hibernating bats throughout New England, but say theyre still far from knowing how to halt the strange die-off. In a new study, researchers identified the characteristic white fungus that has been found on the noses of dead and dying bats, and say its a new species of mold that thrives at low temperatures like those found in caves in the winter. But debate still continues over whether the fungus is the cause of death, or simply a secondary infection that takes advantage of bats with already weakened immune systems.

Bats covered with the fungus, a sickness now called white-nose syndrome, were first spotted in Howes Cave near Albany, N.Y., during the winter of 2006. At that time, field biologists reported caves that were typically covered with hibernating bats had loads of vacancies. In one case, a cave floor was littered with dead bats LiveScience. Since then, the epidemic has spread throughout Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, and Vermont, with 80 to 100 percent of bats dying in some caves.

As reported in Science subscription required, the researchers genetically analyzed the fungus and found that its a previously unknown member of genus Geomyces, which typically colonizes the skin of animals living in cold climates The Scientist. The fungus is found on the muzzles, ears, and wings of dead and dying bats, which are also found to be emaciated. The bat community is alarmed, says bat scientist Marianne Moore. The syndrome has hit at least six species, including the widespread little brown bat and the endangered Indiana bat Science News.

The emaciated bodies of affected bats add to the puzzlement. Its possible that some other factor is causing the bats to waste away, or that a pesticide could have wiped out their usual insect prey, keeping the bats from fattening up before entering caves for hibernation. Their emaciated bodies would then be susceptible to invasion by the fungus LiveScience.

Another possibility, researchers say, is that the fungus is a severe skin irritant that bothers the bats so much they wake up to groom themselves during the exact time they need to be conserving energy to make it through the long winter. In Vermont, Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut, hundreds of skinny bats last winter were found weakly flying in the middle of the winter day possibly looking for food Boston Globe blog.

10/29/2008: Study confirms movement of bird flu from Asia to North America via birds, Indian Daily News

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Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Study confirms movement of bird flu from Asia to North America via birds

Washington, October 29 (ANI): An international team of researchers claims that it has unearthed evidence for the movement of Asian forms of avian influenza to Alaska by northern pintail ducks.

Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) joined forces with researchers at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska and the University of Tokyo to study the role of migratory birds in the transfer of avian influenza viruses between Asia and North America.

Published by the journal Molecular Ecology, their study showed that about half of the low pathogenic avian influenza viruses found in wild northern pintail ducks in Alaska contained at least one of the eight gene segments that were more closely related to Asian than to North American strains of avian influenza.

The researchers said that it was a highly pathogenic form of the H5N1 avian influenza virus that spread across Asia to Europe and Africa over the past decade, causing the deaths of 245 people and raising concerns of a possible human pandemic.

Although some previous research has led to speculation that intercontinental transfer of avian influenza viruses from Asia to North America via wild birds is rare, this study challenges that, said Chris Franson, a research wildlife biologist with the USGS National Wildlife Health Center and co-author of the study.

He revealed that northern pintails were chosen as the focus of the study due to the fact that they are fairly common in North America and Asia, they are frequently infected by low pathogenic avian influenza, and they are known to migrate between North America and Asia.

For their study, the researchers obtained samples from more than 1,400 northern pintails from locations throughout Alaska.

Samples containing viruses were then analysed and compared to virus samples taken from other birds in North America and Eastern Asia where northern pintails are known to winter.

The researchers said that none of the samples was found to contain completely Asian-origin viruses.

They also said that none of the samples contained completely Asian-origin viruses, and none were highly pathogenic forms that have caused deaths of domestic poultry and humans.

This kind of genetic analysis - using the low pathogenic strains of avian influenza virus commonly found in wild birds - can answer questions not only about the migratory movements of wild birds, but the degree of virus exchange that takes place between continents, provided the right species and geographic locations are sampled, said John Pearce, a research wildlife biologist with the USGS Alaska Science Center and co-author of the study.

Furthermore, this research validates our current surveillance sampling process for highly pathogenic avian influenza in Alaska and demonstrates that genetic analysis can be used as an effective tool to further refine surveillance plans across North America, Pearce added.

Based on their observations, the researchers came to the conclusion that future surveillance for avian influenza in wild birds should include the type of genetic analyses used in the current study to better understand patterns of migratory connectivity between Asia and North America and virus ecology. (ANI)

10/28/2008: Migratory Ducks Carry Bird Flu From Asia to Alaska, Environment News Service

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Migratory Ducks Carry Bird Flu From Asia to Alaska

RESTON, Virginia, October 27, 2008 (ENS) - Wild migratory birds appear to be important carriers of avian influenza viruses from continent to continent, according to new research that scientists say has important implications for highly pathogenic avian influenza virus surveillance in North America.

Migratory bird species, including many waterfowl and shorebirds, that frequently carry low pathogenic avian influenza and migrate between continents may carry Asian strains of the virus along their migratory pathways to North America.

Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey, in collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska and the University of Tokyo, have found genetic evidence that northern pintail ducks carried Asian forms of avian influenza to Alaska.

"Although some previous research has led to speculation that intercontinental transfer of avian influenza viruses from Asia to North America via wild birds is rare, this study challenges that," said Chris Franson, a research wildlife biologist with the USGS National Wildlife Health Center and co-author of the study.

Most previous studies examined bird species that are not transcontinental migrants or were from mid-latitude locales in North America, regions far removed from sources of Asian strains of avian influenza, Franson said.

For this study, scientists with the USGS, in collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, state agencies, and Alaska native communities, obtained samples from more than 1,400 northern pintails from locations throughout Alaska.

Samples containing viruses were analyzed and compared to virus samples taken from other birds in North America and Eastern Asia where northern pintails are known to winter.

The scientists observed that nearly half of the low pathogenic avian influenza viruses found in wild northern pintail ducks in Alaska contained at least one of eight gene segments that were more closely related to Asian than to North American strains of bird flu.

None of the samples were found to contain completely Asian-origin viruses and none were highly pathogenic.

The low pathogenic form of the disease commonly causes only mild symptoms such as ruffled feathers and a drop in egg production, and may easily go undetected.

The highly pathogenic form is far more dramatic. It spreads very rapidly through poultry flocks, causes disease affecting multiple internal organs, and has a mortality that can approach 100 percent, often within 48 hours.

Under the crowded conditions of intensive poultry farming, some variants of the H5 and H7 viral subtypes derived from wild birds can evolve into highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses.

It was a highly pathogenic form of the H5N1 bird flu virus that spread across Asia to Europe and Africa over the past decade, causing the culling of hundreds of millions of chickens and ducks, and the deaths of 245 people, raising concerns of a possible human pandemic.

Avian influenza viruses do not normally infect humans but there have been instances of certain highly pathogenic strains causing severe respiratory disease in humans. In most cases, the people infected had been in close contact with infected poultry or with objects contaminated by their feces.

Still, there is concern that the virus could mutate to become more easily transmissible between humans, raising the possibility of an influenza pandemic.

In June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta released results of a study suggesting that some North American avian influenza A H7 virus strains have properties that might enhance their potential to infect humans and their potential to spread from human to human.

"We know that influenza viruses are constantly changing and that is why it's so important to watch them carefully," explained Dr. Jessica Belser, CDC lead author on the project. "In this study, we discovered that some recently identified avian influenza A H7 viruses have some properties that could enhance their potential to infect people and possibly spread among people."

The role of migratory birds in moving the highly pathogenic virus to other geographic areas has been a subject of disagreement among scientists that focused on how likely it is for H5N1 to disperse across continents via wild birds.

For this study, the researchers chose northern pintails because they are fairly common in North America and Asia, they are frequently infected by low pathogenic avian influenza, and they are known to migrate between North America and Asia.

In addition to the samples from more than 1,400 ducks, the scientists utilized satellite telemetry in their research. In February 2007, biologists from the Alaska Science Center worked with Japanese scientists to mark 27 northern pintail ducks with satellite transmitters at Lakes Izunuma-Uchinuma in the Miyagi Prefecture of Japan. In February 2008, this international research team marked 52 pintails with satellite transmitters. Pintails were again marked at Lake Izunuma-Uchinuma as well as at Gosho Reservoir in the Iwate Prefecture. An additional sample of pintails will be marked in 2009, the final year of the study.

"This kind of genetic analysis - using the low pathogenic strains of avian influenza virus commonly found in wild birds - can answer questions not only about the migratory movements of wild birds, but the degree of virus exchange that takes place between continents, provided the right species and geographic locations are sampled," said John Pearce, a research wildlife biologist with the USGS Alaska Science Center and co-author of the study.

"This research validates our current surveillance sampling process for highly pathogenic avian influenza in Alaska and demonstrates that genetic analysis can be used as an effective tool to further refine surveillance plans across North America, said Pearce.

The study is published this week in the journal "Molecular Ecology."

10/28/2008: Hunting Season and Migratory Birds and the Movement of Avian Influenza Viruses, Prepared Citizens

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Hunting Season and Migratory Birds and the Movement of Avian Influenza Viruses

Posted by preparedcitizens on October 28, 2008

Massachusetts Migratory Birds 2008-2009 Season Has Begun

It is important to note that of 500 samples collected since April 2008 - highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has not been detected in any of them.

Hunters and hikers can be our best eyes and ears on the ground.

Guidelines for Reporting Sick or Dying Birds

When three (3) or more sick, dying, or recently dead waterfowl (duck and geese), shorebirds (sandpipers, plovers), or other waterbirds (herons) are found at any single location they should be reported to the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries & Wildlifes Westboro Field Headquarters at 508/389-6300 or the USDA/APHIS-Wildlife Services MA/CT/RI Program at 413/253-2403. Agency staff will evaluate the situation and make arrangements for collecting the birds. Events involving other types of dead birds can be reported to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health Information Line at 1-866-MASS-WNV.

More information and an FAQ publication on Avian Influenza (181 K, PDF) may be found at the Mass. Department of Public Healths avian flu website.

Sportsmens Clubs Order (or download) a poster "Help Find Avian Influenza" to post at your club facilities! This poster is target to the hunting community as part of a state and national monitoring and surveillance program. More information at the USDA-APHIS Wildlife Services Website.

Resources: Massachusetts Migratory Game Bird Laws and Regulations

Massachusetts Hunting Season Dates

The USGS offers this guidance for reporting dead birds. From the report:

Guidance for Public Reporting of Wild Bird Die-offs

When contacted by the general public about finding dead birds, we suggest instructing them not to touch the carcass with their bare hands. If the animal must be moved for submission or disposal, the individual should use disposable gloves or an inverted plastic bag to pick up the dead animal, and wash their hands thoroughly afterwards. If the carcass is not being submitted for evaluation, we recommend that it be double-bagged and placed in a secure trash receptacle for routine garbage pickup. We also stress the importance of avoiding exposure of dead animals to children, pets, and other wildlife.

We recommend mentioning to the public that there are many causes of death for wild birds, that mortality events happen every year, and that there have been no documented cases of highly pathogenic avian influenza in North America to date. The HPAI H5N1 virus does not easily infect people; nevertheless, all dead carcasses should be treated with care.

In determining whether or not to retrieve or accept carcasses, we recommend that you take into consideration the location of the event, species of birds involved, size of the event, and condition of the carcasses. When a decision is made not to accept or retrieve carcasses, thank the individual for their information and explain that the information is very useful to our monitoring effort, but that we are unable to collect and test all wild bird mortalities.

More Recommendations:

Thoroughly washing hands with soap and water (or with alcohol-based hand products if the hands are not visibly soiled) is a very effective method for inactivating influenza viruses, including HPAI. These viruses are also inactivated with many common disinfectants such as detergents, 10% household bleach, alcohol or other commercial disinfectants. The virus is more difficult to inactivate in organic material such as feces or soil.

The General Public should, as a general rule, observe wildlife, including wild birds, from a distance. This protects you from possible exposure to pathogens and minimizes disturbance to the animal.

Avoid touching wildlife. If there is contact with wildlife do not rub eyes, eat, drink, or smoke before washing hands with soap and water as described above.

Do not pick up diseased or dead wildlife. Contact your state, tribal or federal natural resource agency if a sick or dead animal is found.

Hunters should follow routine precautions when handling game.

Do not handle or eat sick game.

Wear rubber or disposable latex gloves while handling and cleaning game, wash hands as described above, and thoroughly clean knives, equipment and surfaces that come in contact with game.

Do not eat, drink, or smoke while handling animals.

All game should be thoroughly cooked (well done or 160o F). Additional information can be found here.

Genetics Provide Evidence for the Movement of Avian Influenza Viruses from Asia to North America via Migratory Birds

Released: 10/27/2008 11:49:09 AM

Contact Information:

U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey

Office of Communication

119 National Center

Reston, VA 20192

Catherine Puckett - Phone: 352-264-3532

Dirk Derksen - Phone: 907-786-7061

John Pearce - Phone: 907-786-7094

Wild migratory birds may be more important carriers of avian influenza viruses from continent to continent than previously thought, according to new scientific research that has important implications for highly pathogenic avian influenza virus surveillance in North America.

As part of a multi-pronged research effort to understand the role of migratory birds in the transfer of avian influenza viruses between Asia and North America, scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska and the University of Tokyo, have found genetic evidence for the movement of Asian forms of avian influenza to Alaska by northern pintail ducks.

In an article published this week in Molecular Ecology, USGS scientists observed that nearly half of the low pathogenic avian influenza viruses found in wild northern pintail ducks in Alaska contained at least one (of eight) gene segments that were more closely related to Asian than to North American strains of avian influenza.

It was a highly pathogenic form of the H5N1 avian influenza virus that spread across Asia to Europe and Africa over the past decade, causing the deaths of 245 people and raising concerns of a possible human pandemic. The role of migratory birds in moving the highly pathogenic virus to other geographic areas has been a subject of debate among scientists. Disagreement has focused on how likely it is for H5N1 to disperse among continents via wild birds.

"Although some previous research has led to speculation that intercontinental transfer of avian influenza viruses from Asia to North America via wild birds is rare, this study challenges that," said Chris Franson, a research wildlife biologist with the USGS National Wildlife Health Center and co-author of the study. Franson added that most of the previous studies examined bird species that are not transcontinental migrants or were from mid-latitude locales in North America, regions far removed from sources of Asian strains of avian influenza.

Scientists with the USGS, in collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, state agencies, and Alaska native communities, obtained samples from more than 1,400 northern pintails from locations throughout Alaska. Samples containing viruses were then analyzed and compared to virus samples taken from other birds in North America and Eastern Asia where northern pintails are known to winter. Researchers chose northern pintails as the focus of the study because they are fairly common in North America and Asia, they are frequently infected by low pathogenic avian influenza, and they are known to migrate between North America and Asia. None of the samples were found to contain completely Asian-origin viruses and none were highly pathogenic.

"This kind of genetic analysis - using the low pathogenic strains of avian influenza virus commonly found in wild birds - can answer questions not only about the migratory movements of wild birds, but the degree of virus exchange that takes place between continents, provided the right species and geographic locations are sampled," said John Pearce, a research wildlife biologist with the USGS Alaska Science Center and co-author of the study. "Furthermore, this research validates our current surveillance sampling process for highly pathogenic avian influenza in Alaska and demonstrates that genetic analysis can be used as an effective tool to further refine surveillance plans across North America, Pearce added.

Website for USGS northern pintail avian influenza research:

http://alaska.usgs.gov/science/biology/avian_influenza/pintail_movements.html

Implications of the Research:

Migratory bird species, including many waterfowl and shorebirds, that frequently carry low pathogenic avian influenza and migrate between continents may carry Asian strains of the virus along their migratory pathways to North America.

USGS researchers found that nearly half of influenza viruses isolated from northern pintail ducks in Alaska contained at least one of eight virus genes that were more closely related to Asian than North American strains. None of the samples contained completely Asian-origin viruses and none were highly pathogenic forms that have caused deaths of domestic poultry and humans.

The central location of Alaska in relation to Asian and North American migratory flyways may explain the higher frequency of Asian lineages observed in this study in comparison to more southerly locations in North America. Thus, continued surveillance for highly pathogenic viruses via sampling of wild birds in Alaska is warranted.

Future surveillance for avian influenza in wild birds should include the type of genetic analyses used in this study to better understand patterns of migratory connectivity between Asia and North America and virus ecology.

10/27/2008: Genetics Provide Evidence for the Movement of Avian Influenza Viruses from Asia to North America via Migratory Birds, Geology News

(Link to the original article)

Genetics Provide Evidence for the Movement of Avian Influenza Viruses from Asia to North America via Migratory Birds

Monday, October 27, 2008 in General by USGS Newsroom | No comments

Editors: Please see this press release at the USGS Newsroom for downloadable, copyright-free photos: http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/

Wild migratory birds may be more important carriers of avian influenza viruses from continent to continent than previously thought, according to new scientific research that has important implications for highly pathogenic avian influenza virus surveillance in North America.

As part of a multi-pronged research effort to understand the role of migratory birds in the transfer of avian influenza viruses between Asia and North America, scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska and the University of Tokyo, have found genetic evidence for the movement of Asian forms of avian influenza to Alaska by northern pintail ducks.

In an article published this week in Molecular Ecology, USGS scientists observed that nearly half of the low pathogenic avian influenza viruses found in wild northern pintail ducks in Alaska contained at least one (of eight) gene segments that were more closely related to Asian than to North American strains of avian influenza.

It was a highly pathogenic form of the H5N1 avian influenza virus that spread across Asia to Europe and Africa over the past decade, causing the deaths of 245 people and raising concerns of a possible human pandemic. The role of migratory birds in moving the highly pathogenic virus to other geographic areas has been a subject of debate among scientists. Disagreement has focused on how likely it is for H5N1 to disperse among continents via wild birds.

Although some previous research has led to speculation that intercontinental transfer of avian influenza viruses from Asia to North America via wild birds is rare, this study challenges that, said Chris Franson, a research wildlife biologist with the USGS National Wildlife Health Center and co-author of the study. Franson added that most of the previous studies examined bird species that are not transcontinental migrants or were from mid-latitude locales in North America, regions far removed from sources of Asian strains of avian influenza.

Scientists with the USGS, in collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, state agencies, and Alaska native communities, obtained samples from more than 1,400 northern pintails from locations throughout Alaska. Samples containing viruses were then analyzed and compared to virus samples taken from other birds in North America and Eastern Asia where northern pintails are known to winter. Researchers chose northern pintails as the focus of the study because they are fairly common in North America and Asia, they are frequently infected by low pathogenic avian influenza, and they are known to migrate between North America and Asia. None of the samples were found to contain completely Asian-origin viruses and none were highly pathogenic.

This kind of genetic analysis - using the low pathogenic strains of avian influenza virus commonly found in wild birds - can answer questions not only about the migratory movements of wild birds, but the degree of virus exchange that takes place between continents, provided the right species and geographic locations are sampled, said John Pearce, a research wildlife biologist with the USGS Alaska Science Center and co-author of the study. Furthermore, this research validates our current surveillance sampling process for highly pathogenic avian influenza in Alaska and demonstrates that genetic analysis can be used as an effective tool to further refine surveillance plans across North America, Pearce added.

Website for USGS northern pintail avian influenza research:

http://alaska.usgs.gov/science/biology/avian_influenza/pintail_movements.html

Implications of the Research:

Migratory bird species, including many waterfowl and shorebirds, that frequently carry low pathogenic avian influenza and migrate between continents may carry Asian strains of the virus along their migratory pathways to North America.

USGS researchers found that nearly half of influenza viruses isolated from northern pintail ducks in Alaska contained at least one of eight virus genes that were more closely related to Asian than North American strains. None of the samples contained completely Asian-origin viruses and none were highly pathogenic forms that have caused deaths of domestic poultry and humans.

The central location of Alaska in relation to Asian and North American migratory flyways may explain the higher frequency of Asian lineages observed in this study in comparison to more southerly locations in North America. Thus, continued surveillance for highly pathogenic viruses via sampling of wild birds in Alaska is warranted.

Future surveillance for avian influenza in wild birds should include the type of genetic analyses used in this study to better understand patterns of migratory connectivity between Asia and North America and virus ecology.

10/21/2008: IDNR participating in avian influenza surveillance, The Daily Ledger

(Link to the original article)

IDNR participating in avian influenza surveillance

Published: Tuesday, October 21, 2008 9:39 AM CDT

SPRINGFIELD - The Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) again this fall is participating in the national surveillance effort for highly pathogenic avian influenza by collecting samples from hunter-harvested ducks during the upcoming Illinois waterfowl hunting season.

Illinois receives funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to participate in the sampling for highly-pathogenic (HP) Asian H5N1 avian influenza in wild birds. To date, the disease has not been detected in North America.

We appreciate the support of hunters in helping us collect samples from ducks they take this fall, said John Buhnerkempe, chief of the IDNR Division of Wildlife Resources. Early detection is a key in the effort to combat the avian influenza virus, and the sampling and testing will provide us with important information about the spread of the disease.

As part of the surveillance effort, duck hunters at a number of sites in Illinois will be asked by IDNR staff to allow samples to be collected from their birds. The sampling procedure, consisting of a swab of the cloaca (posterior part of the intestinal tract) and mouth cavity of each bird, will only take a minute and the ducks will be returned to the hunters intact. Samples will be taken to the Illinois Department of Agriculture Animal Disease Lab in Galesburg for testing. Only pre-determined numbers of certain species have been targeted and hunters will not be informed individually of their birds test results.

Sampling collections will occur at select sites on Oct. 18-19, Oct. 25-26, and Nov. 28-29.

While hunters need not be overly concerned about contracting bird flu from handling wild game, there are some basic precautions developed by the National Wildlife Health Center which should be followed to reduce the risk of exposure to other diseases which may be carried by wild birds.

Those include:

- Do not handle or eat sick game.

- Wear rubber or disposable latex gloves while handling and cleaning game, wash hands thoroughly with soap and water, and thoroughly clean knives, equipment and surfaces that come in contact with game. After cleaning, surfaces and equipment can be disinfected with a 10 percent household bleach solution.

- Do not eat, drink, or smoke while handling animals.

- All game should be thoroughly cooked (well done or 160 degrees F).

10/01/2008: Here a quack, there a quack, Press of Atlantic City

(Link to the original article)

Here a quack, there a quack

By BEN LEACH Staff Writer, 609-272-7261

Published: Wednesday, October 01, 2008

GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP - The crowds might have left for the season, but there is still one group of visitors that flocks to southern New Jersey as the weather gets colder: ducks.

The banding of ducks - placing metal tags on their feet and keeping track of their species, their ages and their sex - is a useful tool to get a sense of what duck populations are like in southern New Jersey. But once migrating ducks start making this area their home, that task becomes much more difficult.

"We won't be able to get good statistical data of what's (native) in the area," said Charles Barreca, a biology intern with the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in Galloway Township.

Biologists, interns and volunteers are banding ducks for the final time this season in the refuge today. Wood ducks, black ducks, pintails and mallards are all found frequently in the area, and with the help of some well-designed traps, the team has a much easier time of finding and banding local ducks.

There are two trap designs - the cloverleaf and the Montezuma confusion trap.

The cloverleaf is round with a funnel, which looks like the indentation on a cloverleaf. Ducks are lured into the trap by bait. They try to swim out but are unsuccessful unless someone opens the trap. The Montezuma confusion trap is similar but uses three box traps instead of one circular trap.

In one cloverleaf trap next to Doughty Creek on Monday morning, nine wood ducks - four females, five males - found their way into the trap. The trap is big enough to fit them all comfortably, but when they tried to take off, they flapped their wings but could not get more than about a couple of feet into the air.

When the team brought them back for banding, they immediately distinguished between males and females because of their coats. However, one male was rather young. His coat resembled the females' coats more than his fellow males, but his red eyes, red beak and anatomy gave him away as a young male, meaning he couldn't have migrated from anywhere else.

"You know it's a bird that was hatched here locally," said Jeff Sloane, biological technician for the refuge.

In addition to banding, the team is swabbing for avian flu. They take oral and cloacal samples - the cloaca is an opening for the urinary tract in a duck - and freeze them in liquid nitrogen to be sent for testing to the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis..

It's part of a nationwide effort to make sure birds in the United States aren't carrying the H5N1 strain of avian influenza that has people worried about another flu pandemic. Kevin Holcomb, a wildlife biologist for the refuge and a member of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said Forsythe has done the same tests the past two years and expanded its efforts this year.

The days are long. Josh Higgins, another biology intern, said they went out at 3 a.m. to set the bait in the traps. The team usually goes out twice a day - once in the morning, again in the evening - about five times each week to band and release as many ducks as possible.

"Working with ducks, you don't have a nine-to-five schedule," Higgins said.

Although no volunteers were along on Monday's banding mission, people from the community often help out with projects like these in Forsythe year-round. Although the banding for the season ends today, the refuge is always looking for a few good men and women to keep track of southern New Jersey's natural habitat.

"When something like (the banding) comes up, we usually let all of our volunteers know that something different is going on," said Sandy Perchetti, the volunteer coordinator for the refuge.

E-mail Ben Leach:BLeach@pressofac.com

For more information about the volunteer program at Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, call Sandy Perchetti at

609-748-1535 or e-mail sandy_perchetti@fws.gov.

09/30/2008: The Dangers of America's Underwater Junkyard, Time

(Link to the original article)

The Dangers of America's Underwater Junkyard

By Emily V. Driscoll Tuesday, Sep. 30, 2008A bird caught in marine debris.

Below America's waters lies a junkyard. Every year, thousands of boats, barges and ships sink or are abandoned in the U.S., having been rendered unusable due to accidents, weather damage, age or an owner's financial duress, and the vast majority of them are never recovered.

"You go to any harbor or shoreline in the country and you'll find derelict and abandoned vessels," said Doug Helton, acting director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Marine Debris Program. NOAA data suggests there are at least 10,000 abandoned ships and obstructions peppering the U.S. coast, but experts predict there are far more. Helton says 300 to 400 abandoned vessels alone were scattered around the coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Abandoned ships wreak havoc on the marine ecosystem long after they've sunk. Decaying wreckages leach toxic chemicals like petroleum products and PCBs that remain in the water harming or destroying sea life, and potentially enter the food chain, eventually getting ingested by humans. Sometimes dead watercraft foster the growth of new sea life that threatens the pre-existing local ecosystem. On Palmyra Atoll, 1,000 miles south of Hawaii, a "population explosion" of corallimorph, an aggressive creature similar to anemones and coral, killed almost all the coral growing around a long-line fishing vessel that sank in 1991, according to a report published in August in the journal PLoS One by Thierry Work, a wildlife disease specialist at the U.S. Geological Survey, and his colleagues. The corallimorph were probably attracted to the leaching iron, a valuable nutrient in the sea, says Work. Since the organism, which sparsely populates other parts of the reef, grows fast, is aggressive and reproduces in three different ways, it out-competed other marine life on the reef. "It's a carpet of living animals that destroyed all the other organisms underneath," said Work. "We were able to show man-made structures were responsible for the growth of these organisms."

Sunken vessels can also trail deadly debris. Fishing boats, for example, which are stocked with nets and traps, often continue to "ghost fish" after the ship itself has been abandoned. The biggest man-made threat to the endangered monk seal of Hawaii is entanglement in derelict fishing gear, according to Keith Criddle, a marine policy professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. Off North Carolina's coast, ghost crab pots continue to trap and kill diamondback terrapin turtles. In a 2004 report entitled "An Ocean Blueprint for the 21st Century," the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy found that at least 267 different species were affected by derelict fishing gear, including 86% of all species of sea turtles. "Fishing gear is intended to catch things, so if it gets lost, it can catch and kill things for extended periods of time," says Criddle.

In September, Criddle authored a National Resource Council report, mandated by Congress and funded by the Coast Guard, that recommended that America reduce all marine debris man-made substances and litter, not just from ships to zero. Under the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, signed by 128 countries, vessels are currently allowed to discharge certain pollutants, like food and operational wastes, as long as ships are away from the coastline and other specially protected areas, such as the Mediterranean and Baltic seas. But Criddle's report warns that despite all regulations, there is still a significant amount of marine debris. "We lack a coordinated strategy dealing with land and sea based debris," said Criddle.

Of course, there are governmental policies in place prohibiting ship abandonment: state laws fine and sometimes jail owners of derelict vessels. The problem is, there's a strong financial disincentive against retrieving and recycling sunken vessels. Dismantling a 40-ft. yacht costs owners on average $5,000 to $10,000, but the costs can run 100 times that amount. "You can't just crush it up into a cube," says Helton. Meanwhile, state fines for abandonment run a lot lower, as little as $100. Definitions of "vessel," "abandonment" and "ownership" also vary among states, which means that ship owners can sometimes sink boats and get off scot-free. Federal legislation, meanwhile, typically only deals with pollution or obstruction caused by vessels, not with ship abandonment itself.

Legislation is slowly beginning to change. Since 2003, Washington State's vessel removal program has led a crackdown on derelict boats, using ramped-up boat-registration fees as funding for the program, which has so far cleared 188 boats. "It gave us financial capability plus the legal hammer if we needed to use it," says Doug Sutherland, the state's commissioner of public lands. Other state officials have expressed interest in Washington's model. In September, the California legislature passed a bill to increase fines to owners of derelict vessels. And last year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an act that gives NOAA funds and authorization to remove abandoned vessels damaging coral reefs.

In some cases, ships are purposefully introduced to the underwater landscape. In 2006 the U.S. Navy sank the decommissioned WWII aircraft carrier USS Oriskany off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., in the Gulf of Mexico and turned it into an artificial reef. It was the first and, so far, only artificial reefing project undertaken by the Navy Inactive Ships Program, which is charged with disposing of old warships (which are typically dismantled and recycled or turned into museums.) It took nearly $20 million to ready the ship for safe sinking, in accordance with standards set forth by the Environmental Protection Agency, which concluded that the 700 lbs. of toxic PCBs aboard the Oriskany had been secured and would not harm wildlife. But the science regarding the safety of artificial reefing is ongoing. Chris Dorsett, vice president of fishery conservation and management at the Ocean Conservancy, says that toxins can still leach from boats underwater and that these artificial reefs can "increase catchability of species," leading to even more overfishing.

The environmental impact of undersea wreckage can't always be seen easily from the shore. Says Helton, it would help if owners of small fishing boats and Jet-Skis as well as giant ore ships and ocean-going freighters could keep in mind that "when a vessel is lost it's not gone."

09/12/2008: Bird disease prompts closure of Agassiz National Wildlife Refuge, Grand Forks Herald

(Link to the original article)

Bird disease prompts closure of Agassiz National Wildlife Refuge

Brad Dokken Grand Forks Herald

Published Friday, September 12, 2008

Agassiz National Wildlife Refuge in northwestern Minnesota has closed temporarily to the public after a virulent strain of Newcastles disease was confirmed in a sick American white pelican that refuge staff found in July.

The disease can be especially contagious to cormorants and pelicans, and the virulent strain found at Agassiz also can cause high death rates to domestic poultry that arent vaccinated.

The disease poses minimal risk to humans.

Brad Dokken Archive

According to John Braastad, assistant manager at Agassiz, refuge staff sent the sick pelican to a lab in Madison, Wis., for testing and received word late Wednesday that the bird had the virulent strain of Newcastles disease.

Refuge personnel also have found other dead or sick pelicans on the refuge. As a result, Braastad said, Agassiz staff decided to close the refuge to the public for the time being.

He said hes also contacted a couple of nearby poultry operations about the positive finding.

What were doing is erring on the side of precaution, Braastad said Thursday. For right now, we wanted to just close the refuge to the public to help contain the disease so nobody gets in contact with it and spreads it to domestic waterfowl or domestic birds.

Transmission of the disease generally is limited to direct contact with bodily secretions, the Fish and Wildlife Service said in a news release. It also can be transmitted by contaminated boots, clothing or equipment.

Newcastles disease has been making the news in Minnesota in recent weeks after the Department of Natural Resources reported more than 900 double-crested cormorants and smaller numbers of American white pelicans and other water birds were found dead or dying at Minnesota Lake and Pigeon Lake.

Since then, DNR staff has found dead or sick birds on a handful of other lakes, including Lake of the Woods.

Braastad says the disease doesnt pose a risk to healthy people, but the elderly or immune deficient could develop flulike symptoms.

We just feel that by closing down the refuge to the public, we will minimize any adverse impacts outside the refuge, Braastad said. We just wanted to make the public aware of that.

Canceled events

Because of the closure, Braastad said the refuge has canceled its annual public duck-banding event set for Sept. 20, and several school groups scheduled to visit the refuge now wont be coming.

The refuge also has closed its Lost Bay Habitat Drive.

Braastad said its too early to say whether the refuge will be closed during the firearms deer season that begins Nov. 8. The refuge for the first time this fall also is scheduled to be open to small game and muzzle-loader deer hunting after the firearms deer opener.

Once deer season comes and we have a good freeze-up, we wont be too concerned, he said. But if we start seeing more sick birds, and it stays fairly warm into deer season, then we will see what kind of actions we want to take.

Agassiz isnt open to waterfowl hunting, but the refuge does border several popular state-administered lands, including Thief Lake Wildlife Management Area. Braastad said hes been in contact with area DNR officials, and the refuge plans to step up its efforts to look for sick or dead birds.

If we start seeing larger collections, we probably have to take a few more steps to isolate the area, he said.

Taking precautions

Once hunting season begins, Braastad said waterfowl hunters, especially those on the nearby state lands, should take precautions and clean up thoroughly after handling birds.

Randy Prachar, manager of Thief Lake WMA, said there havent been any suspect birds at Thief Lake. DNR staff are in monitoring mode, he said, but the case at neighboring Agassiz at this point, at least wont have any impact on the upcoming waterfowl season.

Some of these things are very weather dependent, Prachar said. Once it gets cold, they sort of go away. Im hoping for the sake of those places where it has been discovered and those who dont want it that we get those conditions very soon.

According to the DNR, outbreaks of Newcastles disease are rare in the U.S. in wild birds, with the exception of outbreaks in double-crested cormorants, American white pelicans and gulls in several Midwestern states and Canadian provinces.

The last Minnesota outbreak occurred in 1992, when more than 20,000 cormorants died in Minnesota and the Dakotas, the DNR said.

Dokken reports on outdoors. Reach him at (701) 780-1148; (800) 477-6572, ext. 148; or send e-mail to bdokken@gfherald.com.

09/11/2008: Watch for Pigeon Lake island closing caused by Newcastle disease, Litchfield Independent Review

(Link to the original article)

Watch for Pigeon Lake island closing caused by Newcastle disease

September 11, 2008 - 11:07am Matt McMillan

Filed under: Top Stories

Dont be too surprised if you see closed signs on certain islands and lake access points within five Minnesota lakes. Birds from these lakes were confirmed to have virulent Newcastle disease, according to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

The virus, which already has killed more than 1,200 double-crested cormorants this summer in Minnesota, has been confirmed at Minnesota Lake, Pigeon Lake, Lake of the Woods, Marsh Lake and Lake Kabetogama. DNR officials still are waiting for results from Mille Lacs Lake.

Counties affected or potentially affected by the closed areas include Meeker, Faribault, Mille Lacs, Cass, St. Louis (in the Voyageurs National Park area), Lake of the Woods and Lac Qui Parle. Closed areas should be signed by the end of the week.

The disease can be transmitted via contaminated clothing and equipment, and infected birds can spread the virus through direct contact as well as through their ****** and excretions. Newcastle disease is not a major concern for humans, although it may cause a mild

conjunctivitis and influenza-like symptoms.

Clinical signs of Newcastle disease in avian species are frequently neurological, such as droopy heads and paralyzed wings and legs. Nestlings and juveniles birds are most commonly affected. Mortality rates in wild species can vary greatly, with double-crested cormorants most commonly affected.

No cases of Newcastle disease outbreaks in wild species were reported until 1990 in the United States or Canada. In 1992, more than 35,000 double-crested cormorants died from the virus across the Great Lakes, Upper Midwest and Canada. Sporadic outbreaks in cormorants have been reported since 1990 in California, Utah, Nevada and Oregon.

DNR wildlife staff is working with the National Wildlife Health Center, the National Park Service, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Minnesota Board of Animal Health, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, and the Canadian Cooperative Wildlife Health Centre to manage the outbreak by reducing possible impacts to other wild birds and prevent spillover of the disease into domestic poultry.

08/24/2008: Laysan duck deaths on Midway at 136, Honolulu Advertiser

(Link to the original article)

Laysan duck deaths on Midway at 136

Wildlife refuge officials freshen wetland water to try to stem botulism

By Suzanne Roig

Advertiser Staff Writer

Avian botulism has killed at least 136 Laysan ducks, found dead over the past two weeks in the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, according to the National Wildlife Health Center.

"It's not uncommon to have birds affected by avian botulism," said Barbara Maxfield, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman. "It's the first time on Midway Atoll. Wildlife has been affected here in Hawai'i by the avian botulism, but not with the Laysan ducks."

The first dead duck was found Aug. 10, and the death toll of adult and adolescent birds is up to 136.

Several carcasses were shipped to the National Wildlife Health Center's Honolulu field station, and from there, samples were sent to the NWHC in Madison, Wis.

Avian botulism toxin was found in all eight samples from the refuge, which is in the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument.

The highest concentration was from a catchment basin near where the Laysan ducks nest. The catchment has now been drained and freshwater has been introduced to the wetlands in other nesting areas to dilute the botulism, Maxfield said.

The Laysan duck is on the endangered species list and the entire world's population is fewer than 1,000, all in the Hawaiian Islands, mostly on Laysan Island, Maxfield said.

Avian botulism, which is found in soil throughout the world, does not affect humans, she said. The outbreak affected a new duck population started in 2004 on Midway Atoll as a way to expand the Laysan population.

The Midway population was about 400 birds, and Laysan Island, which is more than 100 nautical miles away, has about 600 ducks. There is no risk of Midway's bout of avian botulism affecting the Laysan population, experts say.

The Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument is administered jointly by the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. Department of the Interior and the state of Hawai'i.

Reach Suzanne Roig at sroig@honoluluadvertiser.com.

08/20/2008: Shipwreck fuels invasion of unwanted species, New Scientist Environment

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Aggressive invaders are spreading through a coral reef in Hawaii thanks to a shipwreck that ran aground in the remote Palmyra Atoll in 1991.

Researchers believe that iron leaching from the ship is fuelling the invasion. And now they are calling for shipwrecks to be removed from sensitive ecosystems elsewhere.

The invader, Rhodactis howesii, is a corallimorph, a yellow-brownish animal related to corals and anenomes. With its tentacles full of stinging cells, the corallimorph wipes out any organisms that get in its way.

"Think of it like using a flame thrower to get real estate," says Thierry Work at the US Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center's Honolulu Field Station and lead author of the study.

Running amok

Work and his colleagues measured the spread of R. howesii through Palmyra Atoll and found that their coverage doubled between 2006 and 2007. This means the invaders have claimed several hundred metres of reef in all directions. Where diverse corals were thriving until recently, there are now two square kilometres of corallimorph monoculture.

Work believes the organism may be native to the area but is now running amok thanks to iron leaching from the wreck.

He thinks that R. howesii may be best equipped to take advantage of the possible sudden iron bounty, not only because of their powerful tentacles but also because of their impressive reproductive capabilities.

Chemical sterilisation

As a result, the researchers worry that even if the US Fish and Wildlife Service successfully manages to get the ship out of the water, the corallimorph crusade may continue owing to sheer power of numbers. If this happens, chemical sterilisation of the area may be the only option to rescue the reef, says Work.

Jason Hall-Spencer at the University of Plymouth, UK, says that while the correlation between the shipwreck and the spread of the corallimorphs is convincing, this may have nothing to do with iron leaching from the ship. The wreck might have killed off competitors of this species when it hit the reef, and allowing the corallimorphs to spread, he says.

But Hall-Spencer agrees that conservationists should look out for the effects of shipwrecks elsewhere: "If something like this wrecks the balance of an ecosystem once, it's likely to happen again."

Journal reference: PLoS ONE (DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0002989)

08/20/2008: Shipwrecks on coral reefs harbor unwanted species, Eureka Alert

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Shipwrecks on coral reefs may increase invasion of unwanted species, according to a recent U.S. Geological Survey study. These unwanted species can completely overtake the reef and eliminate all the native coral, dramatically decreasing the diversity of marine organisms on the reef. This study documents for the first time that a rapid change in the dominant biota on a coral reef is unambiguously associated with man-made structures.

The findings of the study, published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, suggest that removal of these structures sooner rather than later is key to keeping reefs healthy.

In many areas of the world, coral reef health is declining, but identifying the exact cause of the problem is difficult. Overgrowth of coral reefs by other species, such as algae, are usually attributed to environmental degradation, but bleaching, disease, damage by typhoons, overfishing, coastal development, pollution, and tourism can cause problems as well.

The study was conducted at Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the central Pacific, a relatively remote, comparatively pristine area where little human activity has occurred since WWII. In 1991, a 100-foot vessel shipwrecked on the atoll. Scientists first surveyed the area in 2004 and found a species called Rhodactis howesii an organism related to sea anemones and coralsin low abundance around the wreck. In subsequent years, however, populations of this organism increased exponentially. Scientists documented extremely high densities of R. howesii that progressively decreased with distance from the ship, whereas R. howesii were rare to absent in other parts of the atoll. They also confirmed high densities of R. howesii around several buoys.

Whether this phenomenon occurs on other coral atolls is unknown; however, in the case of Palmyra, the R. howesii infestation is beginning to reach catastrophic proportions, according to Dr. Thierry Work, the lead author of the study and a scientist at the USGS National Wildlife Health Center, Honolulu Field Station. Within a few years, R. howesii spread to where it now occupies nearly 1 square mile.

"Why this phenomenon is occurring remains a mystery," said Work. One possibility, he said, is that iron leaching from the ship and mooring buoy chains, accompanied with other environmental factors particular to Palmyra atoll, are somehow promoting the growth of Rhodactis.

"Given the ability of Rhodactis sp. to rapidly reproduce and completely smother reefs, managers are now facing the possibility that even with removal of the ship, sheer reproductive capacity of R. howesii may continue to fuel its spread along the western reef shelf of Palmyra," Work said.

Understanding what constitutes a healthy underwater ecosystem, as well as what does not, is crucial to preventing further losses in species and habitat. This research illustrates a little-known problem that, unlike global warming and pollution, could be prevented by removing man-made debris such as shipwrecks from coral reefs before organisms like Rhodactis howesii can overtake healthy coral reefs.

08/20/2008: Shipwrecks Wreak Havoc on Coral Reefs, Science

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Shipwrecks Wreak Havoc on Coral Reefs

By Phil Berardelli

ScienceNOW Daily News

20 August 2008

Warming seas and ocean acidification aren't the only hazards facing the world's coral reefs. A new study suggests that the communities can be thrown quickly and seriously out of balance by the iron from sunken ships. Scientists hope the findings will encourage the prompt removal of derelicts before they can damage the fragile ecosystems.

The problem with shipwrecks appears to be a particularly aggressive reef-dwelling creature called Rhodactis howesii, a type of sea anemone. When nutrients are abundant and there are no predators, R. howesii thrives. Unfortunately, it also eats coral, threatening the foundation of the ecosystem.

Several previous studies have linked shipwrecks and reef degradation, but researchers in Hawaii decided to measure the effect in detail. They surveyed a coral reef off Palmyra, an isolated atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There they found high densities of R. howesii near a longline fishing boat that sank in 1991. Those densities steadily declined with distance from the wreck; and within about 100 meters, they dropped to zero--with a few exceptions. The exceptions, the team reports today in PLoS ONE, involve navigation buoys installed on the atoll in 2001.

Because Palmyra is so isolated, the team concludes, there's no chance the R. howesii population could be spurred by runoff from agricultural or industrial activities that provide its usual sources of nutrients. Instead, the data show, the R. howesii colonies seem to have radiated out from the hull; the iron dissolved in seawater appears to be their source of nourishment. So the longer the source of iron persists, the farther the anemones can spread, until they completely consume the coral and effectively kill the reef, the team concludes.

The research "is an excellent account of the long-term ecological harm resulting from vessel groundings on coral reef ecosystems," says marine biologist William Precht of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary in Key Largo. It underscores the need to remove wrecks from coral reefs quickly, he says.

08/17/2008: Rare ducks found dead on Midway Atoll, Honolulu Star-Bulletin

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Wildlife officials are investigating the deaths of more than 100 endangered Laysan ducks at Midway Atoll in the Papahanaumokuakea National Wildlife Monument.

The first dead duck was discovered on Aug. 10 and as of yesterday 106 adult and adolescent bird carcasses were found, according to a news release from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

No definitive cause has been identified, but officials suspect avian botulism.

"Although we suspect avian botulism, we will not have a confirmed diagnosis" until this week, Matt Brown, acting refuge manager at Midway, said in a news release.

A number of duck carcasses were shipped to the National Wildlife Health Center Honolulu Field Station for further analysis yesterday. Samples will also be sent to the National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin to confirm whether avian botulism is a cause of the die-off.

Wildlife officials have added large amounts of fresh water to the areas where the dead birds were found to reduce water stagnation. The carcasses are also being collected and burned to reduce further spread of potential disease.

Avian botulism is caused by a bacteria that produces a toxin when certain conditions, such as stagnant water, warm temperatures and decaying vegetation, are present.

Birds are infected with the disease when they eat toxin-laden invertebrates. While the invertebrates are immune to the toxin, botulism affects the birds, paralyzing their voluntary muscles and leading to drowning or asphyxiation.

The disease is not a threat to humans.

The Laysan duck population at Midway was estimated at 200 birds in December, but has since nearly doubled after a successful fledging.

The remaining population on Laysan Island is about 600 ducks.

"We are naturally upset by this loss which further underscores the need to have Laysan ducks at more than one location in the Hawaiian Islands," Brown said. "We sincerely hope we have seen the worst of this outbreak, and that our Midway population of Laysan ducks will rebound quickly."

The endangered Laysan duck is considered the rarest native waterfowl in the United States and lives only within the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands' Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument.

08/15/2008: Presentation planned on parasites and duck loss, The Daily Journal - Int'l Falls, MN

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August 15, 2008 - 11:10am Journal Staff

The Bemidji Area Natural Resources Continuing Education Consortium is presenting Scaup, Coots and Parasites on Winnie, a natural resources presentation scheduled for 3-4 p.m. Aug. 18 at the Bemidji State University Center for Research and Innovation, 3801 Bemidji Ave. N.

The presentation by Jeff Lawrence, of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, is free and open to the public.

Last fall, there was a loss of about 7,000 diving ducks, Lesser scaup and a few hundred coots on Lake Winnibigoshish in north central Minnesota. Dead ducks were sent to the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., and they indicated that the losses were caused by trematodes, a small parasite the ducks picked up while feeding on snails. The DNR monitored the losses.

Lawrence will discuss the life cycle of this parasite, implications and outlook for host snails and parasites in north central Minnesota and elsewhere, and further investigations this summer on distribution and abundance of the snails. The DNR is looking for help from hunters, fishermen, and others outdoors to monitor potential losses this fall.

The presentation is part of an on-going series of CRI presentations, offered on the third Monday of each month. Agencies helping organize the natural resources consortium include the DNR, the Chippewa National Forest, the Leech Lake Division of Resource Management, Ainsworth and the Red Lake Reservation.

08/15/2008: Birds that died on Minn. lakes test positive for Newcastle disease, KAAL TV.com

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Over 700 birds found dead on 2 Minn. lakes 7.22

The National Veterinary Services Laboratory has found that several wild water birds from two Minnesota lakes have tested positive for the virulent form of Newcastle disease.

This strain of virus can be highly contagious among double-crested cormorants, according to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. There is little threat to humans from the disease.

The birds that tested positive were from Minnesota Lake in Faribault County, Pigeon Lake in Meeker County, and Lake Kabetogama in Voyageurs National Park, according to the DNR.

The agency is working closely on this issue with the Minnesota Board of Animal Health, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture and the Minnesota Department of Health. The agency is also collaborating with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Wildlife Health Center, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Service and the National Park Service, and alerting surrounding states and provinces to the lab results.

"Newcastle rarely affects humans, generally causing conjunctivitis, a relatively mild inflammation of the inner eyelids. It is spread to humans by close contact with sick birds," explained state health veterinarian Joni Scheftel.

Since first discovered in July, the DNR reported that more than 900 double-crested cormorants, with smaller numbers of American white pelicans and other water birds were discovered dead or dying at Minnesota Lake and Pigeon Lake. Since then, DNR staff has found dead or dying birds on the other lakes including Angle Island on Lake of the Woods, Marsh Lake, and Lake Mille Lacs. Lab tests on these birds are pending and could take weeks.

Although poultry can catch the disease from wild birds, BAH reports that farm biosecurity measures help ensure that such a possibility is highly unlikely.

If birds show signs of illness, producers should contact their own veterinarians or the Board of Animal Health at (320) 231-5170.

08/10/2008: Outbreak of avian botulism? Dead fish, birds point to presence of disease; zebra mussels blamed, GoErie.com

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Outbreak of avian botulism?

Dead fish, birds point to presence of disease; zebra mussels blamed

BY ROBB FREDERICK

robb.frederick@timesnews.com more details

Local biologists are bracing for an outbreak of avian botulism, a paralytic disease that kills about 10,000 Great Lakes shorebirds every summer.

The conditions are right. Warm temperatures, changing lake levels and decaying vegetation stir up common bacterial spores. Toxins form, and dead fish wash up on the shore.

"It hits pretty hard," said Nathan Ramsay, a wildlife disease technician at the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis. "And it's starting again."

Dead fish indicate the first wave of an outbreak. Recent sweeps of local beaches -- including Shades Beach in Harborcreek and parts of Presque Isle State Park -- have turned up infected sheepshead and catfish.

Bird deaths represent the second wave. There is evidence of that at Sleeping Bear Dunes, a national park on Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

Two strains of botulism are common in the Great Lakes. Both appeared first in Lake Michigan.

Type C botulism was identified in 1936. Type E appeared in 1963. That strain has killed more than 75,000 birds since a spike in the 1990s.

Scientists blame the zebra mussel. Mussels have helped clear the Great Lakes, making the water warmer and allowing more cladophora algae to form. When the algae dies, it releases the botulism toxin.

Zebra and quagga mussels filter the toxin. They are eaten by sheepshead and round gobies, which die.

The fish, in turn, are eaten by gulls, loons, geese and grebes, which also die. Their carcasses produce even more of the toxin.

"It's a vicious cycle," said Eric Obert, the extension director for Pennsylvania Sea Grant, a partnership of the commonwealth, Penn State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "And we're seeing the start of it, with fish washing up."

The next step is especially unpleasant. Shorebirds pick at the dead fish. The ingested toxin attacks the birds' voluntary muscle systems. After that, the birds can't fly.

The paralysis spreads to the eye and neck. That explains an early name for the disease: Limberneck.

The birds no longer can hold their heads up as they float. They drown.

No smoking gun

Infected animals usually die quickly. That limits the risk to humans, who are more likely to get botulism from food that was not canned properly.

"If you catch a fish and it fights on the way in, there's a 99.9 percent chance it's a good fish," Obert said.

Birds die within hours. But there's no smoking gun: Once an animal is dead, the botulism toxin is always in it.

"It's a fast-acting toxin," said David Blehert, the principle microbiologist at the National Wildlife Health Center. "But it's a bit of a mystery, exactly where the birds pick it up. It could be miles from where we find the carcasses."

His answer for that is to plant decoy carcasses, and to track what happens to them over 24 or 48 hours. That could explain how the disease spreads to other bird species.

The project has not yet started. Blehert doesn't have the funding for it.

Local biologists have their own plan. They're watching for lake sturgeon, the largest of Lake Erie's 120 native species. The fish -- bony-plated, olive-gray bottom-feeders -- grow to 7 feet. They eat, among other things, mussels and algae.

The sturgeon is something of a mystery: a once-common fish that is now listed as an endangered species. Some live 100 years.

"They're out there somewhere," said Jeanette Schnars, the director of the Regional Science Consortium. "We just don't see them come up in the nets."

Sturgeon are more likely to wash up on the beach. Field researchers found dead fish in North East in 2000, 2001 and 2007. The first weighed 80 pounds.

A dead sturgeon is worth something. Genetic testing could help determine where the fish live: One strain spawns near the St. Lawrence River, which forms part of New York's northern border. Another spawns in the Maumee River in northern Ohio.

That data could help biologists draw up a species management plan for sturgeon. And that would be a rare benefit of a botulism outbreak.

"Stranger things have happened," said Bob Wellington, a biologist who retired from the Erie County Department of Health. "And we'd be doing the right thing. We'd be putting back something that has been here for thousands of years. And that's a lot better than throwing up our hands and saying, 'What can we do?'"

ROBB FREDERICK can be reached at 870-1733 or by e-mail.

Found A Sturgeon?

If you think you've found a lake sturgeon -- a long, bony-plated fish with chin barbells and a sucker-like mouth -- do not attempt to move it. Call Pennsylvania Sea Grant at 217-9015. The program is one of several now watching for sturgeon that wash up because of avian botulism.

07/28/2008: The mysterious death of bats has continued this summer, but researchers are closing in on a cause, Boston Globe

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The mysterious death of bats has continued this summer, but researchers are closing in on a cause

Email|Print|Single Page| Text size + By Beth Daley

Globe Staff / July 28, 2008

After a series of provocative discoveries in recent months, scientists believe bats in the Northeast might be in greater peril from a mysterious sickness than originally thought.

Researchers now think that a fuzzy white fungus found on thousands of dead and dying bats in New England and New York last winter might be the primary cause of the illness. Scientists have learned that the unidentified fungus seems to thrive in the cold temperatures found in caves and mines in winter - when bats are hibernating and most vulnerable.

As worrisome is that many bats continued to die this spring, dashing hopes that they would recuperate when they emerged from hibernation and resumed feeding. Hundreds of animals with scarred wings, both dead and alive, were discovered in Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire through June. The wing damage can kill bats and likely was caused by the fungus, researchers say.

Biologists are also growing increasingly concerned that the fungus may be spreading to tens of thousands of healthy bats as the animals huddle together while sleeping in their summer roosts.

Humans are not believed to be at risk from the illness, but a large die-off would likely affect people indirectly. The nocturnal mammals eat enormous amounts of crop-infesting and human-biting insects, and scientists say they know so little about bats that their ecological importance may become apparent only once they disappear.

"We could be at the beginning of something much uglier," said Paul Cryan, a bat specialist with the United States Geological Survey in Colorado. He said researchers are beginning to realize that even if they identify a definite cause, it may be too late for thousands of bats. "What do we do then? We are thinking ahead to the spread of it."

The disease was first seen two winters ago, when thousands of bats died in four New York caves within seven miles of each other. Many of the bats had an unusual white fungus on their bodies. By last winter, 25 caves and mines spread across 135 miles were found to have sick or dying bats in Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, and New York. Pennsylvania bats may also be affected.

Scientists originally dubbed the sickness "white nose syndrome" because of the fungus but believed it to be a secondary problem, one that grew on the bats when they were weakened by something else. That's because fungi are rarely fatal by themselves.

But a meticulous search for another pathogen using cutting edge technology has come up short. While researchers say they are not ruling out other causes, such as something in the environment, a recent discovery that the fungus grows best in cold temperatures is training their attention back to it.

Bats' immune systems appear to shut down when they are in deep hibernation, likely to conserve energy and because the parasites, bacteria, and viruses that would attack them are not normally active in the cold either. If a fungus exists in the caves that thrives in cold conditions, it could overtake the bats before their immune system has a chance to respond.

Scientists' hypothesize that the bats could be waking up in the winter from the fungus - either to jumpstart their immune systems or simply to groom themselves. Under either scenario, the bats would burn up enormous amounts of fat reserves they need to survive the winter. That may be why so many skinny bats were seen dying on cave floors this past winter or flying into and out of mines in a futile search for food.

"The attention has narrowed and focused on the fungus," said Vishnu Chaturvedi, director of the Mycology Laboratory at the New York State Department of Health and part of a team that discovered the cold-loving fungus. He said it will take time before scientists know for sure what is going on - and longer to find a solution - but "we're getting a number of clues."

Some scientists are growing discouraged that they will find the answers in time. Some caves struck hard by the illness have lost 97 percent of their bat populations. A bat researcher monitoring a summer roost in New Hampshire estimates that about 25 percent of his colony is gone, likely from the bat sickness.

Worries intensified this spring when researchers discovered bats with inflexible, scarred wings, likely from the fungus. Wings make up more than 75 percent of a bat's surface area and are critical for flying as well as for blood flow and to enable the animals to exchange heat, gas, and water with the air. If the wings are too damaged, the animal can die.

"We thought if they made it through the winter they would be good to go, but that does not appear to be the case," said Jon Reichard, a Boston University graduate student who is monitoring two summer bat roosts in Massachusetts and New Hampshire where he has found hundreds of bats with damaged wings.

Scientists are beginning to study whether bats might be harboring dormant fungal spores in summer roosts, increasing the risk of transmission.

This is a frightening scenario: Bats migrate as far as 250 miles from their winter hibernating sites to their summer roosts, where they mix with bats from other far-off caves and mines. In the fall, they will travel back to their hibernation sites to mingle and mate with still other bats. If new bats are infected, the fungus could begin to grow on them as soon as temperatures dip low enough.

"This condition represents a grave threat to (bats in) the northeastern US," said David Blehert, director of diagnostic microbiology at the US Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin.

07/20/2008: White-nose syndrome plagues bat population in Northeast, The News Times

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White-nose syndrome plagues bat population in Northeast

By Robert Miller

Staff Writer

Article Last Updated: 07/20/2008 07:10:36 AM EDT

RIDGEFIELD -- Small, sharp-toothed and fiercely unhappy about his situation, the big brown bat did not rest easily in Geoff Krukar's hands Wednesday.

"I always wear gloves," Krukar said, watching the bat try to nip his fingers.

Unlike the bat, Krukar was in good spirits as the night settled into the woods. It was breezeless and clear -- good conditions for bats to be on the move.

"There are fireflies out," he said. "I don't know why, but it seems like the nights when there are fireflies out there are bats."

For the past 10 years, Krukar, a wildlife technician for the state Department of Environmental Protection, has spent summer nights studying the state's bat population, catching them in mist nets, checking their numbers and health, banding them and releasing them back into the wild.

He's on a special mission this year, looking for a rare species, the Indiana bat, at Bennett's Pond State Park in Ridgefield and Collis P. Huntington State Park in Redding.

But his efforts have been altered by the onset of a confounding disease, white-nose syndrome, which has killed hundreds of thousands of bats in the caves where they hibernate in winter. The first ominous signs of the disease turned up in Connecticut bats this winter.

"What was found was what was in New York a few years ago," said Jennie Dickson, a DEP wildlife biologist. "We're probably in the early stages."

Indiana bats -- already on the federal and state endangered species list -- are one of the species the syndrome is killing.

So along with looking for the Indiana bat in particular and recording bat numbers in general, Krukar is also on the lookout for any signs of white-nose syndrome.

"We wanted some specific information on the Indiana bat with this research," Dickson said. "But absolutely, the syndrome has complicated it. We're looking at the weight of the bats, their health, their reproductive status."

It's hard to get a handle on bat numbers in the state this year. Dickson said factors like the weather can alter the number of bats out on a particular night. So can owls, whose hooting may cue bats to scatter rather than be prey.

But Dickson said the bats Krukar is catching this year are healthy -- with good weight, healthy wings and pregnant females.

"If there's a bright spot, it's that," Dickson said.

White-nose syndrome is a new disease and 90 percent fatal. Wildlife biologists have found it in four states -- Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Vermont-- with bats in New York hit hardest.

There have been unconfirmed reports of the disease in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Right now biologists don't know what's causing bats to die in such alarming numbers.

What they have found is bats that are severely underweight and dehydrated in their hibernaculums -- the caves and mine shafts where they spend their winters. Some have left their winter quarters looking for food too early, when there are no flying insects out, using up their body's scant reserves of energy to search for food that doesn't exist.

"There was one report of a bat found trying to eat snow to get some water because it was so deyhydrated," Dickson said. "When we heard that, we were amazed. It's so atypical of bats."

The "white-nose" part of the syndrome comes from a white fungus growing on the bats' nose. Fungal infections have also damaged bats' wings, scarring the tissue.

But David Blehert, a microbiologist with the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis. -- part of the United States Geological Survey -- said that generally, fungal disease are opportunistic infections that crop up when an organism is too weak to fight them off.

"They're usually not fatal," he said. "Athlete's foot is a fungal disease."

So Blehert said researchers believe something else is sickening the bats. In their weakened state, the white fungus sets in.

Along with not knowing what's causing the disease, biologists also don't know whether bat colonies will rebound.

"We've seen it in the winter of 2006-07 and the winter of 2007-08," Blehert said. "We don't know what will happen in the winter of 2008-09."

The outbreak of the syndrome has crossed path with Krukar's study of Indiana bats.

The DEP wants to learn whether these rare bats -- which closely resemble the little brown bat, one of the most common species in Connecticut -- are flying east from their winter quarters in New York to spend their summers in Connecticut.

Records indicate Indiana bats were found in the state in the 1990s. Field biologists found one hibernating with other bats.

Krukar said New York researchers track Indiana bats flying to the Connecticut border.

"If you drew a straight line from their hibernaculum to where they've been seen in the summer in New York, and then extended it across the state line, the line heads straight to Danbury," he said.

Krukar chose his mist netting sites in Ridgefield and Redding because the woods there best resemble the spots where wildlife biologists find Indiana bats in New York.

At Bennett's Pond State Park, he used an old road leading to a pond as a sort of natural bat corridor. With help from DEP wildlife technician Laura Saucier, he spaced out his mist nets strategically at points where bats might fly.

"They'll come out of the trees where they roost and fly down to the pond at night for a drink," he said.

Bats have good vision, contrary to popular belief, but they also navigate by echolocation, a sort of built-in sonar system.

They call out in a series of high-pitched chirps -- too high for people to hear -- bouncing the sound off objects and using their acute sense of hearing to pick up the echoes. They use that system to hunt insects on the fly and to avoid flying into things.

By setting his mist nets just below the tree canopy, Krukar uses the bats' ability to fly under the leaves of trees to his advantage. Swerving and dipping to avoid the foliage, they fly into his nets.

"If one gets caught, it'll make a distress call," Krukar said. "Then others fly in out of curiosity."

There are eight bats species in the state, but only two that are really common -- little brown bats and big brown bats. Krukar netted both early in the evening. True to their name, big brown bats are much bigger than their little counterparts.

All bat species come equipped with sharp teeth, the better to crush insects. That also allows them to quickly chew through Krukar's nets. It's also why he wears leather gloves when handling them. He checked every 10 minutes from about 9 p.m. to midnight to see if any bats were entangled in the mesh.

He weighed each catch, checked it size, sex, and age -- bats can live to be 30 years old -- then banded them and let them fly off, so they could once more be the creatures of the night, out of the glare of bright lights.

By the end of the evening he'd netted five bats, including a long-eared bat.

The next night, at Huntington State Park, the count went up to 10 -- nine big brown bats and one silver-haired bat. But his great prize, an Indiana bat, remained at large and unnetted.

The bats he did catch all struggled against his gloved hands fiercely and flew away quickly into the night. That was good to see.

"All the bats we've caught are healthy," he said.

Contact Robert Miller at bmiller@newstimes.com or at (203) 731-3345.

Battered Eight species of bats can be found in Connecticut Little Brown Bat (Myotis lucifugus) Big Brown Bat (Eptesicus fuscus) Eastern Long-eared Bat (Myotis septentrionalis) Eastern Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus subflavus) Silver-haired Bat (Lasionycteris noctivagans) Hoary Bat (Lasiurus cinereus) Red Bat (Lasiurus borealis) Indiana Bat (Myotis sodalis), an endangered species Bats Are the only mammals capable of actual flight. Have good eyesight and rely on vision for long-distance orientation. Are mostly nocturnal. Use echolocation -- their own sonar -- for short-distance navigation and catching food at night. Can detect, pursue and catch an insect in about 1 second using echolocation. Are the only major predators of night-flying insects, and are more efficient at killing mosquitoes than "bug-zappers." A single little brown bat can eat 1,200 mosquitoes in an hour. All the state's bat species are insect eaters. Hoary bats also eats other bats, namely the eastern pipistrelle. Source: The state Department of Environmental Protection

07/19/2008: Researchers urgently probe mystery of dying bats, News Day

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Researchers urgently probe mystery of dying bats

By MICHAEL HILL | Associated Press Writer

July 19, 2008

WEST SAND LAKE, N.Y. - As the sun drops, bats that survived a catastrophic winter begin to flutter by the treetops to feed. Al Hicks gets into a car to count them.

He drives a jury-rigged batmobile, a state-issue SUV with a high-frequency microphone stuck on top. Hicks, a state wildlife biologist, uses it to tally a species in danger of decimation from a mysterious affliction called white-nose syndrome. The setup detects and records bats' sonar signals as they swoop over rural roads near Albany in search of insects. Hicks interprets the sounds from his laptop's speaker as he navigates the darkened curves.

"Did you hear that? 'Zzzzzzzzzzzzz!' That's the feeding buzz. He's closing in on prey," Hicks says. Then the mike picks up another bat. "That's a searching phase, 'Dit, it, dit dit.' He's looking for dinner."

Northeast bat populations were ravaged this year as they hibernated, and Hicks is part of an alliance of scientists urgently trying to get a grip on the disaster before next winter. Researchers are watching the skies, counting bat breaths and cultivating fungus as they try to understand why so many seem to starve as they sleep for the winter.

"We need to figure out what it is. Then we can figure out what to do," said Cal Butchkoski, a wildlife biologist with the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

White nose is named for the sugary smudge of fungus around the nose of some of the emaciated bats. It was noticed two winters ago in a cluster of caves west of Albany. By last year, it spread to dozens of caves within a roughly 150-mile radius that stretched into Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut. Mortality rates differ among the half-dozen affected species, though some caves were all but wiped out. Death tolls cannot be pinpointed, but Bat Conservation International said it could run in the hundreds of thousands.

Some residents around the cluster of caves west of Albany where white nose was first noticed say the summer skies there seem practically bat-free.

White nose seemed to spread out in a circle from cave to carcass-littered cave like a pathogen. The fungus could be the cause, but it also might be an "opportunistic" fungus that shows up when bats are already weakened. Bats might be heading into hibernation with not enough fat, which could be related to fewer moths and other insects around for bats to gorge on in the fall. That means insecticides or climate change could be playing an indirect role.

"There's a cascade effect that might be operating here, though we don't really have a good handle on it," said Thomas Kunz, director of the Center for Ecology and Conservation at Boston University. "This caught us all by surprise."

Bat researchers met for a white-nose summit in Albany this summer to come up with unified plans. One thing they want to know is if the dead bats were underweight when they started to hibernate. So bats will be caught this fall and their fat stores will be analyzed. Researchers have already caught bats in New York this summer and placed them in airtight chambers as a way of testing their metabolism. Microbiologist David Blehert of the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., said progress is being made on identifying the fungus, a crucial step to fighting white nose.

In upstate New York, Hicks and two other New York Department of Environmental Conservation researchers spend some nights driving loops around rural roads. It's a clever way to count an airborne species that comes out in the dark.

A rough-carpentered wood box holds the mike upright as Hicks drives at 17 to 20 miles per hour _ or just slightly faster than a bat can fly. As cars constantly pass him by, Hicks picks up the sonic signatures of dozens of bats over several hours. Bat screeches are represented on the laptop screen as little blue streaks on a graph. Hicks can tell which species is overhead by looking at the graph. Quiet stretches are punctuated by quite a few big brown bats and an occasional surprise.

"Holy cow!" Hicks says, glancing at the screen. "We might have had a silver-haired bat!"

By driving predetermined routes at the same time of night, Hicks and his colleagues are building baseline population estimates. Find an average of six big brown bats over a particular stretch of road this year and two the next year, it could indicate a population drop.

As they collect data, Hicks and the other researchers around the country are constantly in touch. In Wisconsin, Blehert said white-nose researchers have been making "good progress." But even if researchers key in on a culprit this summer, signs point to another rough winter. Identifying the cause of the problem does not mean they can stop it.

Butchkoski in Pennsylvania said he expects white nose to spread to his state this winter. Hicks does too. On a recent night patrol, Hicks waves off a suggestion that the worst is over for bats. He begins listing other dead and devastated species _ the passenger pigeon, the American chestnut _ as he drives down a dark road, listening for signs of life.

On the Net:

http://www.fws.gov/northeast/white_nose.html

http://www.batcon.org

07/07/2008: Northeast bat population is in its own hell, USA Today

(Link to the original article)

Northeast bat population is in its own hell

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

The deaths started in a few caves, with hibernating bats dying in place and falling in charnel heaps to the floor. Others, emaciated and starving, fled their roosts to freeze in the chill of winter.

Deepening the mystery: The dead and dying bats had a white fungus on their faces, giving the name "white-nose syndrome" to a plague killing thousands of bats in five Northeastern states.

"Our guys went in and reported thousands of dead bats," says Alan Hicks of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. "Immediately it was clear this was very bad."

Perhaps 11,000 bats eventually died in four nearby caves in 2007; tens of thousands died this past winter in five states, and the deaths continue.

The true death toll could be even higher, says biologist Susi von Oettingen of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service office in Concord N.H., because more bats may have died in uncharted cave roosts.

The die-off triggered a nationwide call last year to find an answer to what was killing the bats. But so far the syndrome remains a riddle. The only clue to its origin Hicks and his colleagues possess is a photo taken by a curious cave explorer of a single afflicted bat inside a cave west of Albany in 2006.

Conservation officials have asked cave explorers to report signs of afflicted bats, but have also asked them not to travel from affected caves to cleared ones, to prevent the transmission of disease.

Not species-specific

All six species of cave-hibernating bats in the Northeast Eastern pipistrelle, little brown, northern long-eared, small-footed, Indiana and big brown bats have been killed by the syndrome. All are nocturnal insect-eating mammals that hibernate during winter months in caves and mines, burning body fat slowly to stay just barely warmer than cave temperatures and waking only occasionally.

Yet, says Scott Darling of the Vermont Department of Fish & Wildlife, "during the daytime in March and April, residents would see them flopping around on the ground."

During hibernation, the bats have a lowered immune response, perhaps making them more vulnerable to some new, cold-tolerant germs, says biologist Jacques Veilleux of Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, N.H. The species that cluster most tightly together, little brown bats and endangered Indiana bats, are the ones most heavily affected, with 90% dying in some caves.

But necropsies of dead bats have not narrowed the fungus down to any one species, or signs of any particular disease common to them all, Veilleux says.

At a white-nose syndrome meeting in Albany last month, government, academic and non-profit researchers discussed potential causes, including a fungus-related disease, a new parasite or environmental disturbances from farming or development.

Fungal growth is usually retarded at the temperature inside winter caves, about 40 degrees, says biologist David Blehert of the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., but the white fungus afflicting the bats may be able to thrive at the low temperature and prey on the hibernating bats when they are vulnerable.

On the other hand, the fungus simply may be an opportunistic infection that strikes bats weakened by some other cause. Parasites fleas, mites and lice have been found on affected bats, but not any more than usual.

"The questions we are trying to answer are the same ones we'd face in a human epidemic," Veilleux says. "We are right smack in the beginning of the investigation."

One question is whether migrating tree bats, which come north during the summer, are affected. Researchers are collecting bats killed by wind turbines to look for white fungus, Hicks says.

The public feel sympathy

For creatures with as bad an image as bats, the public response to their disappearance has been heartening, Darling says. "I've gotten a lot of calls from residents worried about their bats."

Girl Scout groups have even sewn up collecting bags for some bat researchers, Veilleux says.

Some surveys of summer bat colonies are underway, but the big effort will come this fall, Hicks says, when researchers will try to determine whether bats are arriving in caves already emaciated, or if something is rousting them during the time they should be hibernating, causing the burn-off of fat stores.

"The trend is just really bad," he says. "You go to a cave where you saw thousands of bats, now you see hundreds. If you see only a handful next year, then you are looking at their disappearance."

07/06/2008: ,

(Link to the original article)

A Race To Solve White-Nose Syndrome Fatal To Bats

By RINKER BUCK | Courant Staff Writer

BURLINGTON - The remote hardwood forests of the 450-acre Sessions Woods Wildlife Management Area are surprisingly busy on summer nights, with caravans of mountain bikers and joggers gliding past the beaver ponds until dusk.

But one recent weekday night, the group setting up their nets and high-frequency acoustical receivers near a large swamp in Sessions Woods didn't have recreation in mind. Jenny Dickson, Geoff Krukar and Christina Kocer are wildlife biologists with the state Department of Environmental Protection, the front line of the Connecticut team involved in a massive national effort to solve one of today's most urgent natural mysteries: What's killing our bats?

In early spring of 2007, wildlife biologists in the Northeast began observing alarming behavior in bats, the only flying mammal and one vital to ecology because adult bats can consume more than 4,000 mosquitoes a night. Emaciated and confused bats were prematurely leaving their winter caves in New York state and Vermont and falling into snowy backyards or desperately clinging to storm windows.

The condition was dubbed "white-nose syndrome" for the telltale white fungus coating the bats' noses, legs and wings. Massive numbers of bats with white-nose syndrome have died over the past two winters.

The clearly starved animals, their fat reserves depleted, woke and flew out of their hibernation caves in search of food months before the annual spring hatches had produced insects for them to eat. The bat plague reached the Berkshires last winter, and Dickson and her team confirmed the presence of the syndrome in a Litchfield County hibernaculum, or bat cave, in March.

Now, as biologists and pathologists from Massachusetts to Wisconsin scramble to identify the causes of white-nose, and prevent it from spreading to other states, Dickson and her colleagues are one of several biological SWAT teams fanning out across the Northeast and Midwest.

Venturing into the woods to catch bats several nights a week the team is also sampling bats in Huntington State Park in Redding and Bennett's Pond Park in Ridgefield the Connecticut team isn't looking only for the presence of white-nose syndrome. Before the outbreak, bats had not been studied in depth, and the Sessions Woods biologists are generating baseline data that will help scientists determine just what is, and is not, a healthy bat.

'It's In The Net!'

The DEP crew began an hour before dusk, driving deep into the prime bat country of Sessions Woods in four-wheel-drive trucks. They stretched large, black, thin-mesh "mist nets" between two metal poles, gently snaring the bats out of the sky without injuring them.

While he waited on a portable chair for the sun to set, Krukar tested and tuned his "Anabat" detector, a sensitive audio receiver that picks up the high-frequency calls bats emit as part of their echo-location guidance system.

"We try to set up along clear corridors in the woods where the bats fly from their daytime maternal roosting sites, where dozens of female bats are raising their young, and the moist or watery feeding areas that produce a lot of insects, where the bats forage at night," Krukar said.

Just after dark, as a chorus of tree frogs and toads croaked from the swamp, and barred owls hooted in the distance, Krukar's bat detector sounded with a steady clicking. He aimed the instrument overhead to follow the invisible flight path of a bat.

"Oh, there goes one right now," Krukar said. "And ... it's in the net!"

The three biologists ran south on the cleared trail to their net, donning helmets with headlamps and pulling on one glove. The gloved hand holds the bat steady while the other is free to untangle the net from the bat's wings.

The night's first catch a big brown bat screeched and snapped its teeth as Dickson and Krukar gently freed it from the net. Krukar cradled it in his gloved hand as he walked back to the tailgate of his pickup, where a portable field station had been set up.

With a metal slide-caliper, Krukar measured the forearm of the bat to determine its maturity and weighed it on a tiny digital scale by cupping the bat inside a toilet paper tube taped on one end. The bats are then carefully examined for their overall health and signs of disease. Nursing females are identified by their enlarged breast nipples. All of these data are recorded on field sheets, which will be transferred to computer databases.

Before they are released, the bats are also marked with a tiny, lightweight wing band that will allow biologists to track their movements in the same way bird species are followed by banding.

"All of the bats we have caught so far this year are healthy, with no signs of white-nose syndrome," Dickson said. "But we are actually learning quite a lot out here that will pay off over time. For example, one characteristic of white-nose is that these bats coming out of hibernation have extremely low weights, which would probably prevent a female from sustaining a pregnancy. But the weights of our lactating females are quite good so far. That might be showing us that, after they survive the near-starvation phase in their winter caves, many of these bats quickly recover by finding enough insects to eat and can bear young."

The picture is not as favorable in bat-rich southwestern Vermont an estimated 23,000 bats winter in just one cave near Dorset which experienced high mortality rates from white-nose last winter.

"This spring, we were under the assumption that as soon as bats left their caves and found enough insects to eat, they would return to good health," said Scott Darling, the wildlife biologist heading up the white-nose efforts for the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. "That assumption was wrong. Even now that it's summer, we are still getting reports of bats dying on front lawns and hanging to window screens.

"And the wings of the bats we are examining show significant scarring, tears, holes in the wings and crinkling from dehydration. The assumption is that this is dead tissue that couldn't heal after being coated with the white fungus."

Theories

Dehydration or consumption of pesticides may be causes of the syndrome. And Darling points out that white-nose was detected in New York state and Vermont bats a whole winter before the condition was confirmed in Connecticut. This leads to one theory with ominous overtones for Connecticut's bats.

"I am speculating here, but it's possible that our bats are in the second year of this condition while Connecticut is just a first-year place for white-nose," Darling said. "So you're not seeing any wing scarring there yet, while Vermont seems to have been hit very hard."

Dickson believes that Darling's hypothesis is reasonable. The advantage of regular conference calls and a lot of information-sharing between states, she said, is that theories like Darling's can be shared and tested by others, allowing one state to prepare for what a neighboring state has already experienced.

"There are probably some very sound scientific explanations behind the different results we are finding in Connecticut and Vermont," Dickson said. "Vermont may very well be one year ahead of us with this condition. Our data right now, for example, is consistent with what New York state found after only one year. So we may very well be experiencing the milder one-year impacts, while New York and Vermont are in year two."

A Race

In early June, scientists and biologists from 14 states, eight universities, federal agencies and Canadian wildlife officials met in Albany, N.Y., for a three-day conference on white-nose. The meeting produced several agreements to share databases on bats and to form smaller working groups. These will be devoted to such vital study areas as summer feeding and health, possible surveys of the massive "fall swarm" gatherings of bats before they hibernate, identifying likely pathogens affecting bats and factors that could be affecting winter hibernation.

The conference also established procedures for scientists from different states and universities to conduct regular calls to share information. Wildlife officials from Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Wisconsin, where white-nose has not appeared yet, agreed to conduct summer studies of bats that would establish control information about what a healthy population should look like.

Joint studies like these are considered vital because bats can travel 150 miles or more across state borders each year, wintering in the huge bat caves of the Hudson River Valley and then summering in Connecticut or Massachusetts. The mingling of summer and winter communities probably enhances the spread of white-nose.

The bat scientists consider themselves in a race to discover the causes of white-nose before it reaches Canada, the Midwest and the South. Bat die-offs are considered particularly serious because the species reproduces slowly, and a lowering of bat populations could have significant impacts on insect control and agriculture.

A Breakthrough?

While Dickson and her counterparts ply the field, scientists at the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., are conducting the laboratory detective work required to understand what's happening to the Northeast's bats. And, because of a classic laboratory happenstance, they may already have made a breakthrough.

Among the 30 different fungi found on white-nose bat carcasses, said Dr. Anne E. Ballmann of the center, one cold-loving fungus called geomyces has been identified as a "fungi of interest." The scientists became interested in geomyces after a culture of the fungus, left in a refrigerator to be examined later, quickly grew at low temperatures.

This was considered significant because hibernating bats fall into a torpor-like slumber that plunges their body temperatures to 35 degrees.

"This could prove highly useful because a lot of the white-nose bats we examined were found near the entrance to caves, where it's a lot colder than deeper in the cave," Ballmann said. "The bats were burning up more calories being there near the entrance. So, we know that this cold-loving fungus is associated with lesions on bat wings, but we don't really know what the whole relationship is."

Ballmann said that the fungus might be causing enough wing damage to prevent the bats from feeding well in the warmer months. But no "causality" between geomyces and bat health has been established, she said, and there is not yet a "smoking gun" clearly leading to explaining white-nose.

Meanwhile, back at Sessions Woods, the bat-catching continues. Dickson and her team trap and release from 12 to 20 bats on each nocturnal safari, and are looking forward to sharing their data with other states before the fall swarm commences in western New England and eastern New York.

And there's one moment, late at night in the dark woods, that always gives them hope.

"It's very exciting every time we catch a pregnant or lactating bat," Dickson said. "Then we say to ourselves, 'Yeah! White-nose isn't killing all of them. We're getting reproduction this year.' We're in a race to solve this while the bats are still breeding."

Material from the Associated Press was used in this article. Senior Information Specialist Cristina Bachetti contributed research.

Contact Rinker Buck at rbuck@courant.com.

For a video of the biologists tracking bats, visit www.courant. com/bats.

06/25/2008: A user's guide to the NBII Wildlife Disease Information Node, The Wildlife Society

(Link to the original article)

The Wildlife Professional

Article: pp. 4143 | PDF (273K)

Desktop Diagnosis

A user's guide to the Nbii Wildlife Disease Information Node

Cris Marsh, MLSa, Erica Schmitzb, and Laura Wynholdsb

a Cris Marsh is the, Content Manager for the Wildlife Disease, Information Node

b NBII Wildlife Disease Information Node

DOI: 10.2193/1933-2866(2008)241:DD2.0.CO;2

Cris Marsh

Erica Schmitz

Laura Wynholds

When elk mysteriously weaken and die or waterfowl disappear en masse, wildlife professionals need to act quickly to learn what's happening and why.

Wildlife biologists are increasingly being thrust onto the frontlines of wildlife disease management and surveillance in the United States, write Scott Henke, Alan Fedynich, and Tyler Campbell in Frontiers in Wildlife Science 2007. For example, biologists now routinely engage in oral vaccination of wildlife and collect specimens for both diagnostic purposes and disease surveillance or monitoring.

Given the rising demands for hands-on involvement with disease management, wildlife biologists increasingly need to access and, more important, collaborate on information about disease outbreaks, diagnoses, causes, distribution, treatments, and monitoring. Collaboration across agencies and disciplines is essential to better understand the drivers of disease events. That's especially true today, when incidents of emerging and re-emerging disease around the globe are on the rise, and public agencies are asking professionals to do more with less. Governments will increasingly realize the need to form cooperative linkages to provide better disease surveillance, sharing of information, and database management, write Henke, Fedynich, and Campbell. Benefits of such cooperation will include advance disease detection, which should aid in control and prevention before agents reach epizootic or panzootic proportions.

Now there's an online resourcethe Wildlife Disease Information Node (WDIN)designed to address these issues and meet the needs of wildlife disease professionals. Based at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Wildlife Health Center and supported in part by the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin (both in Madison), WDIN is part of the USGS National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII), an electronic network that provides access to data and information on biological resources in the United States and abroad. NBII uses a node- based structure that is being developed to ensure broad partnerships and information-sharing from all sectors of society. Some nodes are regional while others are thematic, focused on a particular biological issue. Launched in 2004, WDIN is one of several thematic nodes and serves as a centralized gateway providing timely, free, comprehensive, and easily searchable information about wildlife diseases worldwide.

The Winter 2007 issue of The Wildlife Professional reported on how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides electronic databases that can help wildlife professionals learn about and protect themselves against zoonoses and other infectious diseases encountered in the field or lab. Expanding on this principle, WDIN, through collaboration with several public and private partners, serves as a gateway for information specifically about wildlife diseases as well as their implications for domestic animals and human populations. It also provides extensive tools and linksto web resources, scientific articles, fact sheets, breaking news, images, maps, datasets, and discussion forumsthat aid in data collection and sharing among wildlife professionals.

Although the need for such tools has never been more acute, concern about disease has a long history. As Aldo Leopold wrote in his pioneering text, Game Management 1933, The role of disease in wildlife conservation has probably been radically underestimated. Today, the importance of this role is apparent. As wildlife habitat has decreased, animal densities and human-wildlife interactions have risen, making disease a potentially greater threat to both animals and people. Diseases are also spreading rapidly, and crossing substantial international and natural boundaries. And the sources of disease informationin print and online have proliferated, making the task of monitoring new developments much more difficult.

Launched in late 2007, WDIN's Global Wildlife Disease News Map links news about wildlife disease detection and spread to specific spots on the map, where colors indicate distinct geographic units such as countries (yellow) or counties (green). WDIN staff updates news items frequently, enabling wildlife professionals to track disease trends.

WDIN makes that task manageableand wildlife biologist Bryan Richards, for one, appreciates the help. As the USGS Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) project leader, Richards needs to stay abreast of CWD and myriad other wildlife health issues. To do so, he subscribes to WDIN's online Wildlife Disease News Digest, a service launched in 2007. WDIN staffers collect and post global wildlife disease news to the site, and subscribers can request daily e-mail alerts or once-a-week summaries. It's very valuable to me, says Richards, who receives the daily news briefs. Otherwise I could never be able to keep track of the multitude of things going on with wildlife health issues, both nationwide and worldwide.

Wildlife professionals who want to quickly learn about disease outbreaks in a specific geographic area can also access WDIN's Global Wildlife Disease News Map, which links news articles to points on the globe. The map allows users to focus on areas of interest, display specific diseases, and retrieve more information about those diseases from other parts of the WDIN website. Earlier this year, for example, a cursor click on Florida described a rabies alert in Broward County, while a click in Canada described the disappearance of ivory gulls on Baffin Island. This virtual world tour of wildlife disease events can help professionals spot trends in the incidence or spread of disease.

As part of its mission to build collaborative dialogue among wildlife professionals, WDIN hosts topical electronic discussion lists. Through the Wildlife Health Informatics Working Group, for example, professionals create systems to collect and monitor wildlife disease data worldwide, collaborating to set standards that will foster current and future data sharing and ensure minimal duplication of effort. The Implanters List serves as a forum about the surgical implantation of radio-transmitters used for tracking wildlife, and the Wildlife Health List describes upcoming events, lists job openings, and provides a place where members can ask questions or solicit advice from colleagues. For those who prefer face-to-face discussion, an Event Calendar displays disease-related meetings and conferences.

WDIN has also partnered with several organizations to create systems that allow for the collection, management, and sharing of crucial wildlife monitoring data. Among them:

The Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Early Detection Data System (HEDDS) provides avian influenza surveillance data on wild birds. This large-scale project offers a secure platform for reports, tables, and maps, and can be used for spatial modeling. Public and private agencies including state fish and game departments, universities, tribal groups, nonprofits, parks, and reservessubmit the data as part of a nationwide effort addressing a mandate of the U.S. Interagency Strategic Plan. It has all the data stored in one location so anyone who's working with the disease knows where to look, says Leslie Dierauf, director of the National Wildlife Health Center. More important, it provides a portal into which the public can look to learn about the disease. This is critical.

In cooperation with the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts, WDIN helped develop the Seabird Ecological Assessment Network (SEANET), a repository for seabird mortality data collected by volunteer citizen scientists. They walk beaches in several East Coast states, including Maine and Florida, recording observations about beached bird species, weather conditions, and unusual events like oil spills. Such data provide a baseline for seabird mortality, helping professionals identify irregularities and build an understanding of long-term patterns. It's enabling us to detect die-off events, like an early warning system, says ecologist Julie Ellis, SEANET program director.

With assistance from WDIN, the Yale University Occupational and Environmental Medicine Program has successfully created what it calls the Canary Database. Wildlife, like canaries in a coal mine, can serve as indicators of environmental hazards to the health of humans and other species. This database of biomedical literature enables wildlife professionals to review animal evidence that may provide early signs of human health hazards.

Expanding its efforts internationally, WDIN is collaborating with the Wildlife Information Network based at the Royal Veterinary College in London, England, to create modules for Wildpro, a multimedia electronic encyclopedia devoted to issues of wildlife, wildlife habitats, and emerging infectious diseases worldwide. To date, WDIN has helped generate Wildpro modules on Waterfowl: Health and Management, West Nile Virus, and Chronic Wasting Disease in Deer and Elk. Wildpro has additional modules on many specific species and diseases as well as general wildlife articles.

Looking to the future, WDIN is currently building the Wildlife Information System for Disease Observation and Monitoring (WISDOM), a suite of databases and applications that is being created in cooperation with the Wildlife Conservation Society and other partners. It's intended to function much like HEDDS, but will be capable of managing data sets from wildlife disease spheres worldwide. The goal is to supply a means for collecting, storing, reporting, mapping, exchanging, and viewing surveillance data at no cost. For organizations that have already created their own such data systems, WISDOM will provide standards and mechanisms for seamless data exchange. If I step back and look at how WDIN data will slide into the WISDOM system, what we'll have is a dream, an ability to look at wildlife health and track its movement across the world, all in one location, says Dierauf. Wildlife disease is the link that people who are working in public health and domestic animal health often forget. This will bring wildlife disease into the system and provide the missing link.

Bryan Richards of the USGS's CWD project agrees. Professionals in agricultural health, human health, and wildlife health need to be more acutely aware of what's going on and of the relationships between these fields, he says, adding that tools that link disparate agencies will provide nearly real-time, spatially accurate information on diseases and allow collaboration on a global scale. As humans and wildlife are pushed together in the same space and time, says Richards, staying up to date will be even more critical. This is the way we need to do things in the future.

The future is here.

06/25/2008: Mysterious killer hits bats, Poststar.com

(Link to the original article)

Mysterious killer hits bats

By Erin DeMuth Judd

ejudd@poststar.com

Published: Wednesday, June 25, 2008

COURTESY PHOTO

Little brown bats, shown here, exhibit the primary symptom of 'white-nose syndrome.' The mysterious malady, which is killing bats by the thousands, was named for the white fungus that grows on the bodies of some of the affected animals. Scientists are unsure what role the fungus is playing in the bats' deaths, but research into the situation is ongoing.

To order copies of staff-produced photos from The Post-Star, please visit http://reprints.poststar.com/. New York is known for many things: The Yankees, the Statue of Liberty, the Erie Canal, tons of apples, dead bats.

New York is the place where the bats have started dying - dying by the thousands at the hands of an unknown killer.

"We call it 'white-nose syndrome' because we don't have a better name for it," said Alan Hicks, a mammal specialist with the state Department of Environmental Conversation's Endangered Species program. "It's, as yet, an unidentified something that's causing bats to die in very large numbers across the Northeast."

The most obvious symptom of this bat plague is a white fungus that appears on the nose of some, but not all, affected bats. Scientists don't know, however, if the fungus itself is killing the bats. One of the only things they are sure of at this point is that the first sick bats were spotted near Albany.

The start

"It first became evident to us in the winter of 2007, when we got the very first report from a caver who noticed bats all piled up near the entrance of a cave," Hicks said. "Within a few weeks of that call, we started getting reports of bats being out in winter - crashing into snowbanks and dying."

By mid-March, he said, "We started seeing bats dead in large numbers in caves."

Since then, scientists have found out that the dead bats were first noticed a year earlier.

"We've discovered that this was probably first seen the winter before by a caver," Hicks said. "He photographed it, but we didn't hear about it until recently."

"It probably started in 2006," he added.

The first case was confirmed in a cave in Schoharie County and, by the end of 2007, the mysterious malady had been confirmed in five spots within a 9-mile radius of the cave.

By the end of this winter, sick bats had been found in dozens of spots in a rapidly growing area.

"I don't know how many locations it's been confirmed in, but essentially every place everyone has looked within 80 miles of the original site was affected," Hicks said. "It's rapidly spreading in all directions."

"Every cave and mine that we've been to from Albany all the way up to Port Henry and over to southern portions of Vermont and western Massachusetts has been impacted," he added. "It goes almost down to New York City."

Symptoms

The condition of the bats found inside these caves and mines has been strikingly abnormal. Many of them, found in the winter, were acting out of character for hibernating bats.

"Some were what's called bats-on-the-landscape," said Melissa Behr, a veterinary pathologist with the state Department of Health.

These bats had left their caves or mines in the depths of winter and had ended up frozen to homes or snowbanks or had dropped dead outside the mouths of the caves or mines.

They probably left their winter dens, Behr said, because they were starving. Almost all the affected bats have borne the marks of hunger.

"These bats that have come in to us have been in poor body condition, they've used up their fat stores," said Kimberli Miller, a wildlife disease specialist with the USGS National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis. "Normally, they should have fat reserves to take them through the winter into spring."

"But they're coming in, in general, very thin and emaciated," she added. "That's been the one consistent finding across the affected areas."

Finding a cause

Other aspects of the dead bats' conditions have been inconsistent, making it hard to pinpoint what is killing them.

The effects of "white-nose syndrome" can differ from one cave to another.

"At some sites, animals are dying in greater numbers and more quickly," Hicks said. "And some species appear to be more susceptible than others."

But the scientists have been unable to find a known bacteria, virus or other pathogen to blame for the die-offs.

"We're doing necropsies, like human autopsies. We're examining these bats inside and out," Miller said. "We're collecting samples to go to the laboratory for culture-testing with bacteria, parasites, fungus.

"And culture-wise, we're not really finding anything significant or something we've been able to pinpoint as a cause," she said.

To determine if a parasite is to blame, Behr, with the state Department of Health, studied bats from Kentucky that are also found in New York.

"They had the same parasites as New York bats - fleas, and worms in their intestines," she said. "So that was no different."

But health and appearance of the Kentucky animals were different. They didn't have any fungus and they had good fat stores.

The fungus

Scientists in labs across the country are taking note of New York's mysterious fungus.

"It's never been described before," Behr said. "It is a new fungus, but we don't know if it's the primary cause of this illness.

"It could just be that the bats are already sick and the fungus is just being allowed to take over," she continued. "Like, if I had HIV, I couldn't fight off other things as well."

And some affected animals appear not to have the fungus.

"There are nine species of bats in New York, six of which hibernate in caves and mines," Hicks said. "Of those six, we most often seen the fungus on the little brown bats.

"But not all bats have it," he added. "It could be anywhere from a fraction of a percent of the animals to half of them having white noses."

With all the variables, unmasking the fungus and its role is likely to be a lengthy process.

"It is going to take some time to work through this and figure out what's going on here," Miller said. "With some die-offs, like avian botulism that kills large numbers of birds, it's an easy thing to test for.

"But we don't know what to test for in bats and we're trying to figure that out," she said. "There will be folks monitoring bats spring, fall and winter."

Important bats

Vigilance about the health of bats is justified by their importance as a predator and their unique behaviors.

Bats eat millions of bugs, helping to control the legions of biting insects people are always slapping at during the summer months.

"They consume somewhere between one-third and one-half of their weight in insects every night," Hicks said.

Bats are also an untapped fountain of potential medical knowledge.

"They have a remarkable range of physical skills," Hicks said. "How can they spend an entire winter not moving and still come out not debilitated?

"There's a whole range of medical questions related to human health where bats are a good place to answer some of those questions."

For Hicks, bats are a part of the living world, just as important as any other. When one part of that world starts dying at shocking rates, he said, an alarm should sound in human brains everywhere.

"This could be a general symptom of a world getting closer and closer to very hard times," Hicks said. "And we need to pay attention when things in the natural world start to go wrong in a big way.

"We have an obligation to make sure this planet is a good place for our children and grandchildren to grow up in," he added. "We can't keep popping rivets on our airplane and expect it to keep flying."

06/05/2008: Bird flu search finds none yet coming to N.America, Reuters

(Link to the original article)

Bird flu search finds none yet coming to N.America

Thu Jun 5, 2008 5:54pm EDT

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The feared H5N1 avian influenza has yet to make it to North America in the bodies of migrating birds, researchers said on Thursday.

Testing of more than 16,000 migratory birds between May 2006 and March 2007 showed no evidence of the H5N1 bird flu virus, which has become entrenched in many parts of Asia and which regularly pops up in flocks in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The birds are infected with virtually every other known strain of influenza, said Hon Ip of the U.S. Geological Survey, National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin. But not the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus.

"Maybe the Pacific Ocean is a nice, big biological barrier, for which I am forever grateful," Ip said.

"The general avian influenza infection rate is not really different in Alaska or North America than pretty much anywhere else. In spite of H5N1's spread through most of Asia and into Africa and Europe, that spread has not come into North America," Ip added in a telephone interview

About 1.7 percent of the birds were infected, but all with low-pathogenic strains of influenza viruses, which typically do not cause disease, Ip's team reported in the Virology Journal.

Highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza has forced the death or destruction of an estimated 300 million birds, according to the world animal health organization OIE.

SOURCE OF VIRUS

Birds are considered the original source of all influenza viruses. While H5N1 rarely infects people, it has killed 241 out of 383 infected in 15 countries.

Experts say the danger is that the virus will evolve just slightly into a form that people can easily catch and pass to one another, in which case the transmission rate could soar, causing a pandemic in which millions of people could die.

U.S. government officials have said it is inevitable that migratory birds will carry H5N1 to the Americas at some time.

An estimated that 1.5 million to 2.3 million birds migrate from Asia to Alaska each year.

But Ip, who worked with teams at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, says it has not happened yet.

The researchers are sampling birds that ornithologists say are the most likely to have migrated recently from Asia.

"Some of these viruses contain a mix of genes from both North American and Asian viruses," Ip said.

"We have direct evidence that the birds are carrying back at least a relative or descendant of viruses from Asia," he added. "This confirms we are sampling from those birds that are most likely to bring H5N1 back if H5N1 was to be brought back from Asia."

It also confirms that the viruses swap genes inside the birds -- a process that scientists believe gives rise to new and sometimes more dangerous strains.

The researchers have been testing birds since 2005 for H5N1, concentrating on Alaska but looking in all regions.

The birds most likely to be infected with any kind of flu virus are the dabbling ducks -- species such as mallards, Ip said. This reinforces the theory that the virus spreads as birds feed in the same water in which they are defecating.

Just this week U.S. chicken producer Tyson Foods Inc said it would eradicate about 15,000 chickens in Arkansas that carried antibodies to a mild H7N3 strain of bird flu, even though the birds were never sick and there was no risk to human health.

An outbreak this week of H7N7 flu forced the slaughter of all the chickens at a farm in Oxfordshire in Britain.

(Editing by Will Dunham and Cynthia Osterman)

05/13/2008: Dead bats tested here for mysterious syndrome, The Capital Times

(Link to the original article)

Anita Weier

May 13, 2008

About 100 bats that died of a mysterious syndrome in the northeastern United States are being analyzed at the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Madison.

The illness, which has resulted in the deaths of thousands of bats found since March at more than 25 caves and mines, is referred to as "white-nose syndrome" because of a white substance on the muzzles and wings of dead and hibernating bats.

The condition was first observed in February 2007 in caves near Albany, N.Y., by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. In early 2008, it was found in hibernation sites in New York, Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

The syndrome affects species including the little brown, northern long-eared and eastern pipistrelle bats.

"When we receive the carcasses, we examine them for signs of trauma before we look inside, to see whether a predator attacked or they might have been electrocuted. In the case of these bats, there was none of that," said Anne Ballmann, a wildlife disease specialist with the National Wildlife Health Center.

"They do seem a little thin, and some have white powdery substances on their muzzles. Some have reported it on limbs or tail flaps."

After that analysis, the bats are opened up and tissue samples obtained for virus and bacteria screening, and any fungus on the surface of the bats is analyzed.

"There is also some hypothesis that this may be toxic-related, so we are checking for pesticide residues," she said.

Some of the bats exhibited changes in the lung that have been difficult to characterize, and most had microscopic fungi on their bodies. The white substance may represent an overgrowth of normal fungal colonizers of bat skin during hibernation, and could be an indicator of overall poor health, rather than a primary pathogen, according to the National Wildlife Health Center.

The center has received bats throughout the winter season, since they have finished the hibernation season so are no longer found in caves.

People found very weak bats on the ground outside caves and then went inside to discover more of them dead, Ballmann said.

Some were also found roosting on the eaves of houses, which is unusual.

"No single cause has been determined, no causative agent," she said. "We are not the only institution looking, and we are getting ready to have a meeting to discuss this with other research institutions."

The use of pesticides, the impact of climate change and unknown pathogens are all possibilities, said David Blehert, head of diagnostic microbiology at the National Wildlife Health Center.

Some researchers have contacted scientists who are studying colony collapse in bees, to try to find out if the bat syndrome is somehow connected to the syndrome in which bees disappear and do not return to their hives.

"Bats eat a lot of insects, but they also tend to be pollinators because they land on plants," she said. "They do not feed on nectar in the United States, but in tropical areas, they tend to be more nectar feeders."

05/12/2008: Website Tracks Animal-Based Diseases, Wisconsin Public Radio

(Link to the original article)

By Chuck Quirmbach

Monday, May 12, 2008

Theres a new online map for tracking wildlife diseases that threaten animals and people.

Diseases such as West Nile virus, chronic wasting disease, avian flu and others are now often in the news. A website developed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the U.S. Geological Survey aims to track reports of the disease outbreaks around the world.

Project leader and veterinarian Josh Dien (DEEN) says many people want to know when emerging diseases become more widespread. He says it allows for taking proactive action to limit any unfortunate events. Dein says he hopes both health care professionals and the general public use the online map.

Dein says both USGS staff and UW-Madison students help compile the map by gathering news from more than 20 online sources.

The map can be accessed at: http://wildlifedisease.nbii.gov

05/10/2008: Investigation continues into cause of bats' deaths, Daily Gazette - Schenectady, NY

(Link to the original article)

Saturday, May 10, 2008

By Edward Munger Jr.

Gazette Reporter

CAPITAL REGION Scientists by the dozen continue to study different factors that could be causing the death of thousands of bats.

The use of pesticides, the impact of climate change and unknown pathogens are all possibilities, but nothing has been ruled out, said David Blehert, head of diagnostic microbiology at the U.S. Geological Surveys National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin.

Following two massive die-offs discovered in Albany County caves after the winters of 2006 and 2007, wildlife officials began studying a white fungus substance on specimens both living and dead.

Dubbed white-nose syndrome, because of the fungus, the affliction is considered an important issue both for the bats sake and for the role they play in the environment, Blehert said.

Its just unusual. Thats our job, to try to investigate causes of unusual wildlife activity, Blehert said. Youre not supposed to find thousands of dead bats, or, in caves that used to have 100,000 bats, find none at all.

Blehert said scientists are isolating fungi and bacterium in bat tissue samples and large numbers of those tests might lead to a clue.

A sufficient number of tests, once results are complete, will be put on a spreadsheet and studied, he said.

Maybe we will see some trend, Blehert said.

So far, unexplained bat deaths have been confirmed in Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont, according to the USGS.

Afflicted bat species so far include the little brown, big brown, northern long-eared and eastern pipistrelle, according to the USGS.

New York State Wildlife Pathologist Ward Stone said he continues to study dead bats. He was expecting four more on Friday, he said.

Stone said there is still no indication that the affliction poses any threat to people.

Stone said one potentially good sign in related work so far is some of the bats found alive yet still in poor shape have been rehabilitated.

It is hopeful, with at least a couple of species of bats, that the starving animals seem to turn the corner relatively quickly, Stone said.

The ability to rehabilitate the bats could indicate that they are suffering from malnutrition, not some disease they catch that kills them, Stone said.

If you have a virus thats chewing away at you and going to kill you, it will keep on going, he said.

I do not think the bats are going to go extinct, Stone said.

The Northeastern Cave Conservancy recently issued a statement alerting cavers that the conservancys caves, closed since Feb. 10 because of the white nose syndrome, will reopen Thursday.

NCC President Robert Addis on Friday said the conservancy is urging cavers to clean off their gear and follow decontamination procedures when they begin entering caves.

Addis said the progress in research will affect decisions on whether the conservancy will close down its caves in the fall. Typically, the organization does not, he said.

In the interest of the bats health, the conservancy may shut caves down by Oct. 15, which is considered the start of winter hibernation in the northeast.

More information on research into the bat mystery can be found at www.nwhc.usgs.gov.

Information on suggested decontamination procedures can be found at www.fws.gov/northeast/white_nose.html.

05/08/2008: New online map tracks wildlife disease outbreaks, The Capital Times

(Link to the original article)

New online map tracks wildlife disease outbreaks

The Capital Times 5/08/2008 11:49 am

It is now possible to track wildlife disease outbreaks around the world with a new online map, thanks to a collaborative effort by the UW-Madison and the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Global Wildlife Disease News Map -- which also explains possible effects on domestic animals and human beings -- can be accessed at http://wildlifedisease.nbii.gov. It is updated daily.

The site contains information about diseases such as chronic wasting disease, West Nile virus, avian influenza and monkeypox.

Users can browse the latest reports on almost 50 diseases and other health conditions, such as pesticide and lead poisoning, by geographic location.

The map is a project of the Wildlife Disease Information Node, a 5-year-old collaboration between the University of Wisconsin and two federal agencies that are part of the U.S. Geological Survey -- the National Wildlife Health Center and the National Biological Information Infrastucture.

"If you click on the name of a particular disease, it ... does a quick search of everything that we have on that topic," said Cris Marsh, a librarian with the Wildlife Disease Information Node, which is housed at the UW's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the USGS.

WDIN gathers news from more than 20 online sources and makes it available in several formats, from a news digest at wdin.blogspot.com to desktop widgets, e-mail and RSS feeds.

The Capital Times 5/08/2008 11:49 am

05/05/2008: Mapping Wildlife Diseases May Help Prevent Their Spread, Environment News Service

(Link to the original article)

Mapping Wildlife Diseases May Help Prevent Their Spread

MADISON, Wisconsin, May 5, 2008 (ENS) - Tracking wildlife disease outbreaks around the world is now possible with another online map that shows where threats to the health of wild animals, domestic animals, and people are occurring.

The Global Wildlife Disease News Map, developed jointly by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the U.S. Geological Survey, USGS, was introduced publicly today at: http://wildlifedisease.nbii.gov

Updated daily, the map displays pushpins marking stories of wildlife diseases such as West Nile virus, avian influenza, chronic wasting disease, and monkeypox.

Users can browse the latest reports of diseases and other health conditions, such as pesticide and lead poisoning, by geographic location. Filters focus on different disease types, affected species, countries, and dates.

The map is a product of the Wildlife Disease Information Node, a five-year-old collaboration between UW-Madison and two federal agencies, the National Wildlife Health Center and the National Biological Information Infrastructure, that are part of the USGS.

The Wildlife Disease Information Node, WDIN, is housed within the university's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the USGS.

"If you click on the name of a particular disease, it takes you to our main website and does a quick search of everything that we have on that topic," says Cris Marsh, a librarian who oversees news services for the Wildlife Disease Information Node.

State and federal wildlife managers, animal disease specialists, veterinarians, medical professionals, educators, and private citizens will all find the new map useful for monitoring wildlife disease, says Marsh.

Produced by WDIN staffer Megan Hines, the map is the latest addition to a suite of tools aimed at keeping users abreast of wildlife disease news.

Ultimately, the Wildlife Disease Information Node seeks to provide a comprehensive on-line wildlife disease information warehouse, according to project leader Josh Dein, a veterinarian with the Madison-based USGS National Wildlife Health Center.

"People who collect data about wildlife diseases don't currently have an established communication network, which is something we're working to improve," says Dein. "But just seeing what's attracting attention in the news gives us a much better picture of what's out there than we've ever had before."

The Wildlife Disease Information Node collaborates with a wide variety of public and private entities to gather and provide access to important wildlife disease data. Because of the global significance of these diseases, WDIN encourages others to become involved with the project.

"The more information we can link," says Marsh, "the more robust our service becomes."

Another strong service is ProMED-mail - the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases, which also maps wildlife diseases.

This Internet-based reporting system is dedicated to rapid global dissemination of information on outbreaks of infectious diseases and acute exposures to toxins that affect human health, including those in animals and in plants grown for food or animal feed.

ProMED-mail was established in 1994 with the support of the Federation of American Scientists and SatelLife. Since October 1999, ProMED-mail has operated as an official program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases, a nonprofit professional organization with 20,000 members worldwide.

ProMED-mail operates with the mission of providing early warning of outbreaks of emerging and re-emerging diseases so that public health precautions at all levels can be taken in a timely manner to prevent epidemic transmission and to save lives.

Editor Larry Madoff says, "We cover the animal and human infectious disease world which in the wake of avian flu and SARS, we now recognize is imperative if we are to understand and slow the spread of diseases jumping from animals to humans."

"We receive no government funding which means we can be totally objective," says Madoff in an email sent to subscribers today requesting donations.

"Each day I and about 30 other scientists receive dozens of e-mailed reports of mysterious outbreaks sent in from experts and amateur disease watchers throughout the world," he says. "We scan newspapers and health department alerts, government reports and other information sources worldwide for inklings that an infectious disease, perhaps not yet reported widely, is threatening animal, human or food crop health."

There are more than 40 diseases in existence today that were unknown a generation ago, and about 1,100 epidemic events verified by the World Health Organization in the past five years, Madoff says.

04/30/2008: Pendleton bats sent to lab were not found dead, DNR says, Charleston Gazette

(Link to the original article)

Two bats from a Pendleton County cave now being examined by a wildlife disease laboratory in Wisconsin were bearing a small amount of what appeared to be a white fungus, but did not appear to be exhibiting symptoms of white-nose syndrome - a disease that has killed tens of thousands of hibernating bats in the northeast.

By Rick Steelhammer

Staff writer

Two bats from a Pendleton County cave now being examined by a wildlife disease laboratory in Wisconsin were bearing a small amount of what appeared to be a white fungus, but did not appear to be exhibiting symptoms of white-nose syndrome - a disease that has killed tens of thousands of hibernating bats in the northeast.

The bats were collected at Trout Cave in early April.

No dead bats were found at the cave, as previously reported, but two live bats had a very small amount of what appeared to be a fungus on them - one on the ear and the other on its wrist, according to Craig Stihler, the Division of Natural Resources' endangered species coordinator.

"We debated as to whether or not we should collect these bats, but decided we needed to have them looked at by one of the labs working on white-nose syndrome," Stihler said.

After being euthanized, "they were sent to the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin."

While the bats had little fat remaining on their bodies, that condition is not unusual for bats at the end of their hibernation period. The weights of the bats were within the range normally observed at this time of year.

"Unfortunately, no one knows the cause of white-nose syndrome, so the lab can't test for it, but they are going to examine the bats further," Stihler said.

"I would be very concerned if we found a number of dead bats at the cave, but we did not find any dead bats. We did find a couple bats with a small amount of what appeared to be a fungus, but it did not look like white nose and it may be normal for bats hibernating in a moist cave to occasionally get fungus on them. Before this problem arose, we didn't examine bats closely during our surveys and would not have noticed a small amount of fungus."

White-nose syndrome has decimated hibernating bat colonies in New York, Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut, and it is suspected of having spread to caves in Pennsylvania, including areas near the West Virginia border. Winter surveys have shown that in eight of the affected New York caves, mortality ranged from 80 percent to 100 percent since the syndrome was documented at each site.

While it can't be said for a certainty that white-nose syndrome has not reached West Virginia, "so far, we have not seen anything in West Virginia that alarms me, and I hope it remains that way," Stihler said.

To contact staff writer Rick Steelhammer use e-mail or call 348-5169.

04/15/2008: Keizer lake's dead geese raise alarm, Statesman Journal

(Link to the original article)

Keizer lake's dead geese raise alarm

Wildlife officials hope federal lab finds explanation

ALAN GUSTAFSON

Statesman Journal

April 15, 2008

Large numbers of Canada cackling geese keep dying at Staats Lake in Keizer.

It's a mysterious trend that alarms some people who live near the private lake and hate to see the waterfowl sanctuary become a graveyard.

"We feel kind of like it's the canary in the coal mine," Keizer resident Debbie Lowery said. "It's a sign to me that something in our ecosystem is not quite right."

About 60 dead geese were recovered at the lake from Friday through Monday, said Brad Bales, the migratory game bird coordinator for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Laboratory testing of goose carcasses will be done at the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis. Results from the federal lab should be known within 10 days, Bales said Monday.

Newspaper reports indicate that large die-offs of geese previously occurred at Staats Lake in 2007, 2005, 2001 and 2000.

Bales said the lake itself doesn't appear to be the culprit. Previous investigations linked bird fatalities to aspergillosios, a fungal infection of the lungs, and to pesticide contamination, he said.

"In the past, it has not been anything directly related to Staats Lake," he said. "It's just that it's a heavy goose-roosting area. They may be sick when they get there and that's just where they seem to perish."

Investigators who looked into the earlier cases stopped short of determining where the geese may have ingested lethal amounts of pesticide, Bales said.

"We never really tracked down the exact source, so we don't know where the contamination might have occurred," he said.

Canada cackling geese nest in western Alaska and venture into the Willamette Valley during the winter season. They fly and roost in large flocks, often comprising several thousands of birds.

Lise Payne said she was stunned to come across dozens of dead geese Friday morning as she took her customary walk around the 60-acre lake.

"There were almost 40 birds dead," she said. "I mean, they were just lying side by side."

Payne, who moved with her husband to Keizer from Hawaii in October, said she long will remember the sight of the dead geese, and she's intensely curious about what killed them.

"It's heartbreaking," she said. "I'm still upset. Oregon is supposed to be such a green state."

Lowery, who has lived near Staats Lake for five years, said it's hard to fathom why the prime bird-watching setting has become a recurring place for geese to die.

"Maybe it's a cemetery lake, I don't know," she said. "Why they all flock to our lake to die is kind of weird."

The Keizer case could take on more significance if large numbers of geese turn up dead at other roosting places in the Willamette Valley, Bales said.

"There are a lot of things out there that birds can die of," he said. "We're just concerned about how widespread it is. If this is happening on a big scale, affecting a lot of areas, hopefully we'll be getting that information and be able to kind of pinpoint it a little better."

agustafs@StatesmanJournal.com or (503) 399-670

04/09/2008: Report: Recreational hunting alone will not control CWD, The Capital Times

(Link to the original article)

Tim Eisele

Special to The Capital Times

April 9, 2008

Members of the Natural Resources Board gave very close attention to a recent report by Bryan Richards, CWD project leader for the USGS National Wildlife Health Center in Madison.

It's a report that should be heard by every person who has an interest in deer in Wisconsin.

Some hunters and landowners naively believe that efforts to reduce deer populations, and CWD, have been too intense and need to back off.

Richards, who has no direct responsibility over Wisconsin deer herd management or CWD management programs, was very clear that more effort is needed. He said that:

** CWD spreads and prevalence increases.

** In Wisconsin, CWD poses significant long-term problems.

** Effective CWD management will require dramatic and sustained efforts.

** Recreational hunting alone will not control CWD.

Richards, who works for the U.S. Department of the Interior in Madison, stressed that several reasons to be concerned about CWD are the many positive effects deer have on the economy and hunting heritage. Big game hunting in the U.S. is a $10 billion industry each year with 11 million participants. Wisconsin has 600,000 deer hunters who provide a large stimulus to the economy.

But deer populations also have negative effects, including causing more than 35,000 vehicle/deer accidents per year in the state, causing agricultural damage and limiting forest regeneration.

"CWD spreads and prevalence increases," Richards said. "This should be obvious, with a contagious easily transmissible disease, but it is one of the most contentious items. There are constantly challenges that CWD spreads, and the only absolute way to prove it is to test every animal on the landscape."

Richards referred to patterns of CWD on the landscape in several states, where it appears the disease started at a core and dispersed out from the core. In a study of male mule deer in Colorado the prevalence reached over 40 percent, and in Wyoming two out of every five adult female white-tailed deer in one study area had the disease.

Surveys have shown that as prevalence increases, people won't want to hunt deer. Declining hunters means higher deer populations, and more deer/vehicle collisions, crop damage, and suburban nuisance problems from deer.

Richards said that effective CWD management requires dramatic and sustained efforts. His recommendation is that if an area does not have CWD, preventative measures should be implemented to keep it out. If an area does have it, strong management actions are needed and it should be monitored.

Because of budget cuts, the DNR stopped much of its research in outlying areas of the state.

Richards congratulated the State of Wisconsin for its 2002 work to implement measures to reduce risks, and he said the new proposal to restrict the movement of carcasses was an outstanding idea.

"The science is absolutely clear on feeding and baiting," he said. "Where you have high densities of deer congregated around food sources, you have a risk of disease. When you have CWD in the southern Wisconsin and Bovine tuberculosis in Michigan and northern Minnesota, you have a valid rationale for a statewide ban on feeding and baiting."

Richards told the board that if they are depending on the recreational harvest of deer alone to control CWD, they will likely fail.

"Hunters in the State of Wisconsin have not shown themselves as being capable of managing deer populations," he said. Currently over 90 percent of the geographic area of the state is overpopulated with deer.

Minnesota is proposing to allow landowners in a specific area to kill deer 24 hours a day, seven days a week to reduce Bovine TB in the deer population. Their idea is to get rid of restrictions and allow people to kill deer.

Richards raised questions about the current regulations proposed by the DNR and CWD Stakeholders Advisory Committee, saying that the DNR was originally on the right track, but was forced to back off. He believes that the current regulations being considered by the board, which went out to public hearings in March, have no possibility of helping to reduce or eradicate the disease. It would merely slow the spread.

Richards said that, from disease management perspective, he found the proposed CWD regulations for this fall "somewhat stagnant and maybe even taking a step backwards." He sees very little evidence that hunters will bring the deer population back down.

Unfortunately the state is talking about "containment and control," without adequate steps to reduce the disease.

04/05/2008: Dead birds float ashore at Great Salt Lake, Science Daily

(Link to the original article)

Don't be surprised if you see of hundreds of dead birds along the southeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake during the next few weeks.

More than 15,000 birds died on the lake last fall. Most of the birds were eared grebes.

Testing done at the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin has confirmed that the birds died of avian cholera. Avian cholera is a disease that sweeps through grebes and other birds on the lake almost every year.

"Avian cholera is caused by a common bacteria that's found all across the country," says Leslie McFarlane, wildlife disease coordinator for the Division of Wildlife Resources. "When the conditions are right, avian cholera takes off. It can spread through a bird population quickly."

Even though the birds died last fall, the salt water in the lake has preserved their carcasses. "The birds you see along the shore of the Great Salt Lake may look like they died recently, but they've actually been dead for several months," McFarlane says.

McFarlane says the bacteria that causes avian cholera does not affect people or other mammals, including dogs. And because the birds have been dead for so long, their carcasses don't pose a threat to other birds. "The birds have been dead long enough that their carcasses no longer carry the bacteria," she says.

Once the carcasses wash onto the beach, they should decompose quickly. "We won't be picking the birds up," McFarlane says. "Die-offs like this are part of nature, and we'll let nature take its course as far as taking care of the birds that died."

For more information, call the Division of Wildlife Resources Salt Lake City office at (801) 538-4700.

03/31/2008: Crows negative for AI strains, Coshocton Tribune (Ohio)

(Link to the original article)

COSHOCTON Mark Frank, director of Environmental Health with the Coshocton City Health Department, recently received results from a crow roost die-off.

Two of the crows collected during the January 2008 crow die-off were tested for Avian Influenza (AI) at the Ohio Department of Agriculture, Animal Disease Diagnostics Laboratory in Reynoldsburg. The birds were found to be negative for all strains of AI.

An additional carcass was sent to the United States Geological Survey, National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis. At this time, according to Craig Hicks, Wildlife Disease Biologist with the USDA in a letter to Frank, the diagnosis posted on the NWHCs Web site is Enteritis: hemorrhagic, Viral Infection Suspect; NOS. Without sending the sample to an outside laboratory, this is the limit that can be given for the diagnosis.

According to the NWHC, similar crow die-offs have occurred in neighboring states over the last few years. A few of the die-offs have been attributed to an avian strain of Reovirus. NWHC has stated that in the Coshocton die-off, the cytopathic effect is Reovirus-like, but cannot be labeled as Reovirus without further testing. NWHC also stated that the avian strain of Reovirus is not a known human health hazard.

03/30/2008: Should bird hunters get the lead out?, Victoria Advocate

(Link to the original article)

Research underway to replace lead shot with various nontoxic loads

BY TARA BOZICK - VICTORIA ADVOCATE

March 30, 2008 - 10:45 p.m.

AUSTIN Hunters dont think that prohibiting the use of lead shots will save the birds.

Marvin Strakos, with MS Guide Service in Port OConnor, said the nontoxic shots are too expensive and wound more birds than they kill.

Im against shooting nontoxic shots at doves or quail,Strakos said. Ive been hunting all my life and I never found pellets in any birds gizzards.

Lead shots were banned for hunting waterfowl in 1991. Now, researchers in Texas discuss whether to do the same for dove hunting.

Texas Parks and Wildlife researched the issues surrounding lead shots versus nontoxic shots for three years and looks for a contractor to conduct hunter attitude surveys, wildlife program leader Jay Roberson said. The surveys would start in the fall.

Doves need to swallow pebbles to digest food and so the concern is they may be ingesting the lead pellets along with them, he said. Research in wildlife management areas in fields close to Kansas City, Mo., determined that up to 6 percent of doves ingested pellets into their gizzards. By doing so, doves may become vulnerable to predation, disease and death.

Human contamination by eating the birds shot with lead pellets is minor, Roberson added.

State and federal agencies have the legal responsibility to investigate any cause that would affect the birds long-term stability, Roberson said. They must take into account the possibility of other birds and wildlife swallowing lead.

But researchers must also determine the economic impact on the shooting and hunting industries and whether switching to nontoxic shots would exclude anyone from hunting.

Roberson estimates it would take five years to get sufficient information to make a recommendation on this issue.

Lead is a well-known toxin thats not essential or beneficial to living organisms, David Dolton, dove coordinator with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said.

It is logical to assume that other animals eat mourning doves that die of lead poisoning, Dolton wrote in an e-mail.

Bald eagles, California condors and peregrine falcons have been poisoned indirectly by lead shot, according to the Field Manual of Wildlife Diseases published by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Hunter and guide David Rosenboom, of Bent Rod Charters in Port OConnor, believe more birds would die of being wounded by nontoxic shots than by ingesting the pellets of lead shots.

Shots like tungsten-nickel-iron would be more effective than steel shots, but cost at least three times more.

Consumers are going to go with the cheapest way, Rosenboom said. Theyre going to end up buying the steel shot.

Rosenboom hunts waterfowl like duck and geese and has seen the impact of using steel shots on those birds. He estimated for one netting survey that 80 percent of the geese were alive and carrying a steel shot in the muscle.

Theyre crippled by it instead of dying, Rosenboom said. For every bird you retrieve with a steel shot, youre probably crippling two of them.

Researchers may worry about lead weakening birds to predation, but crippling birds does that as well, Rosenboom said. He also worries that inefficient shots would keep hunters in the fields longer to reach bag limits and would disturb the wildlife that need to use the habitat.

But Dolton said hunters could learn to reduce the crippling rate and this should not be a problem for hunters already accustomed to hunting waterfowl with nontoxic shots.

Research from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Waterfowl Harvest Survey from 1952 to 2001 shows nontoxic shots for hunting waterfowl became less crippling as hunters learned to use them.

It turns out the crippling rate went down, Dolton said. Its just not a valid argument.

When Dolton hunts, he finds the steel shot shoots in a tighter pattern and that he can actually hit doves better.

Some hunters believe it is easier to hit birds with nontoxic shot because they dont have to lead them as much, Dolton said.

Everybody has an opinion. A lot of environmentalists have good intentions, he said. Ive been raised if youre going to shoot something, you kill it and eat it. You dont want to go out in the field and start crippling animals.

Tara Bozick is a reporter for the Advocate. Contact her at 361-580-6504 or tbozick@vicad.com.

For more information or to state your opinion as a hunter, call the Texas Parks and Wildlife regulations coordinator at 512-389-4775, or Jay Roberson at 512-389-8011. Or visit www.tpwd.state.tx.us, click Contact Us and leave a comment for regulations.

Types of nontoxic shot:

1. Steel

2. Tungsten (including tungsten, tungsten-iron, tungsten-nickel-iron, and tungsten polymers)

3. Bismuth

4. Tin

--Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

As little as two lead pellets may debilitate a mourning dove.

Source: Missouri Department of Conservation

03/25/2008: Bats Perish, and No One Knows Why, The New York Times

(Link to the original article)

Al Hicks was standing outside an old mine in the Adirondacks, the largest bat hibernaculum, or winter resting place, in New York State.

It was broad daylight in the middle of winter, and bats flew out of the mine about one a minute. Some had fallen to the ground where they flailed around on the snow like tiny wind-broken umbrellas, using the thumbs at the top joint of their wings to gain their balance.

All would be dead by nightfall. Mr. Hicks, a mammal specialist with the states Environmental Conservation Department, said: Bats dont fly in the daytime, and bats dont fly in the winter. Every bat you see out here is a dead bat flying, so to speak.

They have plenty of company. In what is one of the worst calamities to hit bat populations in the United States, on average 90 percent of the hibernating bats in four caves and mines in New York have died since last winter.

Wildlife biologists fear a significant die-off in about 15 caves and mines in New York, as well as at sites in Massachusetts and Vermont. Whatever is killing the bats leaves them unusually thin and, in some cases, dotted with a white fungus. Bat experts fear that what they call White Nose Syndrome may spell doom for several species that keep insect pests under control.

Researchers have yet to determine whether the bats are being killed by a virus, bacteria, toxin, environmental hazard, metabolic disorder or fungus. Some have been found with pneumonia, but that and the fungus are believed to be secondary symptoms.

This is probably one of the strangest and most puzzling problems we have had with bats, said Paul Cryan, a bat ecologist with the United States Geological Survey. Its really startling that weve not come up with a smoking gun yet.

Merlin Tuttle, the president of Bat Conservation International, an education and research group in Austin, Tex., said: So far as we can tell at this point, this may be the most serious threat to North American bats weve experienced in recorded history. It definitely warrants immediate and careful attention.

This month, Mr. Hicks took a team from the Environmental Conservation Department into the hibernaculum that has sheltered 200,000 bats in past years, mostly little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus) and federally endangered Indiana bats (Myotis sodalis), with the worlds second largest concentration of small-footed bats (Myotis leibii).

He asked that the mine location not be published, for fear that visitors could spread the syndrome or harm the bats or themselves.

Other visitors do not need directions. The day before, Mr. Hicks saw eight hawks circling the parking lot of another mine, waiting to kill and eat the bats that flew out.

In a dank galley of the mine, Mr. Hicks asked everyone to count how many out of 100 bats had white noses. About half the bats in one galley did. They would be dead by April, he said.

Mr. Hicks, who was the first person to begin studying the deaths, said more than 10 laboratories were trying to solve the mystery.

In January 2007, a cave explorer reported an unusual number of bats flying near the entrance of a cavern near Albany. In March and April, thousands of dead bats were found in three other mines and caves. In one case, half the dead or living bats had the fungus.

One cave had 15,584 bats in 2005, 6,735 in 2007 and an estimated 1,500 this winter. Another went from 1,329 bats in 2006 to 38 this winter. Some biologists fear that 250,000 bats could die this year.

Since September, when hibernation began, dead or dying bats have been found at 15 sites in New York. Most of them had been visited by people who had been at the original four sites last winter, leading researchers to suspect that humans could transmit the problem.

Details on the problem in neighboring states are sketchier. In the Berkshires in Massachusetts, we are getting reports of dying/dead bats in areas where we do not have known bat hibernacula, so we may have more sites than we will ever be able to identify, said Susi von Oettingen, an endangered species biologist with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

In Vermont, Scott Darling, a wildlife biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Department, said: The last tally that I have is approximately 20 sites in New York, 4 in Vermont and 2 in Massachusetts. We only have estimates of the numbers of bats in the affected sites more or less 500,000. It is impossible for us to count the dead bats, as many have flown away from the caves and died we have over 90 reports from citizens across Vermont as well as many are still dying.

People are not believed to be susceptible to the affliction. But New Jersey, New York and Vermont have advised everyone to stay out of all caverns that might have bats. Visitors to affected caves and mines are asked to decontaminate all clothing, boots, ropes and other gear, as well as the car trunks that transport them.

One affected mine is the winter home to a third of the Indiana bats between Virginia and Maine. These pink-nosed bats, two inches long and weighing a quarter-ounce, are particularly social and cluster together as tightly as 300 a square foot.

Its ironic, until last year most of my time was spent trying to delist it, or take it off the endangered species list, Mr. Hicks said, after the states Indiana bat population grew, to 52,000 from 1,500 in the 1960s.

Its very scary and a little overwhelming from a biologists perspective, Ms. von Oettingen said. If we cant contain it, were going to see extinctions of listed species, and some of species that are not even listed.

Neighbors of mines and caves in the region have notified state wildlife officials of many affected sites when they have noticed bats dead in the snow, latched onto houses or even flying in a recent snowstorm.

Biologists are concerned that if the bats are being killed by something contagious either in the caves or elsewhere, it could spread rapidly, because bats can migrate hundreds of miles in any direction to their summer homes, known as maternity roosts. At those sites, females usually give birth to one pup a year, an added challenge for dropping populations.

Nursing females can eat up to half their weight in insects a day, Mr. Hicks said.

Researchers from institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States Geological Surveys National Wildlife Health Center, Boston University, the New York State Health Department and even Disneys Animal World are addressing the problem. Some are considering trying to feed underweight wild bats to help them survive the remaining weeks before spring. Some are putting temperature sensors on bats to monitor how often they wake up, and others are making thermal images of hibernating bats.

Other researchers want to know whether recently introduced pesticides, including those released to stop West Nile virus, may be contributing to the problem, either through a toxin or by greatly reducing the bats food source.

Dr. Thomas H. Kunz, a biology professor at Boston University, said the body composition of the bats would also be studied, partly to determine the ratio of white to brown fat. Of particular interest is the brown fat between the shoulder blades, known to assist the bats in warming up when they begin to leave deep hibernation in April.

It appears the white nose bats do not have enough fat, either brown or white, to arouse, Dr. Kunz said. Theyre dying in situ and do not have the ability to arouse from their deep torpor.

His researchers cameras have shown that bats in the caves that do wake up when disturbed take hours longer to do so, as was the case in the Adirondack mine. He also notes that if females become too emaciated, they will not have the hormonal reactions necessary to ovulate and reproduce.

In searching for a cause of the syndrome, researchers are hampered by the lack of baseline knowledge about habits like how much bats should weigh in the fall, where they hibernate and even how many bats live in the region.

Were going to learn an awful lot about bats in a comprehensive way that very few animal species have been looked at, said Dr. Elizabeth Buckles, an assistant professor at Cornell who coordinates bat research efforts. Thats good. But its unfortunate it has to be under these circumstances.

The die-offs are big enough that they may have economic effects. A study of Brazilian free-tailed bats in southwestern Texas found that their presence saved cotton farmers a sixth to an eighth of the cash value of their crops by consuming insect pests.

Logic dictates when you are potentially losing as many as a half a million bats in this region, there are going to be ramifications for insect abundance in the coming summer, Mr. Darling, the Vermont wildlife biologist, said.

As Mr. Hicks traveled deeper in the cave, the concentrations of bats hanging from the ceiling increased. They hung like fruit, generally so still that they appeared dead. In some tightly packed groups, just individual noses or elbows peeked through. A few bats had a wing around their nearest cavemates. Their white bellies mostly faced downhill. When they awoke, they made high squeaks, like someone sucking a tooth.

The mine floors were not covered with carcasses, Mr. Hicks said, because raccoons come in and feed on them. Raccoon scat dotted the rocks along the trail left by their footprints.

In the six hours in the cave taking samples, nose counts and photographs, Mr. Hicks said that for him trying for the perfect picture was a form of therapy. Its just that I know Im never going to see these guys again, he said. Were the last to see this concentration of bats in our lifetime.

03/07/2008: Strange Malady Wreaks Havoc on Bat Population, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

(Link to the original article)

New Englanders may face an uptick in mosquito swarms, insect bites and moths this summer as a strange malady has threatened the insects' top predator: bats.

Bats are dying at an alarming rate in the Northeast, and wildlife biologists fear the outbreak could lead to the extinction of the already endangered Indiana bat.

A typical bat cave during winter months is dark, quiet and smells faintly of guano. The winged mammals are usually found hanging upside down in a state of torpor, the decreased physiological activity of hibernation. Some hibernate alone; some in clusters.

But an epidemic has swept through bat populations in the northeastern United States, disrupting the lives of the wintering cave bats. And scientists are puzzled as to what is causing it.

The so-called "white-nose syndrome" has ravaged bat colonies in Vermont, Massachusetts and New York, leading to deaths in large swaths of the region. In caves where bats normally spend the winter hibernating, biologists are finding them emaciated and awake, or lying dead in the snow. Some have a coat of white fungus blanketing their nose and other parts of their bodies.

Bats have been spotted flying around in greater numbers than is normal for this time of year. Scientists suspect they may be starving and searching for food in a desperate attempt to survive.

Of the roughly 500,000 bats hibernating in the caves affected by the syndrome, Scott Darling, a bat biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, estimates that the fatality rate has exceeded 90 percent. And he fears the toll is rising.

"At this time, biologists are not optimistic that we won't lose all of those 500,000 bats," he said.

The cause of the deaths is unknown. Nearly all of the bats are noticeably gaunt, with extremely low fat reserves. But pathologists have found no indications of any known infection, bacteria or virus that would help pinpoint a cause. And the name, white-nose syndrome, could be misleading, as only a portion of the bats have the white fungus.

Susi von Oettingen, an endangered species biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, suspects the cause may be a complex interplay of factors.

"It may be environmental," she said. "It may be a combination of something environmental and a pathogen the bats encountered in the fall. We're looking at everything and letting our imaginations run wild."

Scattered across the country, scientists in 10 different labs are trying to target the source of the epidemic. When a deceased bat arrives at the lab, pathologists inspect its ears, nose, eyes, wings and fur. Then they slice open the carcass, inspect the organs and collect tissue samples for testing.

Scientists also take cultures of bacteria, examine fungus found on the bats and test for rabies, said Kimberli Miller, a wildlife disease specialist with the USGS National Wildlife Health Center. "We've been looking at parasites, and we've been examining the tissues microscopically. But so far, it's not coming together neatly."

Among those threatened is the Indiana bat, which is already on the federal list of endangered species.

"If we lose the Indiana bat, we're losing a species from the Northeast," von Oettingen said. "The whole species may be gone. To me, that's almost incomprehensible that on our watch, we'd lose a species."

But Darling considered the little brown bat an even greater concern, since they make up a much larger portion of the bat population. About 22,500 of the 23,000 bats in Vermont's Aeolus Cave, for example, are little brown bats.

Bats are chowhounds, capable of consuming as many as 1,000 insects in an hour -- and biologists predict that this year's die-off will cause insect populations to swell.

"When you do the math and you figure the bats might be feeding five to six hours a night -- that can add up to an awful lot of insects," Darling said.

He points to caterpillars in particular, which eat leaves and farm crops. Bats also eat beetles, flies and mosquitoes, and are believed to play a vital role in controlling outbreaks of these insects.

"We may be living in an ecological experiment that will demonstrate the role of bats," Darling said.

---- By Jenny Marder, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

02/29/2008: Bats in Northeast Are Mysteriously Dying, Lancaster Farming

(Link to the original article)

Submitted by Editor on Fri, 02/29/2008 - 1:20pm.

Cornell Vet College Scientists Aid Investigation

Krishna Ramanujan

Cornell Chronicle

First it was bees that were mysteriously dying. Now its bats.

Following a summer when honeybees across America began to die in great numbers, researchers are now finding thousands of sick bats in caves in New York, Vermont and Massachusetts. The deaths of the two species appear to be unrelated.

Bat specialists from the New York State Department of Conservation (NYDEC) have found 15 sites, up from four discovered last year, with sick bats: one in Massachusetts, two in Vermont and 12 in New York between Albany and Watertown.

To help diagnose the problem, NYDEC scientists are sending samples to Beth Buckles, assistant professor of biomedical sciences in Cornells College of Veterinary Medicine.

The affected bats are mostly little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus), among the most common North American bats. Other affected bats include the endangered Indiana bat (Myotis Sodalis), the northern long-eared bat (Myotis septentrionalis) and the eastern pipistrelle (Perimyotis subflavus). The bats live year round in the general area and usually hibernate each year in the same caves.

Buckles and colleagues are conducting postmortem exams of organs and tissues and testing for signs of inflammation, bacteria, viruses and toxins. So far, the researchers do not yet know what is causing the massive casualties, Buckles said.

We have some good leads. We are continuing to look for infectious causes and are developing protocols to assess the bats metabolic states. They may not have enough fat to make it through the winter, she said.

Many of the sick bats have a white fungus growing on their faces, are very thin and are congregating near to the cave entrances, a habit of ill bats. But it is unprecedented to find so many sick bats grouped near entrances, said Buckles.

In two caves the researchers studied last year that together had an estimated 18,000 bats up to 97 percent died. The caves found this year may hold between 150,000 and 200,000 bats, many of them sick.

This winter, regarding the mortalities, to say weve lost large numbers now would be inaccurate, because we havent, said Al Hicks, a bat expert at NYDEC. But we expect them to start dying now in substantial numbers.

Researchers are checking for diseases that have previously caused mortality in other animals and may be impacting bats, said Buckles. Possible causes include parasites, distemper, toxins and rapid changes in temperature, though none of these has been verified. There is no evidence that the bat sickness poses any threat to humans, Buckles stressed.

As a pathologist, we see an animal at one point in the disease process, (and) we try to get more bats as the season progresses to see how their tissues change, Buckles said. We will continue to monitor bats from other parts of New York and the country so we can compare healthy bats with unhealthy bats.

Anyone who finds a dead or sick bat should not handle it, but call the local DEC, Buckles said.

As for bees, many continue to die inexplicably. Scientists are investigating whether a virus and pesticides may be playing roles.

Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center, New York State Department of Health and Disneys Animal Kingdom are also working with Buckles and colleagues to better understand the problem.

02/11/2008: Elk Herds Upsetting Ecosystems In Parks, The Washington Post

(Link to the original article)

Officials Favor Shooting to Restore Natural Balance

By Peter Slevin

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, February 11, 2008; A03

CHICAGO -- Elk like to eat. Elk like to eat a lot.

This is a problem for creatures fond of the same greenery coveted by the weighty elk. It is not so good for the ecosystem, either, according to the stewards of three national parks in Colorado and the Dakotas that are faced with growing herds of the herbivorous mammals.

Scientists at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota are preparing to do an elk count, sending an airplane aloft after a fresh snow, when it is easier to spot the quarry in rugged terrain.

"Based on last year's survey, we expect to see a thousand or so elk," said Bill Whitworth, the park's chief of resource management. "We'd like to have somewhere between 100 and 400. We're balancing our elk population with bison, feral horses, other deer and animals that use the forage out here."

Reducing elk herds is not a gentle business. The National Park Service mostly figures on shooting elk, either on parkland using staff members and designated deputies, or on private land where hunters can load up.

Nature in the form of drought or severe snow sometimes helps. It used to be that elk could be shipped elsewhere, but the surfeit of elk and the rise of chronic wasting disease made that option less attractive. In Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, 60 female elk, called cows, were injected with a contraceptive designed to be effective for several years.

Spokeswoman Kyle Patterson said proposals to curb the elk population at Rocky Mountain have inspired "strong feelings across the board." Recommendations ranged from shooting and fencing to contraception and the introduction of wolves, one of elk's few natural predators.

Park managers settled on "lethal reduction," as shooting is called, as the preferred way to control the herd. Sharpshooters with night-vision goggles and silencers would target elk after dark. A formal decision is expected to be released soon, Patterson said, with the program likely to begin next winter and continue for two decades.

"This is a 20-year plan that we've been working on," Patterson said, explaining that the elk population will be monitored through fat times and thin. "Willow and aspen stands are declining. That's what we're concerned about, because that deprives other species of habitat they need.

"We have to manage for the others . . . beaver, butterfly, a variety of birds, insects," Patterson continued. "It's a whole ecosystem concept, and it can get out of whack."

The 415-square-mile park has a winter elk population between 1,700 and 2,200. The park's goal is 1,600 to 2,100 elk, down nearly half from highs reached as recently as 2001.

Since then, unusually deep snow in March 2003 and December 2006 motivated the elk to migrate to more hospitable climes at lower elevations outside the park, Patterson said. Last year, she noted, hunts supervised by the Colorado Division of Wildlife culled 750 elk outside the park.

"We have to plan for some of those things not happening," Patterson said. "If they do, we would cull fewer animals."

A conservation group called WildEarth Guardians opposes shooting elk, preferring the introduction of wolves, which helped control the elk population in Yellowstone National Park -- more than eight times larger than Rocky Mountain -- beginning in the mid-1990s. The organization has threatened to file a lawsuit.

Bryan Richards, who studies elk for the U.S. Geological Survey, said the combination of healthy habitat and few predators is likely to create a continuing elk problem for Rocky Mountain, Theodore Roosevelt and South Dakota's Wind Cave National Park. Human intervention is a necessity, he said.

"Unfortunately, with the hand of cards that has been dealt to the Park Service, there aren't any clear-cut great answers," he said. "If there are not tools implemented to keep those populations in check, the populations will spiral out of control."

Steve Torbit, Colorado-based regional director for the National Wildlife Federation, sees lessons for the future in the elk conundrum. He said the nation is "paying the price for these smaller parks that do not allow for the animal herds to have seasonal movement."

When parks expand, or new parks are created, Torbit says, they should include buffer zones where hunting and wildlife management are permitted "and you don't build the subdivisions or the ranches right up against the park boundary."

02/08/2008: Elk boom leads to debate over culling, Associated Press

(Link to the original article)

Elk Boom Leads to Debate Over Culling

By BLAKE NICHOLSON 6 hours ago

MEDORA, N.D. (AP) The number of elk roaming the nation's parks is booming, and that's bad news for them.

A debate has started among wildlife and conservation officials about how the animals should be culled by sharpshooters' bullets or by their natural enemy, wolves.

The National Park Service has no firm estimate on the total number of elk in national parks, simply because they live in the wild and migrate in and out of many parks.

But managers at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota and Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota have documented overpopulation problems.

At Theodore Roosevelt, officials are considering several options, including the use of government and volunteer shooters. A draft management plan is due out early this year.

One option not on the table: rounding up the animals and shipping them out. That's because the transfer of living elk is restricted for fear they have chronic wasting disease.

"Now that we're not moving elk, we've got to do something else to control elk numbers," said Bert Frost, the Park Service's acting associate director for natural resource stewardship and science.

Moving elk once was a common management tool at Theodore Roosevelt. After a 2000 roundup, elk were given to zoos, American Indian tribes and even the state of Kentucky.

Since the practice was stopped, the herd at the park in southwestern North Dakota has grown to as many as 900 animals, on land that can sustain only about 360.

At Rocky Mountain, where chronic wasting disease was discovered in the early 1980s, the elk herd is estimated to be at the high end of a target range of 1,600 to 2,100 animals.

At Wind Cave, where the disease also was detected, the animals number about 650, nearly double the ideal herd size. The park had been shipping out elk as recently as 1994.

All three parks are working on new elk management plans. Rocky Mountain's plan includes the use of National Park Service employees and volunteers to cull the herd.

The conservation group WildEarth Guardians advocates the restoration of wolves to manage elk at Rocky Mountain. Executive Director John Horning said the group will sue in federal court by spring to block that park's plan to shoot the animals.

The preferred approach in the Wind Cave plan, which will be presented to the public in draft form in the spring, is to allow animals to move outside the park and be hunted, said Dan Foster, the park's chief of resource management.

Theodore Roosevelt officials agreed to consider volunteer shooters under pressure from U.S. senators and state wildlife officials in Colorado and North Dakota. Private hunting is usually not legal in the three parks.

Wolves have kept down elk herds in other parks, said Margaret Wild, a National Park Service wildlife veterinarian and an expert on chronic wasting disease.

The elk herd at Yellowstone National Park grew largely unchecked in part because of the loss of most predators. That changed when wolves were released there in 1995.

"The Park Service mission is to preserve ecological processes, and the way we try to do that is to let natural processes take their course," said P.J. White, supervisory wildlife biologist at Yellowstone. "Restore native species such as wolves, and minimize human intervention to the extent that we can."

Elk at Rocky Mountain are damaging trees that park biologist Therese Johnson said are important to many animal species. At Theodore Roosevelt, the large number of elk in the park have even caused problems for ranchers like Bill Lowman who live outside of the fenced boundaries.

"Elk will run through a fence, just tear it out by the hundreds of feet," he said. "Elk don't know the difference between federal land and private land. They like private land because it has more hay and feed."

Since elk have to be killed to be tested for chronic wasting disease, there is little hope for any future elk transfers out of national parks until a live test for the disease becomes available for general use.

"We're years away from a live test that could be used," said Bryan Richards of the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis.

There is a live test for deer but it does not work in elk because chronic wasting similar to mad cow disease develops differently in the animals, Richards said.

Removing infected herds and starting over is not an option, Frost said. Potentially infected elk would simply wander back into the parks from surrounding areas, he said.

The Black Hills have a lot of mountain lions, but they cannot remove enough elk to be an effective management tool, Foster said. In the absence of natural predators, he said, "we, the managers, have to be the predators."

01/30/2008: Bat Deaths in NY, Vt. Baffle Experts, Associated Press

(Link to the original article)

Bat Deaths in NY, Vt. Baffle Experts

By MICHAEL HILL 21 hours ago

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) Bats are dying off by the thousands as they hibernate in caves and mines around New York and Vermont, sending researchers scrambling to find the cause of mysterious condition dubbed "white nose syndrome."

The ailment named for the white circle of fungus found around the noses of affected bats was first noticed last January in four caves west of Albany. It has now spread to eight hibernation sites in the state and another in Vermont.

Alan Hicks, a bat specialist with New York's Department of Environmental Conservation, called the quick-spreading disorder the "gravest threat" to bats he had ever seen. Up to 11,000 bats were found dead last winter and many more are showing signs illness this winter. One hard-hit cave went from more than 15,000 bats two years ago to 1,500 now, he said.

"We do not know what the cause is and we do not know how it was spread, either from cave to cave, or bat to bat," said Hicks. "You have this potential for this huge spread."

The white fungus ring around bats' noses is a symptom, but not necessarily the cause. For some unknown reason, the bats deplete their fat reserves and die months before they would normally emerge from hibernation.

New York and Vermont environmental officials are asking people not to enter caves or mines with bats until researchers figure out how the infection is spread. There is no evidence it is a threat to humans, but officials want to take every precaution to avoid it spreading from cave to cave.

Bats are considered particularly vulnerable when they hibernate, a time when they can hang together tightly by the thousands. Indiana bats, a federally endangered species, are considered particularly vulnerable, though the highest death count has been among little brown bats.

Researchers with Cornell University and the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., are among those helping state environmental officials.

The bat die-off has some eerie similarities with "colony collapse disorder," the baffling affliction that began decimating honeybee colonies years ago. Scientists last fall said they suspected a virus previously unknown in the United States.

"I'm very concerned," Hicks said. "I can only hope that what we're seeing today will dissipate in the future."

01/22/2008: Birds in Great Salt Lake Felled by Cholera by the Thousands, New York Times

(Link to the original article)

By SANA KHALID

Some of the birds flew upside down or threw their heads back between their wings. Some fell out of the sky. Others tried to land a foot or more above the water, or swam in circles when they got there. And then they died.

The birds eared grebes, ruddy ducks, California gulls and northern shovelers, about 15,000 in all have been discovered over the past month on the shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. According to the United States Geological Surveys National Wildlife Health Center, they died from avian cholera.

The disease is not new to the West, but the recent outbreak was especially potent, said Tom Aldrich, an expert at the Utah division of wildlife resources. It flourishes in cold weather last November was the coldest on record, Mr. Aldrich said and rapidly spreads when there are concentrated populations of birds with diminished food resources.

Avian cholera, caused by the bacterium Pasteurella multocida, is the most prevalent infectious disease among wild North American waterfowl. It was first reported in this country in the 1940s and has cropped up every few years in recent decades. In 1994, it killed 10,000 birds in the Great Salt Lake.

Dr. Krysten Schuler, an ecologist at the National Wildlife Health Center, said avian cholera was probably spread by carrier birds. Mr. Aldrich agreed, pointing out that the eared grebes were the first birds to get infected with avian cholera.

He added, The eared grebes in the salty parts of the Salt Lake are likely agents to spread the cholera to the other birds that move to these salty regions when the freshwater marshes freeze.

Can humans contract avian cholera? It is very unlikely that a human would develop an infection from eating a bird infected with P. multocida, Dr. Schuler said. But they could become infected if a wound or scratch is contaminated. A respiratory infection is possible if a person is working with carcasses in an enclosed, poorly ventilated area.

Dr. Schuler recommended wearing gloves and thoroughly washing hands when handling any sick or dead animals.

01/04/2008: Reovirus Blamed for Crow Die-Offs, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation

(Link to the original article)

Reovirus Blamed for Crow Die-Offs

DEC Investigation Indicates New Strain; Humans Not Thought Susceptible

ALBANY, NY (01/03/2008; 1216)(readMedia)-- A strain of avian reovirus is responsible for crow die-offs reported in at least six counties across New York in the last week, according to a New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) investigation.

Dead crows were reported in Albany, Dutchess, Jefferson, Montgomery, Orange and Steuben counties over the last week, sometimes in large groups. (Exact numbers for the total die-off arent available; estimates are in the hundreds.)

Postmortem tests show that the birds were killed by a form of reovirus, said DEC Wildlife Pathologist Ward Stone. The particular strain of this illness attacks the birds intestinal system and is spread through bird fecal matter. Winter provides prime conditions for spreading the virus, as crows concentrate in large roosts during the cold weather, Stone added.

Stone stressed that the incidents were not a result of West Nile virus. While the samples will also be tested by the NYS Health Department, this strain of reovirus is not likely to be contracted by humans, he said.

Over the last decade, the U.S. National Wildlife Health Center has reported several strains of reovirus in various birds, especially the American woodcock. Officials in Ontario, Canada, also have noted its appearance there. In the last few years, a small number of crows in New York were felled by a strain of the virus. But this winter marks the largest die-off, Stone said.

Residents are advised to report any unusual bird mortalities to DEC Regional offices (www.dec.ny.gov/about/255.html#Regional_Offices). Also, residents, if disposing dead birds, should use rubber or plastic gloves, or a double plastic bag used as a glove.

01/03/2008: Avian cholera killing waterfowl at Great Salt Lake, The Salt Lake Tribune

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Avian cholera is killing eared grebes, ducks and gulls on the Great Salt Lake in what is becoming an all-too-regular event on the important migratory bird flyway.

Prevailing northwesterly winds have blown about 1,500 bird carcasses into windrows along a half-mile stretch of the lake's southern shoreline near Saltair, Tom Aldrich, migratory game bird expert for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, said Wednesday.

While the disease doesn't affect humans, people shouldn't pick up the birds or let their dogs chew on them, he said.

Avian cholera has been confirmed in the eared grebes. Gull and duck carcasses have been sent to the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., for analysis.

"If I was a betting man, I would bet it was cholera," Aldrich said.

Introduced from domestic fowl during the 1940s, avian cholera has become the most common infectious disease among wild North American waterfowl but didn't appear in Utah until the late 1990s. In 2004, avian cholera killed about 30,000 eared grebes on the Great Salt Lake.

How avian cholera came to Utah remains a mystery. "For a long time people thought it was snow geese that carried this around, sort of like Typhoid Mary," Aldrich said. "But we don't get snow geese here."

About 1.5 million eared grebes land on the Great Salt Lake each fall during their migration. Aldrich said the cholera outbreaks have always started with the small water birds.

The outbreaks on the lake now occur every couple of years, he said. As fresh water areas on the lake freeze, the birds move to the southern shore to feed on brine shrimp cysts.

Avian cholera is a kind of blood poisoning that spreads quickly when the birds are overcrowded and food supplies are short. Scientists say death occurs so quickly that birds can fall from the sky or die while eating without showing signs of sickness.

11/24/2007: Tadpole Slayer: Mystery epidemic imperils frogs, Science News

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Tadpole Slayer: Mystery epidemic imperils frogs

Janet Raloff

From Alaska to Florida, a novel and yet-unnamed protozoan is knocking off tadpoles. Species vulnerable to "the beast" belong to the genus Rana, which includes leopard frogs, green frogs, and bullfrogs, says ecologist John C. Maerz.

His team at the University of Georgia in Athens stumbled across mass die-offs of southern leopard frog tadpoles in nearby ponds last year. Dissection showed the animals' innards peppered with spherical, one-celled parasites. Genetic testing confirmed these are loosely related to Perkinsus, a disease-causing organism that affects marine shellfish.

Maerz' group now offers the first published photos of the pathogen and descriptions of its effects in the September EcoHealth. Infected tadpoles become lethargic and developmentally stunted, the Georgia scientists report. Although the mystery parasite infects all organs, it clusters in the liver, sometimes tripling that organ's size and giving the false impression that an animal is fat and robust. So many protozoa swamped and killed tissue in the liver of one sick tadpole, Maerz recalls, that throughout most of the organ "we could find no identifiable liver cells."

He notes that his team did not discover the pathogen. It was first found by veterinary pathologist D. Earl Green of the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisc., part of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Since 1999, Green has quietly been recording a steady and growing incidence of the novel infection in frogs sent to his lab. All came from east of the Mississippi except for two outliers: frogs from Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, several years ago, and one sample that he ran across 3 weeks ago from the West Coast.

Fueled by warm weather, "this infection kills steadily and slowly over the course of summer," Green says. Although it targets tadpoles, there's a chance that adults could also carry it and serve as amphibian Typhoid Marys.

When Green can steal a moment, he intends to publish his experiences with the pathogenand name it. But that may require yet a bit more information on the shape of its mitochondria, explains Sanford H. Feldman of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, a collaborator on Green's studies. Feldman says his work indicates that "this wicked-looking organism is very primitive" and appears to "phylogenetically sit at the spot where animals and fungi diverged."

It's one of only three infectious agents capable of causing large die-offs of amphibiansalmost all of which are in decline the world over. To date, the new protozoan has been reported only in the United States, Green says, where it has emerged as the "principal threat" that could lead to extinction of the Mississippi gopher frog. This amphibian's sole wild population breeds in only one infected pond, where for at least 4 years virtually all tadpoles have died.

11/22/2007: Panel examines states response to CWD, River Valley Newspapers

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Jerry Davis column: Panel examines states response to CWD

By Jerry Davis / Freelance Outdoors writer

FITCHBURG, Wis. A Department of Natural Resources Chronic Wasting Disease Stakeholder Advisory Group was appointed last summer by then DNR secretary P. Scott Hassett.

The 18-member group has met one Saturday each month, beginning last July, and will continue to meet through January, 2008, when it will make a management recommendation to Matt Frank, the new DNR secretary.

Hassetts charge to this group was to revisit the way Wisconsin agencies are managing CWD, realizing the disease has not been eradicated and that it is present in wild deer in the southern part of the state. Several captive herds, which are not limited to southern Wisconsin, have also had CWD-positive animals and some of the herds have been de-populated since discovering the infected deer.

CWD is a contagious, fatal brain disease in deer, elk and moose. In addition to the infectious prions being transferred deer to deer, there is evidence that prions that are shed by deer onto soil can be picked up by other deer.

The group accepted the following statement to guide their deliberations: How should Wisconsin manage CWD to minimize the impact of the disease on Wisconsins free-ranging deer population, the habitats and biological systems, which include deer, the economy, hunters, landowners and others who benefit from a healthy deer herd?

Most advisory group members are not employees of the DNR, Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, or Health and Family Services. Some members represent conservation groups or businesses, which have an interest in deer management.

While most members are from southwest Wisconsin, Al Brown of Stanley, Robert Page of Appleton, Ken Anderson of Eagle River, Steve Hookstead of Helenville, Ron Kulus of Delafield and Dan Griffiths of Lomira represent state regions where no CWD exists.

Most members are hunters, but Tom Givnish, a Madison resident and University of Wisconsin botany department instructor, is not. He has studied diseases and ecological impacts on the environment and presented an overview of foot and mouth disease.

Each meeting is coordinated by Pat Van Gorp of Beacon Associates in Stoughton, a public participation and consulting firm.

Nearly three months were spent listening to wildlife and CWD researchers, mostly from Wisconsin, but also from surrounding states, including Illinois, where CWD was found in 2002.

Since the discovery of CWD in Wisconsin in 2002, from deer killed during the 2001 gun-deer season, Wisconsin has tested 131,587 animals, many from outside the CWD areas. All 682 deer testing positive were found in either a core area, called the Disease Eradication Zone, or a larger surrounding region, the Herd Reduction Zone, which reaches into the southeast portion of Vernon County.

So far, Wisconsin has attempted to contain CWD by reducing the deer herd in the CWD areas, banning feeding and baiting deer, monitoring the locations and prevalence of the disease and educating hunters about the disease.

Early in the process, Scott Craven, University of Wisconsin wildlife instructor, described CWD as no longer being on a radar screen of many hunters, landowners and the general public.

Deer are still incredibly important to the state in terms of the economy, the environment, hunting and vehicle collisions, Craven said. People do care about the deer, but CWD needs to be brought back on a radar screen. But we dont want a human or livestock disease to be what brings it back.

Members did not hear of any evidence that CWD can jump a species barrier and infect humans or domestic livestock as other prion diseases have been able to do.

The members also heard from Jordan Petchenik, DNR resource sociologist.

We, and others, have found that attitudes are often poor predictors of specific behaviors, when it comes to deer hunting, Petchenik said. There is support to curtail the spread of CWD and opposition to doing nothing, but 90 percent of the hunters dont believe in killing more deer than they can use, 80 percent dont want the herd reduced anymore and 75 percent believe CWD cant be stopped.

Copying what other states have tried, should not be a driving force, according to Bryan Richards, CWD project leader with the United States Geological Service National Wildlife Health Center.

There appears to be very, very low risk to humans and other wildlife except cervids, Richards said. The economics of big game hunting are large, amounting to $10 billion annually in United States.

Richards, when asked how long CWD may have been present in Wisconsin, said his best guess is about 20 years.

He said most studies are too short in duration to determine if methods of managing the disease are working.

Just because one state tried something and quit, shouldnt mean that Wisconsin should follow that plan, Richards said. Situations are very, very different from one state to another.

He also told members that observed dispersion patterns are indicative of long-term spread, that prevalence in free-ranging populations can reach high levels, that research suggests CWD can impact deer populations and that each state must determine its own course of action.

Earlier this month, members agreed not to recommend a do-nothing approach. However, with the present knowledge about CWD, eliminating the disease from Wisconsin was unlikely at the present time, but should remain a long-term goal.

That leaves a combination of things, which may look like a modification of what is presently being done. Namely, slowing the spread or containing the disease until other methods of containment or elimination are possible.

Jerry Davis can be reached at (608) 924-1112 or at sivadjam@mhtc.net

11/06/2007: Thousands of bluebills dead since Thursday, Duluth News Tribune

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Thousands of bluebills dead since Thursday

Sam Cook Duluth News Tribune

Published Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Dan Markham and Noel Hill of Duluth were setting up to hunt ducks on Lake Winnibigoshish near Deer River on Saturday when they noticed a dead bluebill on shore. A quick walk along the shore turned up another three dozen dead bluebills.

Waterfowl biologists with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources estimate that as many as 3,000 bluebills, also known as lesser scaup, may have died along the west shore of Lake Winnie.

The die-off began Thursday, said Steve Cordts, DNR waterfowl specialist in Bemidji. Biologists believe the cause is a microscopic trematode, a kind of fluke, present in snails that the bluebills are feeding on.

Cordts thinks the die-off could continue. Were going to find a lot more dead, he said in a telephone interview Monday.

Cordts and other DNR employees collected about 1,000 dead bluebills from a stretch of shoreline on Friday. In the time it took to collect about 900 of those birds, another 30 to 50 had died in the same stretch.

This is potentially pretty bad because of this snail, Cordts said. The trematode is likely brand new to the system. It could be along the whole stretch of the Mississippi River and could get into other lakes and into other species. Its way too early to speculate a lot.

We were just heartbroken, Markham said. Its depressing.

The die-off also has affected coots, Cordts said, although most coots have already left Lake Winnie. He didnt know how many bluebills remained on the lake.

The snail that apparently is a host of the trematode is the banded mystery snail, Cordts said. It was first documented on Lake Winnie eight years ago by fisheries biologists.

Its been concentrated on the west side of the lake, he said. Its numbers have really exploded.

Die-offs of waterfowl due to trematodes have occurred in the spring and fall since about 2002 on the Mississippi River near Winona, Minn., Cordts said, though not in numbers as high as those on Lake Winnie.

DNR officials sent a few ducks to the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., on Thursday. An initial inspection turned up the trematode identification in one duck, but DNR officials were waiting Monday for confirmation of that in other samples.

Hunters or others should not eat any duck that appears to be obviously diseased, Cordts said. Hunters should use latex gloves when cleaning their ducks.

Cordts said he doesnt know of any other major waterfowl die-offs due to trematodes other than those near Winona. Controlling the snail that serves as a host would be almost impossible, he said.

11/01/2007: Flu lab nears completion, Wisconsin State Journal

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MON., OCT 29, 2007 - 11:28 PM

Flu lab nears completion

David Wahlberg

608-252-6125

dwahlberg@madison.com

Ten-inch walls made with crack-resistant concrete. Outlets sealed with silicone.Sensors for broken windows. Infrared surveillance beams. Redundant air handling systems. A back-up generator.

UW-Madison's $12.5 million Institute for Influenza Viral Research, nearing completion at University Research Park, will have a collection of safety and security features the university hasn't seen before.

Many people will be watching the work of the institute, to be directed by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka.

The observers include health officials, who want a better understanding of the bird flu virus that is threatening a global flu epidemic. They include scientists, who are competing with Kawaoka to make discoveries about bird flu and other flu viruses.

They also include critics, who have charged Kawaoka with circumventing safety rules.

Critics objected three years ago to Kawaoka's research at UW-Madison involving the deadly 1918 flu virus, saying his safety measures were not strict enough.

This September, they revealed that the university halted his work on components of the Ebola virus last year after the National Institutes of Health said the studies must be done in a lab more secure than any on campus.

Without proper precautions, the critics say, such viruses can escape.

"It's a