West Virginia Wildlife from Eyewitness News

Whitenose Syndrome

A killer fungus could wipe out West Virginia's bats

August 5, 2009
Reporter: Patrick McMurtry
Videographer: Brad Rice

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West Virginia DNR biologists have won major acclaim and awards for their work with bats. Now they're watching almost helplessly as a killer fungus invades some of the bat colonies here.

"There's absolutely nothing we can do to stop White Nose."

Those are awfully tough words for Craig Stihler, a biologist with West Virginia Department of Natural Resources. He loves these bats and spends a good chunk of his life monitoring and studying them.
He doesn't like what's happening to them now.

"What they've found in NY is when White Nose comes in, you get large die offs of bats, those bats that make it through the first winter, when they return, they again come down with White Nose in the cave and they continue to die. They've seen 90-99% mortality to the bat population and there's no reason to believe we wouldn't see something like that here." says Stihler

That would be devastating. There are a lot of bats in West Virginia, and they eat a ton of bugs and insects. Wipe out the bat population, and life becomes tougher for all of us. Stihler fears what that could mean for West Virginia's bat population.

"If it runs true to course like it has farther to the north, we're going to see large die offs of bats. The estimates are between 500,000 to 1,000,000 bats have already died off in the Northeast. WV has a significant bat population."

There's little the DNR can do. They are stepping up their monitoring of the bat colonies here but the real danger is still a few months away. Craig Stihler explains.

"The bats are not making it through the winter. They are waking up too frequently or are burning their fat supply too quickly, but when they get White Nose Syndrome, the bats basically starve to death in the winter when there are no insects available, so they can't make it through the winter."

There is no cure, no antidote but there is hope. Craig says scientists are working hard to find something that will wipe out this killer fungus before it wipes out our bat colonies.