Little Brown Bat (Myotis lucifugus) - face to viewer
Little Brown Bat population in Pennsylvania is devastated
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Scott LaMar
Little Brown Bat (Myotis lucifugus) - face to viewer
The Little Brown Bat was once the most common species of bats in Pennsylvania. But now it is endangered due to a condition called White Nose Syndrome that has decimated the bat population.
Fewer Little Brown Bats has an impact on the ecosystem as they feed on insects, which can damage crops and plants.
On The Spark Tuesday, Doug Wentzel, program director at Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center in Huntingdon County said there’s been a huge loss of the bats in the past decade and a half,”We’ve lost millions of little brown bats and they’re a species of bat that is long lived — documented 25 years in the wild. And they have a really low reproductive rate. So each of the females give birth to just one pup. You still had to work to see bats. But yeah, they’ve been decimated. So the colony losses in some caves, the Pennsylvania Game Commission has done a really, really good job in monitoring and trying to deal with the situation. So, from them, we get the numbers that mortality in some cases was 100%. So entire populations wiped out of some caves, but most were 90, 95%.”
Wentzel said White Hose Syndrome is a fungus that grows on the bats,”It disturbs their hibernation. And the bats grow restless because they have this fungus growing on them and they wake up from hibernation and they burn through those fat reserves that they need to make it through the long winter until food again becomes available in the spring. So, it’s not so much that the fungus itself is causing the death of the bats, but it’s this disturbance to their hibernation.”
There is no cure for White Nose Syndrome.
Wentzel was asked if anything can be done to save the bats,”The disease or the fungus continues to spread in the U.S. So it’s already done its damage in Pennsylvania and probably continues to do damage. There’s probably very few bats that are left that are highly susceptible, but there may be still caves that don’t have the fungus in it. And so it’s a race against trying to understand that the fungus, try to protect the remaining bats.”
