Scientist Says Bats Are Facing A Terrible Fate

This past week brought the chance to pull back the curtains on the world's only flying mammal during Bat Week.

Bats are not the scary, dangerous, "flying rodents" movies and television shows often make them out to be, but incredibly beneficial to the ecosystem, not rodents but a subgroup of mammals called Chiroptera, and are quite cute up close says Kaleigh Norquay Lab Manager of the Craig Willis Bat Lab at the University of Winnipeg.

Kaleigh Norquay Lab Manager of the Craig Willis Bat Lab at the University of Winnipeg."Here in Manitoba and all across Canada bats only eat insects, so that's great news for us because they eat a ton of insects. A little brown bat can eat half its body weight in insects in a single night."

Norquay says this benefits the agricultural industry, foresty, gardens, and ourselves as the bats will eat pest insects.

The wives tale of bats getting stuck in someone's hair is not true says Norquay. If bitten by a bat a person should take the same precautions as with any other wild mammal; with follow up care and rabies shot. Bats are no more likely to carry diseases than a skunk or a raccoon.

In Manitoba, six species call the province home, three which hibernate over winter and three which migrate South. However, bats are facing a new threat, across North America millions of bats are dying because of white-nose syndrome.

"White-nose syndrome is a fungus that can live in the soil, but it can also live on the skin of animals that are very cold. Bats, when they're hibernating, are only about four degrees. This cold-loving fungus will grow on their skin and eat into the tissue and cause them to basically warm up out of hibernation too much and too early," says Norquay.

99 percent of bats affected by this fungus die after being woken from hibernation and inevitably starve over winter.

Unfortunately, the fungus is spreading quickly, says Norquay, with the first case of WNS identified in Manitoba.

 "Last year for the first time our lab found WNS at a cave in the Interlake in Manitoba that houses about ten thousand bats or so. There were some dead, we're not sure how many, but we do expect to see a larger drop-off this year."

Craig Willis Bat Lab is currently working on artificially heated bat houses as preliminary evidence suggests these houses could increase the survival and reproductive rates of the few bats with WNS that survive winter.

Norquay recommends that people avoid mines or caves in the winter to spread the fungus, and to support the protection of bat habitats, "putting up bat houses that they might use during the summertime, not cutting down old growth forests, if people have small stands of trees on their property that can be really important habitat for bats."

To learn more about WNS and supporting projects that protect bat species click here.