Defenders of Wildlife Blog

Bats with white nose syndrome

The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced today that white-nose syndrome (WNS) has been confirmed among gray bat populations found in Tennessee.  Already listed as endangered, this announcement comes as a blow to the gray bat as their populations have started to make a comeback nationwide.  Although no deaths among the gray bat populations have been attributed to WNS, they were not one of the previous 6 bat species that had been diagnosed with the disease.

For more information on WNS, read Defenders’ magazine article here.

Bats may be perceived as scary but they are a critical part of many ecosystems around the world. The really scary fact about bats has nothing to do with their vampire-like reputations but with the fact that according to the Bat Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), bats are some of the world’s most endangered species. This is due in part to habitat destruction. In my last post about bats, I talked about how harvesting bat guano contributes to this habitat loss and the work of our Emerging Wildlife Conservation Leaders (EWCL) team project to develop international standards for the sustainable harvest of bat guano. By developing standards for sustainable harvesting practices, many of these harmful impacts to bats can be avoided.

The EWCL Bat Group convenes in Florida to plan their sustainable guano harvesting project. That's me, Alli, on the far left doing my best bat pose.

Since my last post, our team has been hard at work on the first phase of developing these standards, with the goal of getting the standards adopted by IUCN in September 2012. IUCN is a global membership organization consisting of NGOs, government agencies and scientists working on some of the world’s most pressing environmental problems, including biodiversity loss. IUCN’s species programme focuses on assessment and developing tools for sustainable species management—which is exactly why our team wants their endorsement on standards for sustainable guano harvesting.

The EWCL bat team has spent some time researching guano harvesting and its impacts on bats and developed a draft set of guidelines. But to really make these guidelines have an impact, we’ve reached out to bat experts from around the world. Our team has formed a five-person advisory committee with experts from the Philippines, Cambodia, the U.S. and the U.K. The committee will take our initial research and draft guidelines and fine-tune them so that they are applicable to situations facing harvesters, communities and governments on the ground.

For example, how will guano harvesting be monitored to ensure that these guidelines are followed and if they are effective? Who should monitor the harvesting? How will the guidelines affect local people? What are the impacts of guano harvesting on the invertebrate communities living in the guano and how should these guidelines address those species?

These are the kinds of big issues that our advisory committee and EWCL team will be grappling with over the next couple of months. With help from our partners, we hope to take draft guidelines developed by the committee to communities in Cambodia and the Philippines to test them out in the real world. With these guidelines, we hope to make the world a little less scary—for the bats.

Adopt Nature’s Best Mosquito Repellent!

Adopt a Bat Today!

Bats play an incredibly important role in the ecosystem, eating billions of crop-destroying insects like moths and beetles, as well as mosquitoes. But in just four years, more than a million bats have been killed by the mysterious disease known as white nose syndrome.

Your bat adoption will show everyone that bats are nothing to fear and help Defenders continue to work to protect these amazing creatures and the places they live.

Visit our Wildlife Adoption & Gift Center to adopt any of our other imperiled creatures of the night—and day!

Take Action to Help Save Bats!

A new petition has gone up on the White House’s We the People site to urge President Obama to fund the fight against White-nose Syndrome in his Fiscal Year 2013 budget. The petition requires 25,000 signatures by November 25th, 2011 to receive a response from the White House.

Please take a moment to speak up for bats by signing the petition. (Note: You must register with whitehouse.gov to be able to sign the petition.)

EWCL (“yoo-cull”) IN YULEE

About two months ago, I participated in the first part of the Emerging Wildlife Conservation Leaders (EWCL) program at the White Oak Conservation Center in Yulee, Florida. EWCL is a two-year training program that brings together promising young leaders from conservation NGOs, state and federal agencies and international organizations for intensive training on media relations, conservation planning, strategic communications, fundraising and basically everything that you need to know to be a successful conservationist. Participants get to test these skills by working on teams to develop full-fledged campaigns for the conservation of specific species.

After a very LONG day of project research and negotiation, our class decided to focus our campaign projects to protect lions, slow lorises, bats, and radiated tortoises. Each of these species faces unique conservation threats ranging from poaching to illegal trade to habitat disturbance and destruction. How each of our EWCL project teams chooses to address these threats will depend on local conditions, the partnerships we’re able to develop over the next year and ultimately, all of the leadership skills that we learn as part of our EWCL training.

THE POWER OF POOP

The EWCL Bat Group convenes in Florida to plan their sustainable guano harvesting project. That's me, Alli, on the far left doing my best bat pose.

I am part of the team working with Bat Conservation International (BCI) on developing international standards for the sustainable harvest of bat guano. Bat guano has been harvested from caves for centuries and has been put to a variety of uses, including for gunpowder during the U.S. Civil War. Today bat guano is primarily used for fertilizer, both in commercial production in places like Texas and for subsistence farming purposes in places throughout Southeast Asia and Latin America. Guano harvesting can have huge impacts on bat colonies. Bats are extremely sensitive to disturbance, and harvesting guano while bats are roosting can cause pup loss and abandonment of caves. Lack of understanding of these impacts, together with unclear property rights and lack of any rules to enforce have led to unsustainable guano harvesting practices.

Over the course of the next year and a half, our EWCL team will work with BCI and other partners to develop international standards for guano harvesting. We will work with up to two communities to develop pilot projects for the application of these standards to help bat conservation professionals work with all relevant stakeholders to create effective management regimes at the local, national and regional level. In just the short amount of time that we’ve been working on this project the need for these standards is clear. The entire EWCL bat team is looking forward to working on this issue.

Click here to learn more about bats in the wild.

Stay tuned for periodic updates on bats and our project in general!

A weekly homage to endangered species, large and small

(Original text written by Benjamin Ikenson)

INDIANA BAT

A bat of unknown subspecies outside a public library in South Portland, Maine.

They sleep hanging upside down … in dark, damp caves; They look like strange rodents with over-sized wings attached at their shoulder blades; And they typically take to the skies at night when the rest of us are getting ready for bed. It’s no wonder bats might have a freaky effect on some.

Take Myotis sodalist.  Myotis means “mouse ear” and refers to the bat’s small, mouse-like ears.  Sodalis means “companion.”  The bat happens to be very social, clustering together in large numbers during hibernation.  The bat’s common name is a little less straightforward. It’s called the Indiana bat not because its home is confined to the Hoosier State but because the first specimen to be described to science was found there, in southern Indiana’s Wyandotte Cave, in 1928. Its actual range includes most of the other states in the eastern half of the U.S. Unfortunately, its expansive distribution made the bat vulnerable to wide scale habitat destruction by the commercialization of caves, the blocking of cave entrances, and timber practices. Once among the most abundant mammals in the eastern United States, the Indiana bat became among the first on the endangered species list in 1967.

Learn more about basic bat biology and behavior from our fact sheet.

White Nose Syndrome

Bats in a cave with the characteristic marks of white nose syndrome.

Since 2006, a mysterious fungus known as “white nose syndrome” has killed more than a million bats in the eastern United States. The epidemic is believed to have started in a cave near Albany, New York and has since spread up and down the Appalachian Mountains, from Maine to North Carolina, and is even starting to spread across the Midwest.

Researchers believe that a newly discovered fungus, Geomyces destructens, is responsible for causing white nose syndrome in bats that hibernate in caves. The fungus leads to a fuzzy white growth on the nose, ears and tail, which wakes the bats up during hibernation, causing them to waste precious energy reserves. Bats that use up their fat reserves in winter often do not survive until spring.

In May, the US Fish and Wildlife Service released a comprehensive plan to study the causes and impacts of white nose syndrome and hopefully identify potential treatment and prevention strategies.

Read more about white nose syndrome in Defenders magazine, including a narrated slideshow by writer Madeline Bodin.

What Good Are They?



Despite population declines, bats have come a long way insofar as their reputations are concerned. Long associated with horror and the occult, bats are now widely appreciated for the roles they play in, well, the real world.

Don’t like mosquitoes? The Indiana bat is your friend. Don’t want crops destroyed? Insect-eating bats work for the farm by providing free pest control. According to a study published in Science magazine, the loss of bats could result in crop damage totaling $3.7 billion per year. Oh, and by the way, if you just happen to be a microorganism living in a cave, bats might just be your (warning: analogy may be in poor “taste”) bread and butter: many forms of cave life depend on the nutrients in bat poop.

Adopt Nature’s Best Mosquito Repellent!

Adopt a Bat Today!

Bats play an incredibly important role in the ecosystem, eating billions of crop-destroying insects like moths and beetles, as well as mosquitoes. But in just four years, more than a million bats have been killed by the mysterious disease known as white nose syndrome.

Your bat adoption will show everyone that bats are nothing to fear and help Defenders continue to work to protect these amazing creatures and the places they live.

Visit our Wildlife Adoption & Gift Center to adopt any of our other imperiled creatures of the night—and day!

View from the top: Calakmul means "the city of two adjacent pyramids"

The Calakmul Biosphere Reserve sits within the Mayan forest, the second largest  tropical forest in the Americas. Home to jaguar, tapir, deer, bats, amphibians, reptiles and monkeys, the reserve is one of the most biodiverse and threatened regions of the world. Recently, the Mexican government has been aggressively promoting economic growth and tourism in the region. But with development comes deforestation and highway expansion – bad news for Mexico’s wildlife. According to some estimates, if all highway plans are carried out, at least 768,917 acres of the Mayan forest will be lost by 2030. That’s bigger than Yosemite National Park!

For the past few years, Mexican officials have been widening Highway 186 that crosses through the Calakmul biosphere reserve to accommodate more traffic. Fortunately, Mexican conservation organizations have been working with officials to incorporate wildlife-friendly measures along the highway. Without them, these bigger, wider highways carrying more cars and faster traffic through the preserve would put wildlife and motorists in jeopardy.

In the summer of 2009, I was invited to Mexico to discuss the best ways to reduce the impacts on wildlife and provide the animals with ways to move throughout their habitat. Together with partner organizations, I met with representatives from the Mexican federal transportation and natural resource agencies, as well as the biologists who have been tracking jaguar movement throughout the reserve. During my last few days, we even toured Highway 186 to scout out the best locations for wildlife crossing structures.

Trisha White (middle) stands with partners from other conservation groups underneath Highway 186

Entering the bat volcano

One evening, my hosts took me to see a unique cave less than 600 feet from the highway called “el volcan de los murcielagos” (in English, “the bat volcano”). Each night, two million bats of eight different species leave the cave  to hunt and feed. Standing at the mouth of the cave, I watched in awe as the bats swirled like a black tornado, and then zoomed right by my head as they flew out for their nocturnal activities. It was a wildlife encounter I will never forget.

Sadly, I also was witness to the slaughter on Highway 186 that ensues every night right after the bats’ departure. As we left the forest, we saw the highway littered with dead bats, hit by passing cars. Looking in both directions, I could see the bats in the headlights just before they were struck. I could hear the tiny impacts on the grills of the trucks as they zoomed past me. I knew this would only get worse as Highway 186 was widened and more and more traffic passed through.

Getting better for bats

Today, I’m happy to report that we are seeing progress on Highway 186. Due to the ongoing, tireless efforts of our great partners in Mexico, plans are underway for wildlife overpasses and tunnels to be constructed in selected sites with the agreement of the Mexican federal government.

Until then, motorists will have new signs to alert them when they are entering wildlife habitat areas. Using the information provided by the conservation organizations, signs were placed where animals are most likely to cross and speed limits are reduced for added safety.

Learn more:

Click here for more information on how we can make roads safer for people and wildlife of the Mayan forest.

Watch this video to learn more about the effects the highway is having on wildlife in Calakmul and Balamku, Mexico.

This Halloween, keep a wary eye out for things that go bump—and prowl, growl, hoot and howl—in the night. Many of the world’s most impressive predators wait for the cover of darkness before setting out to make their living. Here’s a gallery of some of nature’s most successful nighttime hunters.

Leopards prowl the night in Africa, Asia and India, bringing down deer, gazelles, monkeys and even birds. They’ll often drag their kills into the same trees where they lounge during the heat of the day, keeping themselves and their next meals safe from other predators.

Most owls, such as the northern spotted owl and Mexican spotted owl, wait for nightfall to swoop on silent wings in search of hapless squirrels, rabbits, wood rats and other small mammals. However, the snowy owl and burrowing owl do most of their hunting during the day!

The Florida panther is mostly active between dusk and dawn, when it searches through Florida’s swamps and forests for deer, rabbits, raccoons and feral hogs.

The panthers will sometimes take small pets or livestock too; that’s why Defenders works with local landowners to help them construct panther-proof fences and pens to help keep domestic animals safe from these native cats. Learn more about living with panthers on the Defenders website.

One of the smallest predators Defenders works on, the black-footed ferret, depends entirely upon prairie dog colonies for both food and shelter. At night, while the prairie dogs sleep snugly in their dens, the ferret prowls through the colony’s tunnels in search of their next meal.

The wolverine is primarily nocturnal, but can also be active during the daytime. This strong, aggressive animal may lope for dozens of miles as it hunts for ground squirrels and snowshoe hares, though it will also frequently scavange from the carcasses of larger animals killed by wolves or bears.

Red wolves wait until dark to hunt in North Carolina’s Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge and Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. Not much larger than coyotes, red wolves search for rabbits, raccoons, squirrels and other small prey, but will sometimes take down deer as well.

Gray wolves are crepuscular, meaning they do most of their hunting at dawn and again at dusk. But they’re also opportunists; they’ll take advantage of a good hunting opportunity any time of day or night.

Mythbuster: Contrary to popular belief, wolves don’t howl at the moon! But they do howl more often on brightly lit nights. This year, Halloween falls a full week after the full moon—will the night be bright enough to prompt some howling? If you live in wolf country, take a listen, and let us know!

Adopt the Ultimate Creature of the Night!

Adopt a Bat Today!

Bats play an incredibly important role in the ecosystem, eating billions of crop-destroying insects like moths and beetles, as well as mosquitoes. But in just four years, more than a million bats have been killed by the mysterious disease known as white nose syndrome.

Your bat adoption will show everyone that bats are nothing to fear and help Defenders continue to work to protect these amazing creatures and the places they live.

Visit our Wildlife Adoption & Gift Center to adopt any of our other imperiled creatures of the night—and day!