![]() ![]() The culprit is white-nose syndrome (WNS), caused by a fungus called Geomyces destructans that biologists believe arrived from Europe. Since 2006, about a million bats in the northeastern United States have died during hibernation. It’s unprecedented in the annals of science.”. “I’m not an emotional person, but I was in tears when I saw this. ![]() “You couldn’t step on the cave floor the last two winters without walking on dead bats. He and a group of graduate students visited Aeolus in January 2009 and were appalled at what they saw: Tracks in the snow made by crawling, starved bats birds eviscerating bat carcasses outside the cave entrance bats frozen into ice stalagmites, having died while trying to climb to higher ground and a cave carpeted in bat bones. Two years ago, a new, potent fungus was found rampaging through New York, Vermont and Pennsylvania, wiping out entire colonies of bats Kunz had studied since the Johnson administration. Aeolus Cave in Vermont, the largest bat hibernaculum in the northeast, has long been a winter home for more than 100,000 bats. During trips to bat hibernacula-the bats’ winter hideouts-he grew accustomed to cave walls covered in huddled masses of bats, tens of thousands strong. Tom Kunz has been studying bats throughout New England for more than four decades. ![]()
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