podcast transcription:

helen bradshaw  0:02 
what bat data scientist tina chang remembers most about visiting bats in virginia isn’t seeing the scary creatures of halloween stories, or even the sweet animals of children’s picture books. what she remembers is the overwhelming number of dead bats from white-nose syndrome.

tina cheng  0:20 
it’s really heartbreaking to walk in and see these sick bats. sometimes you would find carcasses in caves as well. and these were, this was especially devastating, going to some caves where are these biologists that come for years. they go to these spots and they know exactly where the bats are because they come back every year. and we would return with these researchers and not only with the bats not be there, but we would see bones on the floor. and that was also really heartbreaking.

helen bradshaw  0:54 
amid the bat linked pandemic that spread between people across the world, covid-19, bats in the us are facing an epidemic of their own with white-nose syndrome. since the discovery of white-nose syndrome in upstate new york in 2006, potentially 10s of millions of bats across the country have died. white-nose syndrome attacks hibernating bats in the form of a fungus pseudogymnoascus destructans, known as pd. this fungus then attaches spores of itself to the bats. these spores are what we see as the white fuzz on bats’ noses, hence the name. but how does a little white fuzz on a bat’s nose cause so much death?

rich geboy  1:34 
yeah, so that’s a great question.

helen bradshaw  1:37 
that’s the us fish and wildlife’s white-nose syndrome coordinator for the midwest, rich geboy.

rich geboy  1:43 
the bats themselves typically will acquire a white fuzz on their muzzle or on their wings. and as it grows into the tissue of the bat’s muzzle, or the wing, or the tail membrane, that will then become set in the effects of the disease.

helen bradshaw  2:05 
the effect of the disease, cheng says in blunter terms, is that it causes the bats to come out of torpor in the winter when they aren’t supposed to and…

tina cheng  2:14 
and then they burn through their fat reserves. and many of them die of starvation.

helen bradshaw  2:19 
but mammoth cave resource management specialist, rickard toomey, says there is hope in the form of vaccination. 

rickard toomey  2:27 
there are tons of people working on cures, mitigations, vaccines, probiotics, all sorts of different approaches, trying to do exactly that: make the bats more immune.

helen bradshaw  2:45 
cheng and geboy say these vaccines and probiotics have not been developed nearly as quickly as our own covid-19 vaccines or shown as encouraging of results.

tina cheng  2:55 
so there have been several probiotics that were under investigation and brought to different levels of trial. so i helped to work on one that’s a bacterial probiotic, it’s naturally found on the skin of bats. and the idea is just to try and amplify that on the skin of bats to provide some type of protection. there have not been any trials, including the one that i worked on, which has shown an increase in survival yet. it’s not to say that this type of intervention is not fruitful or worth continuing. but it has not yet shown really promising results. 

rich geboy  3:43 
there have been a number of scientists looking at this out of the national wildlife health center in madison, wisconsin, essentially trying to develop this vaccine. and with the eventual hope of leading to increased survival from bats. at this point, it’s not there, but they’re still in the development phase of that.

helen bradshaw  4:06 
but dissemination of these medicines would be tricky. america’s millions of bats can’t just book an appointment for a shot. 

tina cheng  4:14 
i think the idea was to get the vaccine in some kind of spray, and then to spray it on bats and then when they groom themselves, which they do quite a bit, then they would ingest the oral vaccine and get vaccinated.

helen bradshaw  4:28 
in the meantime, precautions have been put into action in places like mammoth cave. at this point, these measures are less so for keeping white-nose syndrome out as they are for keeping it in. park visitor alex weaver experienced the bleach bath journey firsthand.

alex weaver  4:43 
so as i saw the, the little thing that we walked through, i was i was kind of confused. i was like i just i don’t know what these are for. so i wasn’t sure if it was more for the protection of the people or agriculture outside of the caves. but after a little bit of questions, i realized this for the bats. i don’t really see too many bats while i was down there. but i figured they, they need protection just like anybody else. so it’s got to follow the little bat rules.

helen bradshaw  5:15 
anti-bat sentiment from the pandemic, and the fact that bats are the primary carrier of rabies in the state of illinois, aren’t helping awareness or support for a cure either. author and journalist david quammen, of outsider magazine and the new york times, says an international fear of bats has deep historical roots, largely based on false information.

david quammen  5:35 
in some cultures, there are these negative impressions of bats, fears of bats, because they are peculiar. they are mammals that fly. bats, in fact, do carry a lot of different kinds of viruses, of which rabies is the most famous and the most scary, because it has the highest case fatality rate. but the fact is that if we leave bats alone, then there’s very, very, very little chance of us getting infected with their viruses. there was a concern that this pandemic not be turned into another excuse for persecuting bats. because there is a high likelihood that this virus originated in a form of bat and the bat didn’t come looking for a human. humans, in some way, still undiscovered, put themselves in a situation where they, they gave the virus an opportunity to spill over from a bat into a human fatefully.

helen bradshaw  6:40 
even if an effective vaccine or probiotic is developed, and even if it’s successfully administered, it’s possible not all the bats can be saved in time. cornell says white nose syndrome has a mortality rate of 90 to 100% among some species of hibernating bats, meaning until a treatment is implemented, bat species like the northern long-eared bat are at risk of extinction.

rickard toomey  7:02 
in 2004, 2005, we had a big bath survey, and northern long-eared bats were almost 50% of the bats caught on the park in the summer. 800 bats were caught. post white-nose, we caught i think two of them. our catch rate on northern long-eared bats went down 99.7%. northern long-eared bats on mammoth cave national park are functionally extirpated.

helen bradshaw  7:39 
while some areas hit by white-nose syndrome have stabilizing populations of little brown bats, the future of north american bats is uncertain.

tina cheng  7:47 
there are other species that have not recovered, that are not stabilized, that have gone sometimes to zero, and will likely never come back.

transcribed by https://otter.ai

lips was camped out in the costa rica rainforest, alone, for a year and a half. her shack was nestled in a remote village atop a mountain bordering panama. each night, she plucked every frog she spotted up from the jungle’s tapestry of flora and swabbed them. 

“you’re walking down this beautiful trail, and you hear the birds and see a hummingbird sleeping on the branches. and you look up and there’s a frog sitting on a leaf, and you walk over there, and you pluck it off the leaf,” lips says.

that was in 1993. when lips returned just three years later, she couldn’t hear the croaking of toads or frogs splashing in streams. their environment was “dead silent.” lips noticed that the number of frogs in the region was  down 90% by 1996. initially, lips blamed everything, from her headlamp to the weather. but when she spotted dead frogs everywhere, she sensed she was front-row to the world’s next environmental calamity.

lips shipped 50 lifeless frogs back to a veterinary pathologist in maryland who confirmed her greatest fear… thousands of frogs were dying at the hands of a mysterious killer. 

a viral villain

it wasn’t until the late 1990s when researchers like lips discovered that frogs in australia and panama were dying by the masses. the silent killer wasn’t an elusive predator or a toxic food source. rather, a virulent fungus was swiftly eradicating species in one fell swoop. amphibians were dying at the hand of batrachochytrium dendrobatidis.

the fungus—called bd for short—is so lethal because it invades amphibians’ porous skin, which the animals use to breathe and drink water. the viral villain destroys the skin’s proteins and devours the remaining amino acids. infected animals become lethargic and experience organ failure in a matter of weeks.  

like the most vicious of diseases, bd doesn’t play favorites: it annihilates frogs young and old, wiping out amphibians across the globe. some amphibians can resist or tolerate bd, but 695 species are vulnerable. and 90 species already have disappeared, while 500 others have sunk into a steep decline, with few projected to recover.

“it’s so widespread. it’s not specialized or anything. it’s huge, it’s just a terrible generalist disease. and that’s what makes it terribly lethal,” lips says.

stopping bd’s killing spree

after her bombshell discovery, lips dove headfirst into understanding and advocating for “one of the largest losses of biodiversity.” in the 25 years since, bd’s killing spree hasn’t slowed down, and neither has lips. 

“there’s so many ways to think about karen and all the different things she’s done. i think one is her curiosity, and her ability to just persist, that she cared so much about this,” says margaret krebs, who led a leadership academy with lips.

lips tracked the global spread across six continents to find that human activity is pushing an amphibian death wish to all corners of the earth. the amphibian meat and pet industries allow bd to travel, leaping off of the back of one frog to the next.

though the virus poses no direct health threat to humans, the global destruction of frogs has devastating consequences. a decrease in the frog population causes an uptick in insects like flies and mosquitoes, who spread deadly diseases including malaria and pose a danger to human health. 

“there are indirect effects on human health… as soon as the frogs disappeared, there’s about a 10-year increase in the number of malaria cases in costa rica and panama,” lips says.

currently, wild populations raging with bd cannot be cured on a global scale. for now, researchers say that the best step is to prevent the fungi’s further spread. in 2009, lips left the south american rainforest for the bureaucratic jungle to promote policy that would prevent the further spread of bd.

“because she saw her study and research sites destroyed by this disease, she realized she was going to have to jump in and get her hands dirty in the policy world to try to deal with it,” says peter jenkins, an environmental lawyer who petitioned government agencies alongside lips for preventing the import of infected amphibians who might bring bd. 

bd is already present in the united states, and the u.s. fish and wildlife service is actively monitoring its spread. yet, in march 2017, the agency ceased consideration of a 2009 petition to ban all amphibian imports unless they were bd-free. 

lips argues that although bd is already in the united states, other harmful variants could make their way into the country without the proper testing that is not presently in place. studies show that the even deadlier african and brazilian strains of bd could hybridize with the original bd strain. 

in 2013, researchers identified b. salamandrivorans, known as bsal. its name aptly translates to “salamander-devouring,” as from 2009 to 2012 the fungus eliminated dutch fire salamander populations by more than 99%. a 2016 ruling banned the import of 201 salamander species. however, if the bsal-infected species were already in the u.s. before the ban went into effect, interstate transport of the species is legal. 

salamanders are indicator species, the frontline voice to determine if an environmental catastrophe is looming. often referred to as a “canary in a coal mine,” they serve as an early warning system for an ecological decline that will inevitably impact humans. spotting a two-lined salamander living under a rock at a stream is a sign of good water quality. the absence of woodland salamanders in a forest is an ill omen.

“(north america) has more families, more species of salamanders than anywhere else in the world. we safeguard the salamanders of the planet,” lips says. “and so if this salamander chytrid gets here, we’re going to expect to see massive infections, die-offs, and impacts just like we saw with bd.”

the film is safe to handle in transport, storage, and application. it allows for reduced agrochemical usage due to its ease and precise application. the film requires no solvents and is non-flammable, and it begins its work using only water as the catalyst. as the application of the active ingredients is simply done by laying the film on the soil, there is a reduced risk of phytotoxicity for the crop, no drift of the agrochemicals in the environment, and no respiration hazard for operators and bystanders. the slow release of the active ingredients starts after the film has been laid and irrigation is turned on. the active ingredients are residue-free and are released within a period of approximately 14 days. therefore, the film is disposable and recyclable at the end of its service life. work gloves provide sufficient protection for operators to prevent dermal absorption of the encased active ingredients during film handling.

field tests conducted over the past 12 months have met or surpassed expectations and clearly demonstrated the advantages of the film over conventional spray application of agrochemicals in terms of reduced use of active ingredients, increased crop yields, and reduced overall costs for growers.

the film was co-developped by imaflex inc. and bayer innovation gmbh. for more, click here.

photo credit to bobolink.