Have you ever gone outside in the early evening and saw what you thought was a bird flying around? Instead, you could be seeing one of Ohio’s 13 species of bats. They are the only mammals that fly and can be found all over the world, including your backyard.
Unfortunately, we are seeing a rapid decline in the populations of our Ohio bat species. In 2006, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation discovered a group of bats in a cave that were all dead. These bats all had a mysterious white fungus growing on their muzzles, which was later discovered to be a cold-loving fungus known as Pseudogymnoascus destructans. This disease became known as White-Nose Syndrome (WNS) and has rapidly become a leading killer in bat populations over the last decade.
WNS infects cave-hibernating bats, such as the Big Brown Bat. This infection disturbs the bats hibernation cycle, prematurely depleting the fat reserves they need to survive the long winters. Due to bats living so closely to one another, they frequently transmit the disease to other bats. Since the winter of 2007-2008, millions of bats have died from this disease. Twenty-nine states and five Canadian provinces have officially been confirmed to have the disease.
Read more at Cleveland.com
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