Why bats matter
First, we need to get past the 'ick' factor with bats. 

• They do not turn into vampires.
• They rarely fly into bouffant hairdos.
• They do not drink your blood, except in parts of the Brazilian rain forest.

What bats do, though, is consume a lot of bugs. Hazel Barton, a researcher at the University of Akron, says a single bat can eat 3,600 hundred insects in a night.  She says the epidemic wiping out bats in the Eastern U.S. is radically changing our ecosystems by the removal of these important insect predators.  

She says the loss of 6.5 million bats from the white nose epidemic, "translates to a hundred billion more insects this year than we would have had if those bats were still alive.”

Bats eat insects that attack crops - moths whose caterpillars feed on fruit trees, beetles whose larva eat soybeans or potatoes … bats eat disease carrying mosquitoes.  The loss of bats could cost billions in lost crops and increased use of pesticides.  The looming extinction of several bat species is not just an ecological tragedy; it could be catastrophic to our food growing economy. 

The epidemic spreads 
White nose syndrome first appeared in 2006 in a cave in New York. It is believed to have arrived from Europe on the sole of a hiker’s boot.  Then infected bats spread the fungus along the Atlantic seaboard, north to Ontario, south to the Smoky Mountains, and west all the way to Missouri, leaving millions of dead bats in its wake.  

That’s why a crew is deep in the woods at Liberty MetroPark in Twinsburg welding steel bars across the mouth of a narrow cave.  Tony Morgan and Ryan Boyes bend steel around the contours of a slit cave that dives deep into a sandstone cliff.

The bars are spaced wide enough for bats to fly through, but prevent people from going inside and tracking out invisible spores of the deadly fungus. 

Mike Johnson, chief of wildlife for Summit Metroparks, directs the project.  He says the cave shelters tens of thousands of hibernating bats from four species -  big brown, little brown, tri-color, and northern long-eared bats.  Like a blast of air conditioning, cool air from deep inside the cliff hits the late summer heat.   

The white nose fungus can only live in the cool conditions of caves like this one, and on the chilled bodies of hibernating bats. 

Hope from the survivors
Last year’s mild weather allowed most bats to survive despite the arrival of White Nose Syndrome.  But Johnson is not optimistic about this season.  He says out of those tens of thousands, even one-hundred thousand hibernating bats,"we’re expecting 95% of them to die.”

He says the gates will keep hikers from disturbing the few bats that may survive.  And it’s those few survivors that scientists intend to study.  Hazel Barton and her team at the University of Akron will crawl through a small hole in the bat gate this winter to sample sleeping bats.  They’re hoping to isolate compounds on the surviving bats’ skin that may hold clues to a natural immunity to the fungus, and perhaps lead to a cure.  But for now the plan is to slow the spread of the disease, and the bat gates may be their best hope. 

I’m Jeff St.Clair with this week’s Exploradio.