White Nose Syndrome

White Nose Syndrome

White-nose syndrome (WNS) is a poorly understood disease associated with the deaths of at least 5.7 million to 6.7 million North American bats. The condition, named for a distinctive fungal growth around the muzzles and on the wings of hibernating bats, was first identified in a cave in Schoharie County, New York in February 2006. It has rapidly spread, and as of 2013, the condition had been found in over 115 caves and mines ranging mostly throughout the Northeastern U.S. and as far south as Alabama and west to Missouri and into four Canadian provinces.

According to laboratory research in late 2011, the syndrome appears to be caused by a fungus called Geomyces destructans, but no obvious treatment or means of preventing transmission is known. The mortality rate of some species has been observed at 95%.

The US Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) has called for a moratorium on caving activities in the affected areas and strongly recommends that any clothing or equipment used in such areas be decontaminated after each use.

The National Speleological Society maintains an up-to-date page to keep cavers apprised of current events and advisories.

Read more about White Nose Syndrome:  Impact, Research

Famous quotes containing the words white, nose and/or syndrome:

    ... in every State there are more women who can read and write than the whole number of illiterate male voters; more white women who can read and write than all Negro voters; more American women who can read and write than all foreign voters.
    —National Woman Suffrage Association. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)

    Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.
    Norman Mailer (b. 1923)

    [T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech’s daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.
    Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)