While they are the ultimate survivors, bats and other creatures that have beaten extinction (like crocs) are facing an increasingly toxic environment. Even bees are battling to fly their way through the cirrusy wavelengths that hum will cellphone signals. Moths are also getting lost....Where is all this going?
New theories about what's wiping out huge populations of the tiny winged mammal point to pesticides and climate change.
Biologists named the syndrome for the unusual white fungus growing on the muzzles and bodies of many of the dead and dying bats. But most bat biologists believe the fungus is a symptom of WNS rather than the cause -- an opportunistic infection running amok in an already weakened bat. What's behind the deaths? Scientists don't know exactly, but they know the condition's deadly. Indeed, it looks as though WNS is to bats what colony collapse disorder is to bees, another baffling lethal syndrome.
"This is the worst crisis I've ever seen," says Merlin Tuttle, founder and president of Bat Conservation International. "I think anytime you have animals as ecologically essential, and as distantly related, as bees and bats dying en masse, it should send a canary-in-the-coal-mine signal."
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