by Pat Darnell
MooPig's underfunded "Self-righteous Department" led by da' Battiest Liza Minelli -- has issued a gnarly warning: "The race, genus or specie that learns to eat and subsist on insects will survive what is coming!"
PHOTO: "You know I love ya; but the bats are dying; that's why I wore my bat wing dress..." might have said LM.
Warnings aside -- fathom this News, if you can:White-nose syndrome poses no health threat to people, but some scientists say that if bat populations diminish too much, the insects and crop pests they eat could flourish. Researchers recently identified the fungus that creates the syndrome's distinctive white smudges on the noses and wings of hibernating bats, but they don't yet know how to stop the disorder from killing off caves full of the ecologically important animals.Deadly Bat Disorder Spreads in Northeast
By MICHAEL HILL, AP [Today]
Scientists are scrambling to find a solution to a bat-killing syndrome that was discovered just two years ago in some New York caves and has now spread to at least six northeastern states. In an AP photo, a scientist holds a dead Indiana bat found in an abandoned mine in Rosendale, N.Y.
The syndrome may have spread as far as 450 miles from the epicenter, to the John Guilday Caves Nature Preserve in West Virginia. The National Speleological Society has temporarily shut down the preserve as a possible white-nose sighting is investigated.
So far, there are 40 confirmed white-nose sites in the Northeast, said Jeremy Coleman, who is tracking the disorder for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Cortland, N.Y.
Bats Perish and No One Knows Why
[SOURCE]New York Times, By Tina Kelley, March 25
Al Hicks was standing outside an old mine in the Adirondacks, the largest bat hibernaculum, or winter resting place, in New York State.
It was broad daylight in the middle of winter, and bats flew out of the mine about one a minute. Some had fallen to the ground where they flailed around on the snow like tiny wind-broken umbrellas, using the thumbs at the top joint of their wings to gain their balance.
All would be dead by nightfall. Mr. Hicks, a mammal specialist with the state’s Environmental Conservation Department, said: “Bats don’t fly in the daytime, and bats don’t fly in the winter. Every bat you see out here is a ‘dead bat flying,’ so to speak.”
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