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Hi Steve, Darrel & All, July 7, 2013
I didn't explain my idea clearly enough. I thought 'bat air" said it all
but will now elaborate.
Travel by ocean might work but I suspect the long time without
food/feeding would be fatal.
The hypothetical tourist with dirty boots must have a remarkably unusual
anatomy and articulation for those dirty boots to come into direct contact
with bats for even an instant let alone enough time to transmit a disease.
This idea that a human brought this disease across, in my view, has not even
a shred of merit.
On the other hand, if this tourist is a European Bat, carries the
disease and travels by air ("bat air" to be specific) then the above
difficulties disappear. Our bat spends the evening feeding in the vicinity
of an airport in Europe, looks for a bat motel, finds this crate, enters and
goes to sleep. The crate is soon loaded into the cargo hold of an aircraft,
lands in North America. [And no, the bat would really not need to go through
Customs and Immigration.] The bat flies off and by nightfall gets close to
North American bats.
Some might object that the bat would wake up when the crate was being
moved into the aircraft and consequently not make the trip. This in fact may
explain why the migration of bat disease did not happen decades ago. But
once a bat is asleep it can be very resistant to being awakened (Observed
years ago when I removed a wooden shutter while painting the house and the
bat took a lot of prodding and objecting before it took off.).
All it takes is one diseased bat that does not wake up until after
take-off and the migration of disease is all but completed.
Yt, DW
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen R. Shaw" <srshaw@Dal.Ca>
To: <naturens@chebucto.ns.ca>
Sent: Sunday, July 07, 2013 12:27 PM
Subject: Re: [NatureNS] re bats endangered -- good for other insectivores??
> Hi Dave,
> I think it would be on the unwashed soles of the boots not the clothes or
> armpits, but yours sounds a plausible idea also, though the time at sea
> for a container (2 weeks?) does sounds like a deterrent, as you say.
> Another possible problem is that I don't recall how far inland the
> originator cave lay inside NY State, but you could counter that anyway by
> guessing that the infected bat got there in several flight stages and
> roosts over several days.
>
> All of the options sound extremely unlikely to happen, but that's
> evolutionary opportunity for you -- if tried often enough, the unusual
> will occasionally happen so that an opportunist can colonize a new area,
> in this case with drastic effect on the local species.
> Steve
>
> Quoting David & Alison Webster <dwebster@glinx.com>:
>
>> Hi Steve & All, July 7, 2013
>> Because White nose spreads by direct contact I think one can rule out
>> tourists or researchers as carriers that brought a European disease to
>> NA.
>>
>> I think the chances of some person becoming cosy with a huddle of
>> bats in Europe, zipping across the Atlantic and then hanging out with
>> some North American bats, all without washing, bathing or changing
>> clothes, is very unlikely.
>>
>> The most likely route, in my view, would be by "bat air". Container,
>> cargo and passenger ships are also possible but the long time at sea
>> might be fatal (just guessing).
>>
>> All it takes is one crate/container with a hole large enough for a
>> bat to enter, parked outside in Europe some evening, and transfer of
>> that crate while the bat is asleep to a cargo hold. Once in NA it just
>> needs to go through Customs & Immigration, have it's passport stamped
>> and the rest is history.
>>
>> Yt, Dave Webster, Kentville
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stephen R. Shaw" <srshaw@Dal.Ca>
>> To: <naturens@chebucto.ns.ca>
>> Sent: Friday, July 05, 2013 2:59 AM
>> Subject: Re: [NatureNS] re bats endangered -- good for other
>> insectivores??
>>
>>
>>> Despite the plaudits so far, I'd extend Jim's polite comments further
>>> to say that we take the C-H paper version at home, and found the C-H
>>> bat article in it to be singularly uninformative -- it didn't even
>>> contain info on who to contact if you had the requested bat sightings.
>>> These occasional nature pieces for the C-H are a great idea, but the
>>> surprise in this case is that the consortium of writers that produce
>>> them (which includes David P) didn't get the local person who actually
>>> works on bats and therefore knows something about them, to write the
>>> article - Hugh Broders of SMU.
>>>
>>> I didn't catch the Andrew Hebda interview so the following may be
>>> superfluous, but what I've picked up just from a couple of local talks
>>> here is that the fungus is genetically identically or almost so to the
>>> European strain. This implies that it was imported somehow from there
>>> (on some tourist's or researcher's boots?) and tracked into the single
>>> cave in NY State where the outbreak is known to have started, and from
>>> which it has since radiated outwards quickly. Bats (or some of them)
>>> don't return to the same roosting site but often disperse to different
>>> roosts each morning. This spreads the fungus widely to infect those in
>>> other roosts. That occurs by direct contact between bats --
>>> uninfected bats kept in cages right next to infected ones don't catch
>>> it, meaning that it does not usually behave as an airborne pathogen.
>>> The fungus in Europe seems to have little current effect on the bats
>>> there, which from general host-parasite studies is thought to imply
>>> that the association between the two has been long-term, so the host
>>> bats have eventually become largely immune to the pathogen. Whether
>>> 'long-term' means a few tens of years or 'since the last ice age' is
>>> unclear, but the jump of one now-less-potent malarial parasite from
>>> birds to humans has been placed way back, at an estimated ~12,000
>>> years if memory serves correctly.
>>>
>>> What's unclear to me but someone here will have the answer, is whether
>>> the disappearing NE American/Canadian bats are the same species (or
>>> subspecies whatever that means) that occur in Europe. If so, perhaps
>>> thought is being given to trying to import some individuals of the
>>> counterpart species, that presumably have immunity to the fungus and
>>> so might help to regenerate the local species here?
>>>
>>> Steve (Halifax)
>>> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>>>
>>> Quoting "James W. Wolford" <jimwolford@eastlink.ca>:
>>>>> Subject: [ValleyNature] re bats endangered -- good for other
>>>>> insectivores??
>>>>>
>>>>> Today on CBC Radio News, Andrew Hebda said it might not be long
>>>>> before our little brown bat is extinct, considering the precipitous
>>>>> decline over the past two winters in the hibernacula. Thus Andrew
>>>>> was predicting that, without their night-time enemies, mosquitoes
>>>>> are liable to get much more abundant and troublesome for us than
>>>>> usual.
>>>>>
>>>>> But I wonder if this general insect abundance might actually help our
>>>>> troubled aerial insectivores a bit (swifts, swallows, nighthawks,
>>>>> flycatchers, others?)?
>>>>>
>>>>> Hugh or Mark or Andrew or Fred or Don, Mark's great article in
>>>>> Saturday's NovaScotian section (Herald) left out any information on
>>>>> the history of the fungus (Geomyces destructans) and the bat
>>>>> populations in Europe. Is much known about how the bats fared then
>>>>> and, if they declined hugely like ours, how long it took them to
>>>>> creep back into present abundance. I think I have heard or read
>>>>> that the same fungus now doesn't seem to be affecting the bats much
>>>>> or at all in the Old World.
>>>>>
>>>>> Cheers from Jim in Wolfville.
>
>
>
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