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Enclosed in a tent of netting, four pairs of hands gripped bats out of the air, like dollar bills in the fair's cash booth. Biologists from Fort Drum and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services were collecting and tagging little brown bats from a bat box on post. The information collected from Tuesday night's tagging will be used to get an estimate of bat populations and about white-nose syndrome. White-nose syndrome, a white fungus that collects on the noses and wings of hibernating bats, has killed more than 1 million cave-hibernating bats in the state since it was first discovered near Albany in 2006. Since then, the fungal disease has spread to other states and several provinces in Canada.
Robyn A. Niver, endangered species biologist for the U.S., said Tuesday's tagging was her first bat sighting of the season. "We're here to help Fort Drum with a research project looking at little brown bats and the effects of white-nose syndrome on them," she said. We're living a huge environmental experiment right now. We've never witnessed widespread losses of animals like this ever in our lifetimes." The information gathered, Ms. Niver said, will also be used to help the U.S. make a final decision on whether the eastern small-footed and northern long-eared bats warrant additional protection under the Endangered Species Act. If the species receive federal protection, they will also gain protection from the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
Carl J. Herzog, DEC wildlife biologist in Albany, said because of the state's drastic decline in bat numbers, DEC was able to supply the service with information that supports the request to add these species to the endangered list. "We were among the key suppliers for information to help them determine that these species should be placed on the list for additional protection," Mr. Herzog said. "We're really ground zero for white-nose syndrome. The numbers we gave the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are figured very highly in the mix." The service is conducting a more thorough review to determine whether the bats should be added to the federal list of endangered and threatened wildlife. A decision is expected sometime in late summer.
More Watertown Daily Times | STUDY DOCUMENTS BAT DIE-OFF
The 19-year-old Mexican was a migrant farm worker who had been bitten on the heel by a vampire bat in his native -Michoacan on July 15 last year, 10 days before he left for the US to pick sugar cane at a plantation in Louisiana. This case represents the first reported human death from a vampire bat rabies virus variant in the United States, said the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in its Morbidity and Mortality weekly report. The unusually aggressive form of rabies had an incubation period of just 15 days, compared with the median 85 days seen in other cases of human rabies in the US, the CDC said. Although vampire bat populations are currently confined to Latin America, climate change could be forcing their populations northward, leading to more cases of human infection in the southern US, the CDC warned.
MEDICAL HELP
The victim had never received a rabies vaccine and fell ill about two weeks after he was bitten by the blood-sucking creature. At the end of July last year, after one day of working in the fields, the man sought medical help for fatigue, shoulder pain, numbness in his left hand and a drooping left eye. The patient soon developed respiratory distress and a 38.4°C fever. During the next several days, the patient became gradually less responsive to external stimuli, developed fixed and dilated pupils, and began having episodes of bradycardia [slow heartbeat] and hypothermia, the CDC said.
Tests showed he had developed encephalitis, or swelling of the brain. On Aug. 20, samples of his spinal fluid confirmed a diagnosis of rabies. A subsequent brain scan revealed severe impairment. His family decided to take him off life support and the man died shortly after. Postmortem tests on his brain tissue determined the variant to be a vampire bat rabies virus variant, the CDC said. The case highlights the growing importance of bats in public health, added the CDC, urging the public to avoid contact with vampire bats and get vaccinated if possible.
INCREASED EXPOSURE
Research suggests that the range of these bats might be expanding as a result of changes in climate, the CDC said. Expansion of vampire bats into the United States likely would lead to increased bat exposures to both humans and animals including domestic livestock and wildlife species and substantially alter rabies virus dynamics and ecology in the southern United States, it said. The US has documented a total of 32 cases of human rabies, mostly from a canine rabies variant, since the year 2000, eight of which were acquired abroad. Two of the cases originated in Mexico. Vampire bats are bloodsucking nocturnal mammals that are typically found in Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Argentina. They usually feed on sleeping wildlife and livestock, but sometimes bite people, too.
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No one knows if the bat had rabies because it escaped. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday it wants to talk to people to make sure they didn't have close contact with it, putting them at risk. CDC officials are trying to reach all 50 passengers who were on the Aug. 5 Delta flight 5121, which departed Madison, Wis., at 6:45 a.m. for Atlanta. The jet was in the air when the winged intruder emerged and repeatedly flew back and forth the length of cabin as shown in a video posted on YouTube. The flight immediately returned to Madison.
Some who have watched the video have speculated the creature may have been a bird. But it was labeled a bat by the passenger who shot the video, the CDC rabies expert who studied the video and by a spokesman for Atlantic Southeast Airlines the Atlanta company that operates the Delta connecting flight. Employees at the Madison airport who helped get it out of the terminal also said it was a bat, based on how it flew and behaved, said Brent McHenry, spokesman for the Dane County Regional Airport. He said there are bats around other buildings at the airport. "We see them all the time."
Passengers trapped the animal in a jet bathroom. At first, it couldn't be found, McHenry said. But it later escaped, flying out the passenger bridge and into the terminal before it was ushered outside. As a precautionary step, health officials want to talk to each of the passengers and ask about possible exposure. Finding them has been complicated. The airline only could provide the names of the 15 who reboarded the plane after its return and completed the flight to the Atlanta. The other 35 were shifted to other flights. The CDC is urging passengers to call 1-866-613-2683.
So far, health investigators have talked to 13 of the 15 passengers who stayed on the flight, and none was bitten or had close enough contact to cause concern. Bats are the primary source of rabies deaths in the United States; only about two to three people die of rabies each year on average. But thousands of people get shots to prevent rabies after exposure to cats, dogs and other rabid animals.
If any people on the plane were infected, they wouldn't know it yet because it generally takes more than two months for rabies to fully develop. The early symptoms are unremarkable fever, headache and general weakness or discomfort. As the disease progresses, more telling symptoms appear like insomnia, anxiety, confusion, paralysis, hallucinations, agitation, an increase in salivation and a fear of water. Dr. Charles Rupprecht, chief of the CDC's rabies program, said agency officials don't recall any similar such investigation in the past.
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But most bats are harmless fruit or insect-eaters, and in North America alone, they save the farm economy billions of dollars annually by controlling destructive pests and pollinating crops. Still, bat populations have been declining rapidly for years, due to rampant disease and human encroachment on their habitats. One woman in the Washington area, who is working to improve public understanding of bats, is also doing what she can to help them survive. As sunlight fades from the evening sky, Leslie Sturges checks on a colony of bats she has been monitoring.
The bats gather at the portals of their summer homes - these wooden bat boxes hung on a pole in a suburban park. One by one, the small brown bats take flight into darkness, hunting for insects and small bugs. But Sturges says she's concerned that her count reveals only half the number of bats as last year. She hopes some have made an early return to the cave where they hibernate in winter. You know my hope is that a lot of the colony already moved out," said Sturges. "But I cant be that optimistic as far as bats are concerned in the Mid-Atlantic."
Sturges is director of a conservation group called Bat World NOVA. She cares for injured and orphaned bats here in her basement. Then she releases them back to the wild. Bat populations are declining worldwide, mostly because of habitat destruction and overuse of pesticides. Sturges says common fears that bats will fly into your hair, or that all bats carry the deadly rabies virus also contribute to human intolerance of bat populations. A lot of people refer to bats as filthy," she said. "But they arent. They groom like cats and dogs do. They use these toes back here to actually comb their fur out.
Sturges also teaches the importance of bats at nature centers and in schools. Her goal is to promote their protection and conservation by stressing the positive things bats contribute to the environment. One of the things they contribute, well around here in North America, is pest control for plant-eating insects," said Sturges. "So anyone who grows anything is getting an assist from bats. Contrary to popular belief, bats are not blind. Their eyesight is actually pretty good. But at night they navigate in flight using a system called echo-location . They use their sensitive ears to listen for objects and bugs - that reflect back their high-pitched chirps - which we can hear with this device.
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