It’s another pathological puzzle for North American biologists. Two years after the mysterious “colony collapse disorder” decimated the bee population, a fatal illness is sweeping through bat caves of the north-eastern US.
White-nose syndrome leaves bats abnormally thin, with a white fungus furring their noses. It wiped out 90 per cent of the bats in the two caves in New York state where it was first identified last winter. Now it seems to have spread to New England’s largest bat cave, Aeolus cave in Vermont.
“It doesn’t appear that the fungus is the primary cause of death,” says Elizabeth Buckles of Cornell University, New York. The syndrome encompasses a number of problems,…
