Saving Bats Could Prevent Huge U.S. Farming Losses

Kate Kelland PlanetArk 1 Apr 11;

America's bats are dying in their hundreds of thousands due to a mysterious illness called white-nose syndrome, and efforts to save them could prevent billions of dollars in agricultural losses, scientists say.

In a paper published in the journal Science, bat researchers estimated that a single colony of 150 brown bats in the U.S. state of Indiana eats around 1.3 million pest insects a year, and that the value of such bats to agriculture may be around $22.9 billion a year.

They criticized a lack of funds and efforts to save the bats and to find out more about what is causing their widespread population decline. The current "wait-and-see" approach is unacceptable, they said.

"Bats are among the most overlooked, yet economically important, non-domesticated animals in North America, and their conservation is important for the integrity of ecosystems and in the best interest of both national and international economies," the scientists, led by Justin Boyles of the University of Pretoria in South Africa, wrote in the journal.

"The life histories of these flying, nocturnal mammals -- characterized by long generation times and low reproductive rates -- mean that population recovery is unlikely for decades or even centuries, if at all."

The deadly white-nose infection is spreading quickly across the Northeastern United States and Canada, and a study published last year suggested the disease is likely to cause the regional extinction of the one species of bat known as little brown myotis bat.

The syndrome, linked to a fungus that spreads among bats as they hibernate, affects at least seven species, experts say. It was only identified in the United States 2006, in bats nesting in caves near Albany, New York, and since then more than a million of the flying mammals have died.

"This disease is burning through our bat populations like a five-alarm fire," said Mollie Matteson, a conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity in Ohio.

In a telephone interview, Boyles said the researchers aim was to drive home the importance of protecting bats -- animals he said were often undervalued by the public and policymakers.

"A lot of people say 'why should we care about bats?," he explained. "So our goal is to try and emphasize how important they are ecologically and economically," he said.

The scientists said the rising number of wind turbines in the United States and Europe were another major threat to bats. Thousands of dead bats have been found near wind farms, and some scientists believe sudden changes in air pressure close to wind turbines can cause the lungs of the tiny creatures to collapse.

"Solutions that will reduce the population impacts of white-nose syndrome and reduce the mortality from wind-energy facilities are possible in the next few years," they wrote. "But identifying, substantiating, and applying solutions will only be fueled...by increased and widespread awareness of the benefits of insectivorous bats among the public, policy-makers and scientists.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

Bat deaths could cost US economy billions: study
Yahoo News 31 Mar 11;

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Call them creepy little creatures if you like, but insect-munching bats are so valuable to US agriculture that their deaths could cost the economy billions of dollars per year, experts said Thursday.

A fungal disease known as white nose syndrome, combined with the rise in wind turbines which can ensnare the dark fliers, have killed off more than a million of the bug predators in North America since 2006.

Their deaths mean the elimination of an important natural pesticide which is worth at least 3.7 billion dollars per year to farmers, said the study by US and South African researchers in the journal Science.

"Without bats, crop yields are affected. Pesticide applications go up," said Gary McCracken, head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

"Even if our estimates were quartered, they clearly show how bats have enormous potential to influence the economics of agriculture and forestry."

The analysis was based on "published estimates of the value of pest suppression services provided by bats," the study said.

The cost ranges "from about $12 to $173/acre (with a most likely scenario of $74/acre) in a cotton-dominated agricultural landscape in south-central Texas."

Extending those estimates across the United States as a whole, they found "the value of bats may be as low as $3.7 billion/year and as high as $53 billion/year."

McCracken's co-authors were Justin Boyles of the University of Pretoria in South Africa, Paul Cryan of the US Geological Survey and Thomas Kunz of Boston University.

The study says that more than a million bats in North America have died due to fungal diseases in the past five years, and that some projections show that "by 2020, wind turbines will have killed 33,000 to 111,000 annually in the Mid-Atlantic Highlands alone."

The cost analysis focused on the expense of pesticides but did not include the effects of pesticides on the environment or human and animal health.

"Not acting is not an option because the life histories of these flying, nocturnal mammals -- characterized by long generation times and low reproductive rates -- mean that population recovery is unlikely for decades or even centuries, if at all," said McCracken.

Bats Are Worth at Least $3 Billion Per Year
Brandon Keim Wired Science 1 Apr 11;

Insect-eating bats are worth at least $3 billion — perhaps as much as $54 billion — per year to U.S. agriculture alone, say biologists who evaluated their ecological contributions.

With bats threatened by careless wind-turbine development in major flyways and, more pressingly, by the new and dreadful White Nose Syndrome, protecting them isn’t just ethical. It makes bottom-line sense.

If bat mortality “continues unabated, we can expect noticeable economic losses to North American agriculture in the next four to five years,” wrote the researchers, whose study was published online March 31 by Science. “A wait-and-see approach to the issue of widespread declines of bat populations is not an option.”

The estimates are an informed, back-of-the-envelope calculation based on earlier research by study co-author Tom Kunz, a Boston University bat specialist who in 2006 published the most detailed look ever at the relationship of bats to insects and agriculture.

In the eight-county Winter Garden region of south central Texas, Kunz’s group calculated that Mexican free-tailed bats annually saved about $740,000 in pesticide costs, or roughly $74 per acre. (The savings held steady for cotton genetically engineered to produce its own pesticides.)

The new study extrapolates those values, adjusted for local levels of agricultural productivity, to the United States at large. It’s necessarily a rough extrapolation: Some regions have more bats than Texas, or fewer. And they might eat fewer insects, or more. But even as precise values vary, the underlying truth is invariable: Bats eat bugs, lots of them.

Their taxonomic order Chiroptera contains more species than any order except rodents, and eating insects is what they’ve evolved to do. What’s more, there are many “downstream” costs to increased pesticide use — health problems in people, accelerated development of resistance in bugs — omitted from the study.

“Our estimate is very conservative,” said Kunz. “The devil is in the details, and the devil is that this is an extrapolation of one study over the entire U.S.. But that’s the only data we have, and we need to define this information.”

Kunz’s emphasis reflects two critical threats to bats’ future. One is the installation near bat caves and flight routes of wind turbines, which suck bats into their blades. By 2020, wind turbines will kill about 60,000 bats each year in the mid-Atlantic states alone.

The other, more immediate threat is White Nose Syndrome, an extraordinarily virulent disease that emerged in upstate New York in 2006. It had spread to 14 states and two Canadian provinces by 2010, killing well over a million bats. Those death rates are unprecedented in known mammalian history, and threaten to eliminate bats from much of North America.

Spring is the season for identifying newly infected caves, and new reports came in March from Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, Maryland, Tennessee and New Brunswick. More are expected. Yet even as researchers dread the continued spread of White Nose, only a trickle of funding exists to investigate the disease.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the front-line federal protector of bats, spent about $2.4 million in 2010 on WNS. Spread across dozens of states and research teams, that money runs out fast.

Another $1.9 million specially allotted by Congress in 2010 was stripped, along with other so-called “earmarks,” from the stopgap funding resolutions that keep the U.S. government running in the absence of an official Fiscal Year 2011 budget, which should have been passed last October.

When that budget finally passes, White Nose Syndrome research probably won’t be part of it, and agencies that support research will likely have their budgets cut. Meanwhile, whether because money is tight and competition fierce, or because of an institutional failure to appreciate the threat — or both — the National Science Foundation has barely funded WNS research.

“We get drops of water following the bucket, compared to what we need,” said Kunz. “And it’s a dry bucket now.”

One potentially promising development is the proposed Wildlife Disease Emergency Act, which would provide, at least in theory, quick-turnaround funding for research on White Nose Syndrome and other animal outbreaks. However, according to Bat Conservation International policy specialist Jocelyn Ziemian, the legislation could produce an “unfunded mandate” — creating a purse, but not putting money into it.

If bats really are worth $3 billion each year in pesticides alone, short-term frugality may ultimately prove expensive. “In terms of budget, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” said Ziemian.