Patty Loew:
A threat of historic proportions takes aim at Wisconsin's bat population. Yep, those flying critters some people love to hate, but keep in mind they are vital to our ecosystem and to our agriculture. Not to mention they feast on mosquitos. "In Wisconsin" reporter Jo Garrett has been tracking new developments with bats.

Jo Garrett:
Patty, bats face a nationwide ecological catastrophe. One Wisconsin researcher is on the front lines as the battle lines are drawn. It's an animal you can see by sound.

Man:
You can hear one going by now.

Jo Garrett:
Tracked through technology.

Man:
You can tell at what height the targets are.

Jo Garrett:
The animal is the bat.

Man:
All right. That was cool. Yeah. Two of them on one path.

Jo Garrett:
Seldom seen by the naked eye. With the use of an infrared lens at night in the middle of what's called fall swarm, you can see, you can get a sense of the tens of thousands of bats that pour through our skies on their way to their hibernaculum, the cave, in this case an old mine in Dodge County where they spend their winter in metabolic slumber. Every year some 143,000 bats wing their way into this one and it's just one on Wisconsin's landscape. Take a good look because this scene, bats cascading through the nighttime sky, could soon be a rare sight. Dave Redell is a bat researcher for the Wisconsin department of natural resources.

Dave Redell:
There's a crisis in front of us. You don't have a lot of time. Look at the belly on this one. We could be looking at two to three years before it gets to Wisconsin.

Jo Garrett:
The “it” is white nose syndrome. Look at these bats. See the ring of white fungus around their nose? Whether this fungus causes white nose syndrome or is just a side effect isn't known. But look at this carpet of dead bats in a cave in Vermont. They know this about white nose syndrome. The mortality rate is devastating.

Dave Redell:
75 to 99% so it could clear out the entire hibernaculum of multiple species.

Jo Garrett:
That's what it's done every year since 2006. Starting with one individual cave in New York state.

Dave Redell:
Spreading south, all the way to Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. We've got nine states now so that's the leading edge right now. Everyone in the northeast states except for Maine has been affected.

Jo Garrett:
Scientists are stunned and scrambling for answers. Redell and his research work here in Wisconsin are in the thick of it

Dave Redell:
What we're doing tonight is looking at post-hibernation weights. As soon as they get through the first one, they hit the second and then flutter down to the collecting bay. They just went through the entire hibernation period. We want to see how much they weigh coming out, how much fat they have remaining. Reason we're doing it here in Wisconsin is because we still have healthy bats and this is sort of our attempt to describe what a normal bat is like.

Jo Garrett:
They need to know what is baseline for bats as part of the campaign to cure or even contain white nose syndrome and they have a deadline. An awful deadline.

Dave Redell:
That's our biggest enemy, is the time line. If in three years you can get nine states, does that mean it will be here in Wisconsin in three years? Worst outcome is multiple species of bats going extinct. More bats being listed as endangered or threatened. Just get caught up.

Jo Garrett:
Spring 2009. Redell and his longtime assistant, Paul White, have spent hours, days, weeks in the fields capturing and then garnering information on bats.

Dave Redell:
Female northern long eared. Biota centrenalis. These are the species of greatest conservation need in the state.

Jo Garrett:
But this story, sadly, is not just about losing bats that are rare like this northern long eared.

Dave Redell:
A lot of people focus their attention on the endangered species and tend to assume the common bat will always be common. Female, little brown bat. Ornery.

Jo Garrett:
It's about common bats like this little brown bat becoming uncommon or even disappearing.

Dave Redell:
Little brown bat is one of the most abundant bats in the eastern part of North America. And to think of a common bat like that going either endangered or extinct is hard to fathom.

Jo Garrett:
The consequences could be catastrophic not just for bats but for us.

Dave Redell:
The common bats are really out there doing the most work.

Jo Garrett:
Work, eating insects.

Dave Redell:
Ask yourself the question, what happens when this number of insects is not eaten anymore. Maybe a single bat eats 5,000 insects per night up to its body weight. You've got a couple of hundred thousand bats in just one area. Now you take away the free service of the bats. We're talking about tons of insects.

Jo Garrett:
Lose these bats and farmers and foresters pay out more, a lot more, for pesticides to tackle those tons of insects. Redell is so concerned about this crisis, he's dipped into his own cash to ensure a steady supply of research dollars.

Dave Redell:
I looked deep in the pocket and my wife Lisa and I, we talked about it for a while. We came up with the idea, let's start a conservation endowment through Natural Resources Foundation. And so we donated enough money to get that started.

Jo Garrett:
And not a small amount of money.

Dave Redell:
It was about $10,000.

Jo Garrett:
Understand that Redell wasn't tapping a trust fund or lottery winnings.

Dave Redell:
No. That's about half my annual salary. I knew we had to raise funds for bat conservation and I couldn't really ask people to donate to something that I don't believe strongly enough in and that I wasn't willing to put myself out on the line for. You have to wait until they calm down. Sometimes this is the longest process of the night is the bat just wants to get out. I just want to weigh them. 9.6. That weighs more than the one we just had. Three dimes.

Jo Garrett:
The plight of the bats might seem similar to the problems faced by another winged animal in the news. The collapse of honeybee colonies. There’s one very important difference, however. Bats reproduce only one baby bat at a time.

Dave Redell:
Generally one young per female per year. That could take hundreds of years if we lose this number of bats to actually recover, assuming that we don't lose them all. You don't want to sit here and document extinctions.

Jo Garrett:
The clock is ticking. Fall 2009 and Redell has recruited more allies to help him in this battle.

Dave Redell:
Looks like all hands on deck.

Paul Heupschmann:
People are in work mode. There's a lot to be done. We're trying to gather as much data as we go.

Jo Garret:
Paul Heupschmann is an associate professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville.

Paul White:
95% in greater reductions in populations.

Paul Heupschmann:
I think everybody is just sort of in a hurry right now.

Jo Garrett:
Research has revealed some clues about white nose syndrome.

Dave Redell:
We know through the transmission studies right here in Wisconsin it is possible for bat to bat transmission of the fungus, either through face-to-face contact or through the air. So that was a big finding.

Jo Garrett:
But sadly, a daunting one. It suggests airborne transmission of the disease, not good.

Dave Redell:
But at least now we know what we're up against.

Jo Garrett:
What are you up against?

Dave Redell:
A fungus that is quite easily spread.

Jo Garrett:
And somehow it seems that weight may be an important element in the syndrome. Affected bats are found emaciated, starved. Does the fungus somehow rouse them during their dormancy which then burns through precious fat reserves?

Dave Redell:
That's what they're doing right now is putting on fat so they have to eat a lot of insects.

Jo Garrett:
Or does it affect the wings, affecting flight and hunting success?

Paul Heupschmann:
He has a scar but it looks like it's injury. So me it looks like there was a tear right there.

Dave Redell:
Bats typically have a few knicks and cuts on them here and there but nothing to the effect they're finding out east.

Jo Garrett:
What they're finding out east, the devastation and the losses, serves as a spur for Wisconsin's researchers.

Dave Redell:
We don’t have much time and we can't afford to sit back and say, wow, there's nothing we can do. We have to give everything towards it that we can.

Patty Loew:
He's going to need some help, isn't he?

Jo Garrett:
Yeah. There's a great program they just started. It's a citizen monitoring program for bats. It's an easy, fun way for people to get involved in this baseline research that's so important.

Patty Loew:
Thank you so much for that report. And for more information, you can check out our website at wpt.org/inwisconsin. You can find ways to participate as a citizen monitor and watch our other reports on Wisconsin bats.