WNS “has caused the most precipitous wildlife decline in the past century in North
America,” said John Hayes, Chairman of the University of Florida Department of
Wildlife Ecology and Conservation Department.
“This could be the most important meeting any of us will ever attend with regard to the
conservation of American bats,” Merlin Tuttle, Founder and Executive Director of
Austin-based Bat Conservation International (BCI), said in opening the session.
And from the BCI webpage which had the press release:
Whole species, including the already-endangered Indiana and gray bats, are in imminent peril. Their loss could have serious consequences for the wellbeing of North American ecosystems, agriculture and human health. These bats are prodigious predators of night-flying insects, including many damaging agricultural and forest pests. Many bats, including the WNS-battered little brown bat, eat an average of half their body weight in insects each night from mid-April to mid-October. Kunz conservatively estimates that the million bats already lost to WNS would have eaten about 1.39 million pounds of insects each year. Without these bats, crop damage and pesticide use will almost certainly increase.
Another quote from Merlin Tuttle - this is “the worst wildlife crisis documented in North America in the last century”.
If you have not already contacted your elected officials regarding WNS, please do so! Also if you want to donate directly to the research you can do so on BCI's page: http://www.batcon.org/index.php/educati ... -fund.html
