Each year we celebrate Halloween, each year different media channels and web sites cover this topic. There are over 173,000,000 Halloween Results in Google. Hardly the majority of the given number highlights history, costumes, and jokes about this holiday. But while looking for some interesting info I came across a very interesting article at Boston.com about bats. It seems that they become fewer and fewer each year. We know that Bats are one of Halloween’s most enduring icons, but according to the Boston.com article “the mysterious creatures’ silhouettes against the moon are disappearing in the Northeast. A baffling illness has wiped out more than 75 percent of bat populations in the abandoned mines and ice-encased caves where they hibernate.”According to the online edition of the journal Science researchers report that the white fungus is very noticeable on the bats, they last year dubbed the sickness "white-nose syndrome."

Scientists know that the fungus grows best between 41 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit. According to the Boston.com Where we come across the citation of David Blehert, director of diagnostic microbiology at the US Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin, saying "It grows slowly just like mold grows on your cottage cheese in the refrigerator," But he adds that in hotter temperatures grows far more slowly.

Seems that hardly one can help bats in this direction.As Blehert says "We can do all we want to attempt to control human movements, but we can’t control ... wild bats."



References:http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/green/greenblog/2008/10/fewer_bats_this_halloween_scie_1.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/sciencexpress/recent.dtl