By Janet Raloff
The same fungal species wiping out hibernating American bats also strikes their European kin — although it doesn’t kill them. But that’s not because the European strain of the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome is less virulent, a new study finds.
“The European version is even nastier than the North American one,” says Craig Willis, a wildlife biologist at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba. The surprise finding emerged from a trial in which he and his colleagues infected 36 healthy Canadian little brown bats with the fungus Geomyces destructans.
Half of the animals got fungus isolated from North America, the others fungus from Europe. All animals quickly developed white-nose syndrome, a disease named for the telltale mask of threadlike fungal growths it leaves on bat faces. Harder to see but more devastating, G. destructans eats through the skin of a bat’s wings and begins digesting inner tissue.