By Janet Raloff
When Donald McAlpine and his colleagues broke through a snow barricade at the entrance to a cave in New Brunswick this March, bat carcasses covered the floor. The biologists had been conducting winter surveys throughout the Canadian province for two years, monitoring the health of hibernating bats. As of early winter, all appeared healthy. But now hosts of corpses lay shrouded in a pale fungus.
Dreaded white-nose syndrome — a virulent fungal infection — had clearly arrived.
McAlpine’s team, from the New Brunswick Museum in St. John, estimated that 1,200 of the cave’s 6,000 bats were dead. Within a month after the discovery, the body count mushroomed to more than 5,000 among this, the province’s largest known collection of hibernating bats.