I don’t know what is happening to the bats, though the fungus is obviously inolved. Bats are mammals and are carriers of rabies. They eat mosquitoes which carry many things, including West Nile, which is relatively new, and can infect mammals. There are several new viral diseases in America due to immigration and airline travel, including norovirus, cryptosporidium, and others. Concievably they are being hit by one of those. Tick populations are way up in areas where their numbers had been lowered substantially due to agriculture, the north-east is one of the areas that is being reforested to a level not seen since settlement, and the undergrowth isn’t being burned out by the natives the way it was before the Pilgrims. “Winter ticks” are killing off deer, due to the feedback between the huge increase in deer and mouse populations, leading to more ticks, leading to more ticks infecting more deer at higher levels. I suspect that bats can be affected by ticks and by lyme disease as well.

It has been an exceptionally cold and snowy winter, but we’ve had those before in previous centuries, and while we didn’t take inventories of bats in the 1800s, they did survive it.

I’m not aware of any new pesticides being broadcast in the past 7 years.

We definitely need to find out what is wrong, because the bats are so important to the environment.

Its an Uphill battle if it has anything to do with us humans (pesticides etc.) especially with Bush still in office

good point referring to the Honey Bee’s also… maybe it is related