Learning a lot more about WNS

15 Jul Learning a lot more about WNS

When I started this internship, I knew very little about WNS or white nose syndrome as a whole. All I knew was that it was a very deadly disease that pretty much destroyed most of the big bat colonys all throughout the east. Researchers haven not found a cure to this disease, but they do know where it originated.

It started in New York and started spreading from there. Now WNS only spreads on bats when they are in hibernation and spreads when the bats either go to material colony or all males colony. But the reason getting DNA samples of white nose is so diffcult is that Bats actually groom the fungus off there bodies after a certain number of weeks after hibernation. That is where guano samples come into play. After a certain point the only way for us to know if bats have WNS is to lab test their guano to see if they have the strain of WNS in droppings. I thought this little piece of information about WNS was actually pretty interesting and I can’t wait to learn more about it in the future.