Credit: Nancy Heaslip, New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation

Here is yet another scary article about white-nose syndrome in bats and Hibernia Mine, New Jersey’s premier bat hibernaculum.  Check out US Fish and Wildlife Service’s response to white-nose syndrome here.

Here is a link to a frightening video from cavebiota website that is well worth watching.

I wonder what can be learned from the response to white-nose syndrome and applied to other emerging threats to wildlife.

Could additional scientific resources help stop the spread of this disease? Perhaps, but it seems like the federal and state wildlife agencies are working cooperatively together and are doing a really good job at identifying and monitoring the problem.

The thing that bothers me about the response to white-nose syndrome is that all of the caves in the US have not yet been closed.  We should close all caves at least until scientists have more of a handle on how this disease is transmitted.

I understand that there is a degree of uncertainty about the spread white-nose syndrome and specifically whether or not spelunkers spread it.  Given this uncertainty, it is easy to justify continued cave recreation [natural resource degradation], because  cave recreation is a source of revenue for commercial cave operators and others.  Closing all caves to recreation would shut down this revenue source and seriously affect the caving industry.   However, shutting down caves to spelunkers could slow or stop the spread of this highly virulent disease and potentially prevent the decimation of large populations of bats.  Unfortunately, the way we value natural resources, live bats aren’t worth as much as the caving industry.

It is almost certain that the monetary value of the ecosystem services that bats provide far outweigh the monetary value of  the caving industry.  Bats eat a lot of bugs, so who knows what kind of pest problems we will have in the future, especially on the natural lands we manage. Here is another example of the value of bats, taken from the daily record article:

Merlin Tuttle, an internationally known bat expert and founder of Bat Conservation International in Austin, Texas, told the Daily Record in January that a decrease in bats could affect cucumber crops.

The response to white-nose syndrome is a typical natural resource economics problem that is going to be very interesting to watch play-out, especially if it turns out to be as bad as the scientists think.  Creative economic solutions could be used to help cushion the blow to the caving industry if a nationwide cave closure were to take place.   There are countless examples of creative solutions from other natural resource-dependent industries, especially commercial fishing.

If spelunkers are the major vector for white-nose syndrome and there is not a nationwide cave closure , we may look back and think the response to white-nose syndrome was a failure.