For these researchers, an ideal summer night is spent chasing bats through Vancouver’s parks | 24CA News

Around nightfall on a balmy evening in July, tiny winged animals zip by way of the fading sky above Vancouver’s Vanier Park. Armed with a headlamp strapped to his brow, bat researcher Aaron Aguirre rubs his gloved fingers along with delight.

“Oh, I love this,” he says, smile nonetheless clear from behind his black face masks. “I love getting my hands on bats.”

Aguirre, 29, is a part of a specialised staff spending the summer time gathering extra details about the town’s city bat inhabitants to guard the mammals — and their billion-dollar profit to the financial system — as one of many deadliest wildlife ailments in North America creeps nearer to the coast.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) are capturing bats in at the very least 20 metropolis parks to allow them to be tracked and examined for white-nose syndrome, a plague brought on by a fungus that feeds on the muzzle, ears and wings of hibernating bats.

White-nose syndrome detected in Kootenays

This summer time, they should collect baseline info so that they have a place to begin from which to trace losses and probably begin preventative therapies ought to white-nose syndrome attain the town.

The fungus that causes white-nose syndrome was present in bat guano — or bat droppings — in B.C.’s Kootenays earlier this 12 months.

The situation burns up fats the bats must make it by way of the winter, leaving them to starve or freeze to demise. The mammals also can get up too early as a result of the fuzz for which the illness is called is simply uncomfortable — like making an attempt to sleep with a foul case of athlete’s foot throughout your nostril.

The illness, which spreads shortly between huddled bats, can wipe out as much as 98 per cent of any given bat inhabitants.

“It was devastating to see,” mentioned Canadian National White-Nose Syndrome co-ordinator Jordi Segers, recalling an outbreak that killed a lot of the bat inhabitants in Nova Scotia almost a decade in the past.

“We were literally walking on corpses as we entered the cave. There were just thousands of dead bats lying on the ground there.”

Natural pest management price billions

Preserving the bat inhabitants is important for the financial system and atmosphere in B.C. The mammals are pollinators and insect-eaters able to devouring half their weight in bugs — together with mosquitoes — in a single evening. Their pure pest management saves Canada’s agriculture and forestry sectors billions yearly, in line with Parks Canada.

Despite their advantages, there may be little analysis out there on city bat populations.

At Vanier Park, the staff wears face masks and rubber gloves to keep away from any likelihood of infecting the bats with COVID-19.

They catch the bats with nets so positive the mesh is troublesome for people to see with the bare eye. Most of the bats in Vancouver are little brown bats — speedy, nocturnal animals that weigh about as a lot as a plastic bank card. They wish to roost in human-made buildings, however the species is now thought-about endangered due to its susceptibility to white-nose syndrome.

Once captured, the fragile animals are measured, weighed and swabbed. They’re additionally milked to substantiate whether or not they’re lactating females.

Bigger bats are tagged with small radio telemetry tags to observe their motion and monitor the place they sleep throughout the day.

“I would say it’s pretty urgent,” mentioned Matthew Mitchell with UBC’s Faculty of Land and Food Systems, referring to the analysis underway.

“Especially here where the bats and particularly the urban bats are fairly understudied, we really want to get a handle on what these populations are like, what their ecology is like, where they’re spending their time before we start seeing bats with white-nose syndrome.”

White-nose syndrome first appeared in North America in 2006 in New York state, in all probability by way of transport. It’s unfold largely bat to bat, though people can play a job by carrying spores on their garments or gear. There isn’t any treatment for the illness, however there are preventative therapies.

“It’s hard to predict exactly what will happen if we lose bat species. There’s lots of other things going on in urban landscapes, the climate change, people changing the landscape, all of those sorts of things,” mentioned Mitchell.

“But I would also just be really sad if there weren’t bats around.”