White-nose syndrome has devastated North American bat populations. This catastrophic disease creates individual and population-level welfare crises requiring urgent response.
White-nose syndrome causes individual welfare suffering on a massive scale. Affected bats wake repeatedly during hibernation due to fungal irritation, depleting fat reserves needed to survive winter. Bats that emerge prematurely into cold temperatures without food face starvation and thermal stress. The welfare distress experienced by millions of individual bats during this disease process is profound and largely unwitnessed. Conservation responses including biocontrol, habitat protection, and monitoring aim to reduce population losses but cannot prevent individual suffering in currently affected populations. The speed and scale of this disease illustrates how introduced pathogens can create rapid welfare crises for wildlife.