Understanding the catastrophic welfare and conservation impact of white-nose syndrome on North American bat populations and efforts to combat it.
White-nose syndrome causes one of the most welfare-impactful wildlife disease events in recent history. Affected bats experience a prolonged dying process — waking from hibernation repeatedly due to fungal irritation, burning through fat reserves, emerging in winter to forage when no insects exist, and dying from starvation, hypothermia, or dehydration over days to weeks. The individual suffering involved across millions of animals is enormous. Beyond individual welfare, the ecological consequences of losing insectivorous bat populations are severe, as bats provide billions of dollars of pest control services annually in North America. WNS management and treatment research is both a welfare and conservation imperative with genuine urgency given the speed of species decline.