Bats play essential ecological roles as insect predators and pollinators, yet they face severe threats from white-nose syndrome (a devastating fungal disease), wind turbine collisions, and roost disturbance that affect millions of individuals.
Bats dying from white-nose syndrome experience prolonged suffering. The fungal infection disrupts the fat reserves that bats depend on for hibernation, causing them to wake repeatedly during winter when no insect food is available. Affected bats leave their roosts in winter cold, emaciated and disoriented, dying of starvation or exposure. The process takes weeks. Individual bats discovered on the ground in winter are often still alive but terminally ill - in a state of slow starvation. Wind turbine barotrauma causes sudden, violent death through internal hemorrhage. Roost disturbance during maternity season causes mother bats to abandon pups that die from cold and starvation. The welfare costs of these threats are multiplied by the extraordinary mortality scale of white-nose syndrome.