Dying Bats Need a Probiotic?

first the bees, now we hear that bats are dying in alarming numbers across the northeast. no one knows why. but researchers have discovered that the dying bats have virtually no beneficial bacteria in their intestines and suspect a pesticide could be killing off the healthy bacteria. more at link.


http://www.salon.com/env/feature/2008/08/01/bat_deaths/index1.html


But the chitinase-producing bacteria were harder to come by. She took multiple samples from each of the bats, up and down the intestinal tracts. She found extremely low numbers of the beneficial bacteria in one bat. In the remaining 11, she found none at all.

Dannelly's hunch is that a toxin may be killing off the symbiotic bacteria in the bats' intestines. "Maybe they're using a new pesticide [in the Northeast] and it's becoming more widespread," she suggests. Theoretically, bats could take in traces of a pesticide with their food or drinking water. If the chemical wiped out the beneficial bacteria, the bats couldn't break down the chitin in insect parts. It's the energy from that chitin, Whitaker believes, that may give bats the boost they need to survive the winter.

According to Dannelly, at least one relatively new pesticide is known to be toxic to chitinase-producing bacteria. "So far nobody has been able to tell me if it's used in the New York area," she says. She declines to give pesticide names, since she doesn't have evidence implicating any specific chemical. And she and Whitaker admit their data isn't perfect. They examined only 12 sick bats, and they weren't able to examine healthy bats from the Northeast to use as a control. Instead, they compared the gut bacteria of sick bats with those of healthy little brown bats from Indiana. Their findings are "a powerful clue" that the disease may be linked to a loss of beneficial bacteria, Whitaker says. But it's not an answer. "We haven't proved it yet."

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