No Time for Bats to Rest Easy

The 10 hibernating little brown bats hang from a corner of their tailor-made refrigeration 
chamber at Bucknell University like a clump of old potato skins, only less animated.
In torpor, bats become one with their wintry surroundings, their body temperatures falling 
to just above freezing, their heart rates slowing to one or two beats a minute, their breathing 
virtually undetectable.
But suddenly, a male yanks himself free of the bunch and hops down to a dish on the floor. 
After taking a long, slow drink of water, the bat uses the claws on his folded wings 
to hoist himself along the wire mesh of the chamber, his motions angular, 
deliberative and spidery. 
A second bat rappels down for a drink, and then a third.
“Well, that’s a lucky break,” said Thomas Lilley, a tall and crisply composed postdoctoral 
fellow from Finland. 
“Multiple rounds of bat drama.”
As Bucknell’s de facto bat concierge, Dr. Lilley helps wild bats acclimate to life in captivity, 
a difficult task with an urgent spur. He and his colleagues are laboring mightily 
to understand white-nose syndrome, a devastating fungal disease that has killed at 
least six million North American bats since it first appeared in Albany a decade ago 
and that threatens to annihilate some bat species entirely.
Because the fungus attacks bats as they hibernate in caves, the researchers are 
exploring the complex biology of normal bat hibernation, and so-called arousal bouts 
turn out to be a big part of the puzzle, said Kenneth Field, an associate professor of biology.
Hibernatingbats will warm themselves out of torpor every week or two throughout the winter, 
for several hours at a stretch. 
Though researchers don’t yet understand the reasons for the thermal interludes, they have 
quantified just how important such thaws must be to bat survival.
“All the work that bats do during the fall, feeding nonstop and putting on fat until they’re 
like butterballs on wings, and 90 percent is spent to sustain the winter warm-ups,” 
said DeAnn Reeder, a professor of biology and one of the nation’s leading bat ecologists.
New research suggests that white-nose syndrome begins disrupting the arousal-torpor 
cycle long before any telltale white fuzz appears on the bat’s face and wings, 
and that the disorder really spins out of control when the bat’s immune system behaves 
in a distinctly unbatlike manner, mounting a zealous response against the fungal spores.
Unbatlike because, as scientists are discovering, the bat immune system is astonishingly 
tolerant of most pathogens — a trait that could pose risks to people, but that also 
offers clues to preventing human diseases of aging, including cancer.

Evidence is mounting that bats can serve as reservoirs of many of 
the world’s deadliest viruses, including the pathogens behind Ebola, 
Marburg and related hemorrhagic fevers; acute respiratory syndromes 
like SARS and MERS; and even familiar villains like measles and mumps.
Yet bats appear largely immune to the many viruses they carry and rarely show signs 
of the diseases that will rapidly overwhelm any human, monkey, horse, pig or othe
Bat experts argue that a keener understanding of bat biology could not only help prevent 
the next outbreak of Ebola or other cross-species “zoonotic” infection, but also offer 
a fresh take on immune and inflammatory disorders like diabetes or heart diseas...[...] 
nytimes.com