ever seen anything like it either. Some of Hicks’s counterparts in other
states took a joking tone. What they wanted to know, they said, was what
those bats in New York were snorting.
Spring arrived. Bats all across New York and New England awoke from
their torpor and flew off. The white powder remained a mystery. “We
were thinking, Oh, boy, we hope this just goes away,” Hicks told me. “It
was like the Bush administration. And, like the Bush administration, it just
wouldn’t go away.” Instead, it spread. The following winter, the same
white powdery substance was found on bats in thirty-three caves in four
different states. Meanwhile, bats kept dying. In some hibernacula,
populations plunged by more than ninety percent. In one cave in
Vermont, thousands of corpses dropped from the ceiling and piled up on
the ground, like snowdrifts.
A little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) with white-nose syndrome.
The bat die-off continued the following winter, spreading to five more
states. It continued the winter after that, in three additional states, and,
although in many places there are hardly any bats left to kill off, it
continues to this day. The white powder is now known to be a cold-loving
fungus—what’s known as a psychrophile—that was accidentally imported
to the U.S., probably from Europe. When it was first isolated, the fungus,
from the genus Geomyces, had no name. For its effect on the bats it was