We gave birth on the road to the hospital

Centralization isn’t always a good thing. In Ireland, centralization of maternity facilities is causing more and more incidents like this.

Muslim Adam and Eve

Follow the link for a cartoon by Hamid Bahrami about the Muslim Adam & Eve. The cartoon is copyrighted by Hamid Bahrami, so you have to go to the other Web site to see it.

Thousands of bats die in midwinter

Researchers don’t know why bats are leaving their caves to die in the snow or sucumbing to a mysterious white fungus. The bats don’t have as much body fat as usual. It takes them a long time to wake up enough to start moving. And when they leave the caves, there’s still snow on the ground.

Researchers speculate that the winter might not be cold enough for the bats to truly hibernate, so they are using energy too quickly. Then they wake up literally starving. In their weakened condition, fungus has attacked their bodies. We don’t know if it’s a cause or an effect but I suspect the latter.

There were some die-offs last year so this year scientists are looking for them. One thing they are finding is dead bats in areas where they didn’t know bats hibernated. Bats eat a lot of insects. For some crops, a loss of the bats might mean a loss of 1/8 to 1/6 of the crop to insects.

Links:

• Bats perish and no-one knows why (NY Times)
  Experts fear that as many as 250 000 bats may die this winter.

• Mass die-off of bats worries and puzzles researchers
  A mass die-off of tens of thousands of bats in the U.S. Northeast is confounding researchers and worrying wildlife advocates. The phenomenon has been dubbed white nose syndrome since many of the dead and dying bats show a white fungus on their nose. However, the fungus itself is believed to be a secondary symptom; the primary cause is as yet unknown. Officials estimate that white nose syndrome has had a 50 to 90 percent mortality rate in those afflicted. “We’ve never seen anything like this before with our bats, much less any other mammals, with a very large regional die-off,” said Susi von Oettingen of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Bat advocates aren’t the only ones worried about the plummeting population. Farmers and others will likely miss the bats later this year since the disappearance of whole populations could mean a much larger number of insects. So far, the disease has been found in Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont, though biologists say it could easily spread to other regions.

• Quebec mines scoured for signs of disease as bats drop like flies in U.S
  Researchers in Canada watch for similar problems.