Widespread Bat White-Nose Syndrome Fungus, Northeastern China.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Hoyt JR
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4698868 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:White-nose syndrome is caused by the fungus Geomyces destructans and is responsible for the deaths of >1,000,000 bats since 2006. This disease and fungus had been restricted to the northeastern United States. We detected this fungus in a bat in France and assessed the implications of this finding.
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Project description:White-nose syndrome, first diagnosed in North America in 2006, causes mass deaths among bats in North America. We found the causative fungus, Pseudogymnoascus destructans, in a 1918 sample collected in Europe, where bats have now adapted to the fungus. These results are consistent with a Eurasian origin of the pathogen.
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Project description:White-nose syndrome (WNS) is an emergent disease estimated to have killed over five million North American bats. Caused by the psychrophilic fungus Geomyces destructans, WNS specifically affects bats during hibernation. We describe temperature-dependent growth performance and morphology for six independent isolates of G. destructans from North America and Europe. Thermal performance curves for all isolates displayed an intermediate peak with rapid decline in performance above the peak. Optimal temperatures for growth were between 12.5 and 15.8°C, and the upper critical temperature for growth was between 19.0 and 19.8°C. Growth rates varied across isolates, irrespective of geographic origin, and above 12°C all isolates displayed atypical morphology that may have implications for proliferation of the fungus. This study demonstrates that small variations in temperature, consistent with those inherent of bat hibernacula, affect growth performance and physiology of G. destructans, which may influence temperature-dependent progression and severity of WNS in wild bats.
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Project description:The skin microbiome is an essential line of host defense against pathogens, yet our understanding of microbial communities and how they change when hosts become infected is limited. We investigated skin microbial composition in three North American bat species (Myotis lucifugus, Eptesicus fuscus, and Perimyotis subflavus) that have been impacted by the infectious disease, white-nose syndrome, caused by an invasive fungal pathogen, Pseudogymnoascus destructans. We compared bacterial and fungal composition from 154 skin swab samples and 70 environmental samples using a targeted 16S rRNA and internal transcribed spacer amplicon approach. We found that for M. lucifugus, a species that experiences high mortality from white-nose syndrome, bacterial microbiome diversity was dramatically lower when P. destructans was present. Key bacterial families-including those potentially involved in pathogen defense-significantly differed in abundance in bats infected with P. destructans compared to uninfected bats. However, skin bacterial diversity was not lower in E. fuscus or P. subflavus when P. destructans was present despite populations of the latter species declining sharply from white-nose syndrome. The fungal species present on bats substantially overlapped with the fungal taxa present in the environment at the site where the bat was sampled, but fungal community composition was unaffected by the presence of P. destructans for any of the three bat species. This species-specific alteration in bat skin bacterial microbiomes after pathogen invasion may suggest a mechanism for the severity of white-nose syndrome in M. lucifugus but not for other bat species impacted by the disease.IMPORTANCEInherent complexities in the composition of microbiomes can often preclude investigations of microbe-associated diseases. Instead of single organisms being associated with disease, community characteristics may be more relevant. Longitudinal microbiome studies of the same individual bats as pathogens arrive and infect a population are the ideal experiment but remain logistically challenging; therefore, investigations like our approach that are able to correlate invasive pathogens to alterations within a microbiome may be the next best alternative. The results of this study potentially suggest that microbiome-host interactions may determine the likelihood of infection. However, the contrasting relationship between Pd and the bacterial microbiomes of Myotis lucifugus and Perimyotis subflavus indicate that we are just beginning to understand how the bat microbiome interacts with a fungal invader such as Pd.
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Project description:Increases in anthropogenic movement have led to a rise in pathogen introductions and the emergence of infectious diseases in naive host communities worldwide. We combined empirical data and mathematical models to examine changes in disease dynamics in little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) populations following the introduction of the emerging fungal pathogen Pseudogymnoascus destructans, which causes the disease white-nose syndrome. We found that infection intensity was much lower in persisting populations than in declining populations where the fungus has recently invaded. Fitted models indicate that this is most consistent with a reduction in the growth rate of the pathogen when fungal loads become high. The data are inconsistent with the evolution of tolerance or an overall reduced pathogen growth rate that might be caused by environmental factors. The existence of resistance in some persisting populations of little brown bats offers a glimmer of hope that a precipitously declining species will persist in the face of this deadly pathogen.This article is part of the themed issue 'Human influences on evolution, and the ecological and societal consequences'.
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Project description:White-nose syndrome is an emerging disease in North America that has caused substantial declines in hibernating bats. A recently identified fungus (Geomyces destructans) causes skin lesions that are characteristic of this disease. Typical signs of this infection were not observed in bats in North America before white-nose syndrome was detected. However, unconfirmed reports from Europe indicated white fungal growth on hibernating bats without associated deaths. To investigate these differences, hibernating bats were sampled in Germany, Switzerland, and Hungary to determine whether G. destructans is present in Europe. Microscopic observations, fungal culture, and genetic analyses of 43 samples from 23 bats indicated that 21 bats of 5 species in 3 countries were colonized by G. destructans. We hypothesize that G. destructans is present throughout Europe and that bats in Europe may be more immunologically or behaviorally resistant to G. destructans than their congeners in North America because they potentially coevolved with the fungus.
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Project description:White-nose syndrome (WNS) is an emerging fungal disease of bats caused by Pseudogymnoascus destructans. Since it was first detected near Albany, NY, in 2006, the fungus has spread across eastern North America, killing unprecedented numbers of hibernating bats. The devastating impacts of WNS on Nearctic bat species are attributed to the likely introduction of P. destructans from Eurasia to naive host populations in eastern North America. Since 2006, the disease has spread in a gradual wavelike pattern consistent with introduction of the pathogen at a single location. Here, we describe the first detection of P. destructans in western North America in a little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) from near Seattle, WA, far from the previously recognized geographic distribution of the fungus. Whole-genome sequencing and phylogenetic analyses indicated that the isolate of P. destructans from Washington grouped with other isolates of a presumed clonal lineage from the eastern United States. Thus, the occurrence of P. destructans in Washington does not likely represent a novel introduction of the fungus from Eurasia, and the lack of intensive surveillance in the western United States makes it difficult to interpret whether the occurrence of P. destructans in the Pacific Northwest is disjunct from that in eastern North America. Although there is uncertainty surrounding the impacts of WNS in the Pacific Northwest, the presence of the pathogen in western North America could have major consequences for bat conservation. IMPORTANCE White-nose syndrome (WNS) represents one of the most consequential wildlife diseases of modern times. Since it was first documented in New York in 2006, the disease has killed millions of bats and threatens several formerly abundant species with extirpation or extinction. The spread of WNS in eastern North America has been relatively gradual, inducing optimism that disease mitigation strategies could be established in time to conserve bats susceptible to WNS in western North America. The recent detection of the fungus that causes WNS in the Pacific Northwest, far from its previous known distribution, increases the urgency for understanding the long-term impacts of this disease and for developing strategies to conserve imperiled bat species.
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Project description:Host traits and phylogeny can determine infection risk by driving pathogen transmission and its ability to infect new hosts. Predicting such risks is critical when designing disease mitigation strategies, and especially as regards wildlife, where intensive management is often advocated or prevented by economic and/or practical reasons. We investigated Pseudogymnoascus [Geomyces] destructans infection, the cause of white-nose syndrome (WNS), in relation to chiropteran ecology, behaviour and phylogenetics. While this fungus has caused devastating declines in North American bat populations, there have been no apparent population changes attributable to the disease in Europe. We screened 276 bats of 15 species from hibernacula in the Czech Republic over 2012 and 2013, and provided histopathological evidence for 11 European species positive for WNS. With the exception of Myotis myotis, the other ten species are all new reports for WNS in Europe. Of these, M. emarginatus, Eptesicus nilssonii, Rhinolophus hipposideros, Barbastella barbastellus and Plecotus auritus are new to the list of P. destructans-infected bat species. While the infected species are all statistically phylogenetically related, WNS affects bats from two suborders. These are ecologically diverse and adopt a wide range of hibernating strategies. Occurrence of WNS in distantly related bat species with diverse ecology suggests that the pathogen may be a generalist and that all bats hibernating within the distribution range of P. destructans may be at risk of infection.
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Project description:Habitat alteration can influence suitability, creating ecological traps where habitat preference and fitness are mismatched. Despite their importance, ecological traps are notoriously difficult to identify and their impact on host-pathogen dynamics remains largely unexplored. Here we assess individual bat survival and habitat preferences in the midwestern United States before, during, and after the invasion of the fungal pathogen that causes white-nose syndrome. Despite strong selection pressures, most hosts continued to select habitats where disease severity was highest and survival was lowest, causing continued population declines. However, some individuals used refugia where survival was higher. Over time, a higher proportion of the total population used refugia than before pathogen arrival. Our results demonstrate that host preferences for habitats with high disease-induced mortality can create ecological traps that threaten populations, even in the presence of accessible refugia.
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Project description:In multihost disease systems, differences in mortality between species may reflect variation in host physiology, morphology, and behavior. In systems where the pathogen can persist in the environment, microclimate conditions, and the adaptation of the host to these conditions, may also impact mortality. White-nose syndrome (WNS) is an emerging disease of hibernating bats caused by an environmentally persistent fungus, Pseudogymnoascus destructans. We assessed the effects of body mass, torpid metabolic rate, evaporative water loss, and hibernaculum temperature and water vapor deficit on predicted overwinter survival of bats infected by P. destructans. We used a hibernation energetics model in an individual-based model framework to predict the probability of survival of nine bat species at eight sampling sites across North America. The model predicts time until fat exhaustion as a function of species-specific host characteristics, hibernaculum microclimate, and fungal growth. We fit a linear model to determine relationships with each variable and predicted survival and semipartial correlation coefficients to determine the major drivers in variation in bat survival. We found host body mass and hibernaculum water vapor deficit explained over half of the variation in survival with WNS across species. As previous work on the interplay between host and pathogen physiology and the environment has focused on species with narrow microclimate preferences, our view on this relationship is limited. Our results highlight some key predictors of interspecific survival among western bat species and provide a framework to assess impacts of WNS as the fungus continues to spread into western North America.
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