Bat Mythbusting
By Nicholas Niendorf, GEAS Guest Blogger
Dr. Rita Dixon remembers her first up close and personal exposure to the world of bats.
Dixon, whose background and formal training is in ornithology with a Ph.D. in Natural Resources, was in her first week on the job with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game when she got the fateful call in 2000.
The Idaho Department of Land wanted to close some mines and reached out to Dixon to find out how to handle the possible bat population in the mines.
When Dixon agreed to help, they asked what she was going to do.
“To tell you the truth: I don’t know,” Dixon responded. “But I am going to figure it out and help you.”
Dixon got right to work on researching bats, bat colonies in caves, and how to survey for them. She also used her resources and called up a local colleague in the U.S. National Park Service who had worked with bats in Utah mines.
The pair visited the mines and confirmed bats were living in both caves. Dixon secured funding to gate the mines with bat-friendly closures, solving the issue of closing the mines without harming the bat populations within.
That fateful phone call began Dixon’s work her 23-year (and counting) relationship with bats.
“I just came into it by pure accident and have never looked back,” Dixon said. “It completely changed the trajectory of my life and my career.”
This is a Silver-haired Bat named Lil Wayne. Lil Wayne could not be released to the wild, and she became Dixon’s bat ambassador. Dixon said, “Everyone who met her fell in love with her and she was such a great little ambassador for bats, appearing on Idaho Matters and a short film about bats and rabies.”
Photo courtesy of Rita Dixon
What You Don’t Know About Bats
Dixon spends a lot of her time dispelling misinformation about bats and educating various communities in Idaho on their importance, something she could never have imagined before that fateful phone call all those years ago. Most people don’t realize that Idaho bats, like birds, eat insects and they do so at an impressive rate, devouring agricultural and forest pests alike.
“They are incredibly valuable to our economy through their ecological services, if you will,” Dixon said. “If we didn’t have bats out there eating all our insects we would have a lot more pesticides on our food and in our environment. They also feed on insects that carry insect-borne diseases like West Nile virus.”
The misconceptions around rabies and bats particularly bother Dixon because of how valuable bats are to Idahoans, although most don’t know it.
“A lot of people have the misconception that all bats have rabies and that is not at all true,” Dixon said. “Less than 1% ever get the disease and they are not asymptomatic carriers of rabies.”
Once a bat contracts rabies, there’s an incubation period where it can’t infect anybody. It’s only once the virus reaches the brain, causing symptoms, that a bat becomes infectious.
“So strike the phrase ‘carries rabies’ from your vocabulary because that is not an accurate reflection of bats and rabies,” Dixon said. “They contract it, they get sick, and they die.”
A Pallid Bat with a grasshopper
The Deadly Disease
One of Dixon’s top priorities is coordinating with state biologists and partners on White-nose Syndrome prevention in Idaho. White-nose Syndrome is a deadly fungal disease first identified in North America in 2006 that has since killed millions of bats. The fungal pathogen is called Pseudogymnoascus destructans, or Pd for short.
“White-nose Syndrome is the manifestation of the disease in bats,” Dixon said. “And White-nose Syndrome only affects bats, hibernating bats as far as we know.”
Idaho is part of the White-nose Syndrome Response team, an organization of members across North America dedicated to researching, detecting, and preventing White-nose Syndrome.
“Right now for Idaho we have one site where we’ve detected the fungus, but we have not confirmed the disease in Idaho,” Dixon said. “That’s a really important distinction because, to date, we have seen no mortality associated with White-nose Syndrome and we first detected it in October of 2021 at Minnetonka Cave. We’ve continued to collect samples there and have not had any other detections of the fungus and no mortality.”
Dixon and her partners work with researchers at the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin to vaccinate bats at Minnetonka Cave. The vaccine trial has been ongoing at Minnetonka for three years now, with the latest round of vaccinations occurring this week.
The Two-legged Threat
Beyond White-nose Syndrome, Dixon also works to combat another danger to bats: humans.
“One of the most important messages I want to tell people is to never handle a bat with bare hands,” Dixon said. “The reason I say that is because, nationwide, we lose on average 24,000 to 25,000 bats per year through rabies testing. Many of those could have been avoided if people had just left the bat alone.”
Anytime somebody picks up a bat and is bitten or isn’t sure what their contact with the bat was, that bat must be euthanized and tested for rabies.
Habitat Restoration Benefits Bats
Bats are an important part of a functioning ecosystem, and, just like birds, they depend on a healthy population of insects. The insects depend on plants, and that’s where the Golden Eagle Audubon Boise River ReWild Project comes in. The project is working to re-establish native plants on 50 acres along the Boise River, and with the plants will come the bugs, the birds and the bats.
You can see Dr. Rita Dixon talk about our local bats and bat conservation in Idaho at the Idaho Fish and Game Headquarters on Tuesday, October 17 at 6:30 pm.