The New York Times, May 28, 2025
In the winter of 2006, biologists in New York State got a gruesome surprise. As they surveyed colonies of hibernating bats, they discovered heaps of dead animals on the floors of caves and abandoned mines.
The culprit was a fungus new to science. It caused white-nose disease, named for the fuzzy pale tendrils that sprouted from the nostrils of its victims. (The disease was originally known as white-nose syndrome, but was renamed in recent years.) The fungus, Pseudogymnoascus destructans, or P. destructans, has spread from New York to 40 states and nine Canadian provinces.