Environment

Feds study bat protection but loggers disagree

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By KEVIN DUFFY
Capital News Service
LANSING— A fight over logging restrictions is delaying federal protection of the northern long-eared bat, a Great Lakes species already decimated in the American Northeast. A decision on whether to list the bat as endangered or threatened has been pushed back to April. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has federal jurisdiction over protected species, is using the extra time to respond to the unexpected controversy, said Mollie Matteson, a senior scientist and a bat disease specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. Endangered means a species is at high risk of extinction in the wild, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Under federal law, a threatened species “is likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range.”

Forest industry officials worry a federal listing will hinder logging.

Environment

Invasives will be caught on screen for all to see

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By KEVIN DUFFY
Capital News Service
LANSING – Michigan researchers are building a time machine to fight freshwater invasive species. The project will let them navigate through a 150-year historical collection of plants and animals largely hidden among the storerooms of Great Lakes museums.
A $2.5 million federal grant will help move their collections from cupboards and shelves to a computer database through a process called digitization. Plant and animal specimens will be labeled and photographed for online access. A cooperative of 28 Great Lakes universities, including 11 in Michigan, will bypass the need for research staff to spend hours in a collection room pulling samples of North American fish, plants and mollusks. The project will allow online access to more than 1.7 million specimens, including 2,500 species, said Ken Cameron, who is leading the project and is director of the Wisconsin State Herbarium.

Environment

Holy noses, Batman! A fungus is killing bats

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By KEVIN DUFFY
Capital News Service
LANSING – Hollywood superstar Ben Affleck is switching on the bat-signal for one his favorite species: the bat. The star of the forthcoming movie “Batman v Superman,” the film’s director Zack Snyder and the rest of the crew took time out of their long shooting schedule in Michigan to join the fight against white-nose syndrome. It’s a fungal disease that threatens the survival of insect-devouring bats that support a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry. Without bats, U.S. farmers would pay an annual $3.7 billion for pest control, according to a study by university and U.S. Geological Survey researchers published in Science. And without bats, Affleck – who portrays Batman in the movie – wouldn’t be able to don the iconic batsuit.

Environment

Manistee dam removal yields safe shelter for snakes

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By KEVIN DUFFY
Capital News Service
LANSING – Conservation biologists have built the first artificial home for snakes in Northern Michigan. And they removed an entire dam to do it. Experts say the snakes need the help. Native snakes, including the Eastern Mississauga rattlesnake and Northern water snake, require shelter from cold winters. But development threatens their habitat in what is “the greatest impact to amphibian and reptile populations and reproduction,” said David Mifsud, a wetlands ecologist at Herpetological Resource and Management (HRM) who helped with the project.