Researchers are trying to learn where bats hibernate on Yosemite's massive towers before a deadly fungus—that has killed millions of bats in North America—reaches Yosemite
Shannon Joslin adjusts the beam of her headlamp and looks deep into one of the countless finger-size cracks that makea rock-climbing mecca. The granite seems to pour out of Yosemite Valley to the west on this crisp October morning, and beneath us is nothing but air and the gleaming ribbon of the Merced River a thousand feet below.
Their importance is why there’s a pressing need for biologists who love to climb. During the past decade, white-nose syndrome—caused by a fungus called—has killed more than five million bats in North America. Pd attacks bats’ skin while they hibernate, and the discomfort makes them more active, burning critical fat stores they need to survive the winter. Pd spread west from New York state and has been found on bats in four California counties since 2018.
Next year, the team will place tiny data monitors in the roosts to measure temperature and humidity, which will help determine whether the right conditions exist for Pd. And if white-nose syndrome does appear in Yosemite, they’ll climb to roosts to swab bats to test for the disease. She teamed up with Yosemite’s climbing rangers, who specialize in patrolling and surveying the vertical wilderness, and in 2018 created Big Wall Bats with the goal of understanding the potential for white-nose syndrome in the park. When funding dried up during the COVID-19 pandemic, Jackson left the National Park Service to direct the Yosemite and Sequoia Field Stations for the University of California, Merced.
From the start, Jackson knew it would be crucial to enlist the help of recreational climbers in reporting any bat or guano sightings. “It's a frontier that we're really only able to access in modern times because of climbing becoming so popular and people having the skills to safely access these ecosystems,” she says.
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