Missouri’s caves don’t make a fuss about themselves. They are mostly not marked and aren’t noticed as they sit under limestone ridges and cedar-covered hillsides. However, something important is happening inside them every winter. Or rather, something important is stopping.
Jordan Meyer has been going into these caves for years as a bat ecologist for the Missouri Department of Conservation. It takes a lot of care, quiet, and time to do the work. You wear clean clothes. You move slowly. This means you try not to breathe too loudly. The densely grouped bats hanging from the ceilings are burning through their winter fat stores just to stay alive. Every disturbance costs them energy that they can’t afford to lose, so Meyer has said, “We want to keep disturbance to a minimum so we don’t make the bats use up their energy reserves any faster than they need to.” How to make it happen is not as easy as it sounds. In less than three hours, teams finish their counts. Every other year, they only go to each cave once. Every piece of gear, like boots, suits, and cameras, is cleaned before and after entry because white-nose syndrome can really spread from one site to another and has already done a lot of damage in other places.
This is the kind of illness that doesn’t get much attention until it’s too late. It’s caused by a fungus that grows on the bats’ exposed skin while they sleep. It wakes them up from their sleep, makes them burn fat they don’t have, and kills a huge number of them. In 2006, it was first found in New York. Since then, it has quietly spread across North America. The caves in Missouri have also been hit.
By 1975, the MDC was officially keeping an eye on bat populations. The counts back then were probably more routine—a baseline check, the kind of data collection that seems more like a safety measure than something that needs to be done right away. They feel different now. A lot of species that used to live in dense clusters in Missouri’s hibernacula are now spreading out. Two bat species, the Indiana bat and the gray bat, are federally endangered. There are plans to protect the northern long-eared bat. Once thought to be stable, the tri-colored bat is now being considered for federal endangered species status. The numbers from these cave counts are some of the clearest proof of this pretty sad progression.
Meyer and her team don’t count by hand at all when bat clusters are big enough. They quickly take a picture of the ceiling with a high-megapixel camera, then use a computer screen to count each bat later. It works better and takes less time in the cave, so it solves two problems at once. There’s something extremely clever about that. Science changed not because the science itself changed, but because things needed to be done quickly.
Over 500 monitored sites across Missouri’s caves and mines are used by bats as hibernacula. These sites provide bats with stable, cool temperatures that allow their metabolisms to slow down during the winter. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Cave Research Foundation, and Missouri State Parks are some of the partners that help with the monitoring. The data is used to make decisions by regional management, but it’s not always clear what those decisions can change. You can keep counting bats. That doesn’t automatically get rid of a soil fungus that is spreading across a continent.
Seeing all of this makes me think that the researchers know there is a gap between what they can measure and what they can fix. Problems like White-nose Syndrome, habitat loss, and climate change can’t be fixed with a three-hour cave tour. But it’s still important to count. There would be no record, no baseline, and no way to see if the interventions are working or if the caves are getting quieter without it.
Tony Elliott, who is in charge of resource science at MDC, says that the best thing people can do is also the easiest: stay out. Do not bother bats that are in caves. Don’t bring a boot that hasn’t been checked into a hibernaculum because you could introduce a pathogen. Given what’s at stake, that’s a very low request.
