An experimental test of energy and electrolyte supplementation as a mitigation strategy for white-nose syndrome
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fungi are increasingly recognised as harmful pathogens of wildlife. White-nose syndrome (WNS) is a fungal disease that has killed millions of hibernating bats in North America. High mortality has driven research to identify management strategies for the disease. Increased energy expenditure and fat depletion, as well as fluid loss, hypotonic dehydration and electrolyte depletion appear to be key aspects of WNS pathophysiology. Bats with WNS spend energy too quickly and also lose fluids containing water and electrolytes from lesions on exposed skin surfaces. During periodic arousals, bats often drink water but, in most of the WNS-affected area, food is not available during winter and, therefore, they cannot maintain energy balance or replace lost electrolytes. Therefore, providing a liquid caloric/electrolyte/nutrient supplement could be useful for treating WNS. We studied captive, hibernating little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus) to test whether providing supplemental energy and electrolytes (a 1:1 dilution of unflavoured Pedialyte) to hibernating bats could reduce severity of WNS symptoms and increase survival. Infected bats in the Pedialyte-supplemented group generally avoided the Pedialyte and preferentially drank plain water. We did not observe any differences in survival, arousal frequency or blood chemistry, but bats in the Pedialyte-supplemented group had higher fungal load and more UV fluorescence than the control group that was only provided with water. Supplemental electrolytes would be an attractive management strategy because of their low cost and logistic feasibility but our results suggest this approach would be ineffective. However, it could be useful to conduct preference experiments with multiple dilutions and/or flavours of electrolyte solution. Although they did not prefer Pedialyte in our experiment, bats in the hand readily drink it and electrolyte supplementation remains an important tool for rehabilitation of captive bats recovering from WNS and other causes of dehydration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".