I've been working with bats for almost 30 years.

The big issue for us right now is dealing with the disease white nose syndrome.

At this point the disease spreads bat to bat.

And basically what happens is it only affects bats that hibernate.

Theyre awakening multiple times during the winter when they would normally just be sleeping and using very little energy stores.

When they have to wake up, they fire up their metabolism and they burn a bunch of energy to do that.

So some animals are actually starving to death.

Other animals are actually dying from the damage to their tissues and their circulatory systems and stuff.

It's an incredible wildlife disease that we've basically watched unfold from the start.

It just made it into Colorado a few years ago.

And so we're kind of trying to track the movement of that disease across the state.

Basically now we consider the disease to be moving amongst bat populations, and it's probably starting to work its way up into the mountains.

Worst-case scenario from white nose syndrome would be that 10 species need to be listed on the Endangered Species Act, or that we need to try to implement conservation measures to try to recover them, or that they may even go extinct.

However, Colorado has some odd spots where we've detected the fungus, and three, four years later, we still haven't found sick bats.

The fungus really likes a sweet spot of temperatures and humidities to grow in, and back East, the caves match those perfectly.

But out West, a lot of the roosts that our bats use don't really match those profiles perfectly.

And so it's possible that just the ecology of the Western bats will be enough to maybe help them, but we're going to need time to see if that plays out or not.

Damaged tissue from white nose will fluoresce an orange color.

This looks good to me.

Its goodit doesn't have tears or holes in it.

And there's no fluorescence of a dark orange.

So if we did see big declines in our bat populations, I think one thing we can expect that will follow that is shifts in the insect populations.

More insects mean more annoying pests for us, like mosquitoes and things.

I mean, these bat populations are removing metric tons of insects off the landscape every night, and that equates to millions, even into the billions of dollars nationwide in the services that it provides people, for our agricultural community.

So we're hopeful that our bats will develop that resistance too over time.

It's really just a question of how much their populations decline before that occurs.