Credit: Joseph Hoyt of Virginia Tech
Since 2006, a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome has caused sharp declines in bat populations across the eastern United States. The fungus that causes the disease, Pseudogymnoascus destructans, thrives in subterranean habitats where bats hibernate over the winter months.
Bats roosting in the warmest sites have been hit particularly hard, since more fungus grows on their skin, and they are more likely to die from white-nose syndrome, according to a new study by researchers at Virginia Tech.
But instead of avoiding these warm and deadly sites, bats continue to use them year after year. The reason? Bats are mistakenly preferring sites where fungal growth is high and therefore their survival is low. This is one of the first clear examples of an infectious disease creating an ecological trap for wildlife.
Managing salt pollution to protect drinking water resources and freshwater ecosystems
Doctors often tell us, cut back on your salt. And just like too much dietary salt is bad for blood pressure, too much salt in our nation s streams, lakes, and reservoirs threatens ecosystem health and the security of our nation s drinking water and food supplies. Salt levels are rising fast in freshwaters across the United States, said Stanley Grant, professor of civil and environmental engineering in the Virginia Tech College of Engineering and the principal investigator of a recent multimillion dollar grant from the National Science Foundation aimed at addressing the issue. It s a slow-moving train wreck. If we don t figure out how to reverse this trend soon, it could become one of our nation s top environmental challenges going forward.
Credit: Alexandria Hounshell
Because of land use and climate change, lakes and reservoirs globally are seeing large decreases in oxygen concentrations in their bottom waters. It is well-documented that low oxygen levels have detrimental effects on fish and water quality, but little is known about how these conditions will affect the concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in freshwaters.
Carbon dioxide and methane are the primary forms of carbon that can be found in the Earth s atmosphere. Both of these gases are partially responsible for the greenhouse effect, a process that increases global air temperatures. Methane is 34 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so knowing how low oxygen levels within lakes and reservoirs affect both carbon dioxide and methane could have important implications for global warming.
Virginia Tech researchers awarded NIH grant to develop Zika virus vaccine
Flaviviruses a group of viruses transmitted by ticks or mosquitoes infect an estimated 400 million people annually with diseases like yellow fever, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, and, most recently, Zika virus.
Outbreaks of Zika virus, a flavivirus originating in Africa, were once rare and isolated events. But in 2015, it arrived in the Americas and rapidly spread to 27 countries within the span of a year.
Zika virus outbreaks have now been recorded throughout Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, South America, and Central America. To protect the health of billions of people at risk and prevent future outbreaks, a team of Virginia Tech researchers received a $2 million R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a safe, effective, single-dose vaccine candidate for Zika virus.