NY Times: bats are dying off in huge numbers throughout the Adirondacks. No one seems to know why, but symptoms include low fat reserves and susceptibility to some sort of superficial fungus. Puts me in mind of colony collapse disorder in honeybees – another unexplained disaster befalling ecologically critical species.

It’s frankly scary. This is the kind of thing we might expect as a result of climate change and a general increase in human interference in natural systems: gradual changes having sudden, nonlinear effects. We’re dismantling our own life-support system for parts, and we don’t even know which bits are important.