NM: Fed, state land managers team up to fight fungus affecting bats

Federal and state land managers in New Mexico have teamed up to limit the spread of a fungus that has wiped out entire bat colonies in the eastern United States. Officials with the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the Forest Service Southwest region and the state Game and Fish Department will be enacting partial closures for some caves and abandoned mines on public lands in New Mexico in response to white-nose syndrome. Developed caves such as Carlsbad Caverns National Park will not be affected by the closures, but officials there are considering a screening process for some visitors, much like the one enacted at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Carlsbad, one of the more famous cave systems in the Southwest, draws around 430,000 visitors annually, and the bats are one of the park's main draws. First spotted in New York in 2006, the disease has been confirmed in dozens of hibernating locations in Canada and the U.S., ranging as far south as Tennessee and west to Oklahoma...more