Jeremy Coleman was on the trail of a ruthless serial killer recently, studying its behavior, patterns and moves at a Massachusetts lab. The more he saw, the more it confirmed a hunch. He had seen it all before. He was looking at a copycat killer.
The mass murderer of bats under Coleman's microscope, Pseudogymnoascus destructans, has a lot in common with Chytridiomycosis, a mass slayer of frogs and other amphibians. The culprits resemble a third culprit, Ophidiomyces, which kills and disfigures snakes.
They are fungi, and they arrived in the U.S. from overseas with an assist from humans — through travel and trade. They prefer cold conditions and kill with precision — so efficiently that they are creating a crisis in the wild.