“…farmers compensated for bat decline by increasing their insecticide use by 31.1%. The compensatory increase in insecticide use by farmers adversely affected health—human infant mortality increased by 7.9% in the counties that experienced bat die-offs.” Eyal G. Frank
A Science article by Eyal Frank got a lot of press last week for linking US bat population plummeting (up to 70%) due to the “white nose syndrom” (an invasive fungus) impacting bats since 2006 (through premature awakening from hibernation) and therefore agriculture, to a huge (8%) rise in infant mortality in the impacted regions, resulting from a jump in the use of insecticides… (The statistical model behind the predicted mortality is a linear model for all dependent outcomes, insecticide use, crop yield, and infant mortality. With plenty of precautions to separate infected counties from non-infected ones and to eliminate exogenous causes.)
