MAMMOTH CAVE NATIONAL PARK — Mammoth Cave National Park acquired 16 interns this summer through the Student Conservation Association, an organization that provides college students with hands-on conservation experiences, to assist national park scientists in doing a variety of research projects.

The interns were sent to test water quality in the backcountry, inventory protected plants and combat exotic plants among other tasks.

Two of the interns, Samantha Sterman, of New York, N.Y., and Marisa Maldonado, of Midlothian, Va., were assigned to monitor the park’s bat populations and record baseline data that will help scientists understand White-Nose Syndrome, a disease that is killing bat populations by the millions.

White-Nose Syndrome was first detected in New York in 2006 and is caused by a fungus. Since 2006, the disease has killed an estimated 1 million bats in eastern United States and Canada.

“It is spreading across the country,” said Dr. Rick Toomey, director of Mammoth Cave International Center for Science and Learning. “It has not been found in Kentucky yet.”

But the disease has been found along the Kentucky-Tennessee border, and in Missouri, West Virginia, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

“It’s known to kill substantial numbers in at least five species of bats,” Toomey said. “All of the species that it’s known to kill occur [at the] park, as well as one or two species that it is known to occur in and hasn’t shown that it can kill off also occur at the park. So we are very worried about this.”

The disease is spread from bat to bat and can be spread by humans who walk in bat guano and carry it from one place to another on clothing or shoes.

In an effort to keep the disease from being brought into the national park, tour guides ask before the start of each tour if anyone has visited another cave earlier in the day.

“It’s not unusual for them to have someone who has been on another cave tour that morning, and then they are here in the afternoon,” said Vickie Carson, public information officer for the national park.

If visitors have been to other caves, they are asked to change their clothes and shoes. If they can’t change their shoes, their shoes are soaked in a Lysol solution for about five minutes, she said, adding that last summer the national park treated about 1,000 pairs of shoes.

There is no known way to stop the spread of the disease, but there is no treatment known for it and there’s lots of research going on to try to understand it better, Toomey said.

Bats are an important part of the environment.

“They are the main predators on night flying insects, things like beetles and moths, especially things that eat crops,” Toomey said. “They will occasionally hammer swarming termites. They will hammer swarming ants. They will take mosquitoes as well. They are the biggest predator on night flying insects, and a lot of those night flying insects are crop pests.”

Bats love Mammoth Cave National Park because it has several places they can roost, such as caves, trees and buildings.

“There are 400 caves in the park, and so for bats that roost in the park, there’s a lot of habitat. There’s also 52,000 acres of nearly all forest for bats that like trees,” said Carson.

Part of Sterman and Maldonado’s job in monitoring the bat population at Mammoth Cave was to count them as they come off their roost and document what species they are. There are approximately 13 species of bats in the park.

“We did exit counts like every night, except for nights that we did acoustic transects,” said Sterman.

An acoustic transect involves using a device called an Anabat, which is like a tape recorder, that was placed atop a truck driven by Sterman and Maldonado. They drove 20 mph around the park recording the sounds of the bats.

“It was like picking up on any bat that was flying around in a certain vicinity,” Maldonado said.

The highest number of bats they counted coming out of a roost was 630 at Long Cave. The smallest number was five they saw near the Wondering Woods tower.

Some of the buildings and structures where they found bats were the park superintendent’s conference room and the bridge between Mammoth Cave Hotel and the national park’s visitors’ center.

“Depending on the species, they come out at different times,” Sterman said. The species they saw the most was Rafinesque’s Big-Eared Bat, which is easily detected by its large ears, hence the name. “They were pretty easy for us to find because they are in most of the caves that we were looking at. They are just in a lot of roosts that are really easy for us to get to and that we know about, whereas the Indiana Bat roosts in trees and it’s a lot harder to find them because they aren’t in very large numbers anywhere.”

The information Sterman and Maldonado collected will be shared with other national parks, the U.S. and Kentucky Departments of Fish and Wildlife and other organizations.

Toomey hopes to have other interns next summer to continue collecting data regarding bats and White-Nose Syndrome, but said right now there isn’t any funding for continuation of the program. The park received special funding through the National Park Service Youth Intern Program for the program this summer, said Carson.

“We are looking at funding to continue this,” Toomey said.