LEWISBURG, PA. — The 10 hibernating little brown bats hang from a corner of their tailor-made refrigeration chamber at Bucknell University like a clump of old potato skins, only less animated. In torpor, bats become one with their wintry surroundings, their body temperatures falling to just above freezing, their heart rates slowing to one or two beats a minute, their breathing virtually undetectable.

But suddenly, a male yanks himself free of the bunch and hops down to a dish on the floor. After taking a long, slow drink of water, the bat uses the claws on his folded wings to hoist himself along the wire mesh of the chamber, his motions angular, deliberative and spidery. A second bat rappels down for a drink, and then a third.

“Well, that’s a lucky break,” said Thomas Lilley, a tall and crisply composed postdoctoral fellow from Finland. “Multiple rounds of bat drama.”

As Bucknell’s de facto bat concierge, Dr. Lilley helps wild bats acclimate to life in captivity, a difficult task with an urgent spur. He and his colleagues are laboring mightily to understand white-nose syndrome, a devastating fungal disease that has killed at least six million North American bats since it first appeared in Albany a decade ago and that threatens to annihilate some bat species entirely.