KNOXVILLE, Tenn., Dec. 24 (UPI) -- A proposal to cull bat populations will not halt the spread of a disease that has killed a million bats in the United States since 2006, a study says.

Researchers at the University of Tennessee say a study of how the fungal disease known as white-nose syndrome is passed from bat to bat suggests a cull would not stop its spread, the BBC reported Friday.


"Given the dispersal aspect of the problem and the complexity of hibernating bat ecology, it was a case that these things together certainly meant that culling would not work in the case of bats," Thomas Hallam from the UT Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology says.

There is a high degree of bat-to-bat interaction, which has been identified as the main way the disease is transmitted, during the course of a year, Hallam says.

Once present in a colony, white-nose syndrome can wipe out the entire colony's population, scientists say.

WNS, considered by some researchers as the worst wildlife health crisis in the United States, is named after a white fungus that grows on the muzzle and wings of infected animals.

Since WNS was first discovered in February 2006 in a cave in New York, it has spread to at least 14 states and a number of Canadian provinces.