When it comes to apocalyptic animal die-offs in nature, bees and starfish hog the spotlight. But bats are suffering, too. A disease called white-nose syndrome is killing bats across the country.

Technically it's a cold-loving fungus called Pseudogymnoascus destructans, and it first showed up in North American bats in 2006, in upstate New York. Since then, it has stormed across the continent, killing more than 5.7 million bats in just eight years. But now, researchers from the US Forest Service think they may have stumbled on a treatment at last.

During his doctoral work in 2011 and 2012, Chris Cornelison, a wildlife researcher at Georgia State University, learned of a common soil bacteria, Rhodococcus rhodochrous, that inhibits mold growth on some fruits and crops. "If it can prevent fungi from growing on a piece of fruit," Cornelison thought, "it might help prevent fungi from growing on a bat.”

This isn't the first strategy researchers have tried. Caught off-guard by the severity and spread of the disease, bat researchers and wildlife ecologists have spent several years employing a “try-anything attitude” out of desperation, says Cornelison. Some have used artificial heaters in caves to prevent the fungus from growing. Others tried closing caves off to humans to prevent people from introducing or spreading stowaway spores. They've even sprayed fungicides in caves or introduced other fungi that could outcompete P. destructans. The most prevalent intervention, says Indiana State University bat researcher Joy O’Keefe, has been decontamination—spraying anti-fungal solutions on spelunkers and cave tourists, as well as any equipment they are bringing in and out.

But none of them have been able to stop the fuzz. WNS manifests as a fuzzy white growth around muzzles and wings during hibernation, destroying wing membranes and tissues. It also prevents bats from entering a restful hibernation state, so they use twice as much energy as healthy bats—burning the fat they’ve stored up for the cold months and starving to death. Infection has spread as far west as Mississippi, down to the southern limits of the continental US, and up north into Canada. Some colony populations have been cut by more than 90 percent. Many bat species live for 30 to 40 years, and females only give birth to about one pup per year, so it’s going to take several generations for some species to recover from this latest epidemic—assuming those species even manage to stave off extinction.

That's why Cornelison's results—though still unpublished—are getting some researchers excited. After toxicity tests to verify the mold-inhibiting bacteria was safe for bats, Cornelison's team captured a large number of infected bats and exposed them to the bacteria for 48 hours. They released them back into their cold caves, where the fungus typically spreads rapidly through physical contact—bats snuggling close to one another to share body heat during their hibernation. Most of the treated bats survived to the end of the cold season, and the bacteria proved to be an excellent treatment and prevention tool of WNS. On Tuesday, the researchers were able to release dozens of treated bats back into the wild, although many are being retained for long term impact assessments.

O’Keefe, who was not involved with the trials, thinks one of the biggest advantages to using R. rhodochrous is that it negates the need to physically handle bats to treat them. “A lot of bat deaths result from these kind of WNS experiments,” she says. “All that handling can be adverse to bat health by decreasing the energy and disrupting their hibernation even more.”

Although they’re optimistic, Cornelison and his colleagues don't think R. rhodochrous is necessarily a cure. The exact numbers will need to be released, and will require need more analysis and scrutiny, before wildlife researchers can figure out how to interpret and use the results. The researchers also need to make sure that the fungus-killing bacterium won’t harm beneficial fungi, or other cave-dwelling plants and animals. O’Keefe also points out that the impact of WNS on bat populations varies considerably between colonies—while one colony could see its numbers dwindle to 5 percent, others might see only a few individuals killed—so researchers will need to modify how they use R. rhodochrous, rather than install a one-size-fits-all model strategy.

But they'll have to figure out something soon. During their active season, bats consume two-thirds of their weight in insects every night, including pest insects that wreak havoc on crops. The loss of North American bats could cause agriculture losses totaling about $22.9 billion a year. That's the thing about apocalyptic animal die-offs—they tend to be bad news for the next animal up the line.