Crawling on their hands and knees through piles of bat guano and wood rat droppings, six Bigfork High School cave club members ventured into six caves in the Little Belt Mountains over the course of three days.

During that early November trip the students also belayed into seemingly bottomless pits to install temperature and relative humidity data loggers in each cave with bats hibernating inside.

The BHS cave club is participating in a statewide data collection effort to help prevent a fungal disease, white-nose syndrome, from decimating bat populations in Montana the way it has in the eastern United States.

“White-nose could be triggered in one species or another depending on the temperatures,” third-year cave club senior Mandy Derber said.“Monitoring these caves and keeping track of what’s going on, it’s kind of nice to be able to do something that makes a difference.”

They were invited to work as part of a cooperative effort with several state agencies and a group of recreational Montana cavers to gather the information. One of the big issues with white-nose is scientists aren’t sure exactly how it spreads. Some prelimenary research suggests that it’s spread through bat-to-bat contact in hibernating colonies at temperatures between a certain range.

White-nose syndrome is associated with the deaths of anywhere from 5-7 million bats in caves from the East Coast to Missouri and north to Canada. The fungus was first found in New York state in 2006 and spread rapidly. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service called for a moratorium on caving activities in the affected areas.

Not that Whitenose has come close to Montana’s stateline yet, but Derber and her fellow students are recording temperatures, relative humidity, bat hibernation and soil information to add to the state’s bat and cave database. That way, if the disease ever does show up in Montana, state agencies will better understand where the bats are.

The clubs’ transportation to the caves and lodging are funded by the Forest Service. In the process students are also taking the opportunity to continue recording information they’ve collected for years — mineral sources, fossils, human impact and animal biology.

All the information collected is put into Geographical Information System maps students create with the help of cave club advisor and BHS teacher Hans Bodenhamer.

Using those maps, the cave club gave a presentation in November on the information they’ve collected thus far at the Montana Association of Conservation Districts convention at the Hilton Garden Inn in Kalispell.

“Hans and his students have been incredibly helpful along those lines,” head zoologist for the Montana Natural History Program Bryce Maxell said. “They just do these incredibly detailed maps of these caves.”

Maxell oversees the data collection project and the history program acts as a holding space for all the information.

The cooperative effort in Montana came together during the summer of 2011, after Region One of the Forest Service announced similar plans to close caves in the state as a method of protecting the state’s bat population from spread of the disease. Maxell said recreational cavers throughout the state were worried about losing their opportunities to cave.

“They really love caving and they were concerned that the caves were going to be shut down indiscriminately throughout the region,” Maxell said.

Many of the state’s recreational cavers belong to the Northwest Rocky Mountain Grotto, a statewide recreational caving group founded in 2000. One of the groups founding members, Daryl Greaser, said there was an uproar among Montana cavers. It spurred the cooperative process the state is now employing to collect information on caves and bats in the state.

“Now they’re at the table with us,” Greaser said. “Because we are the experts, we know what’s going on in the caves, we have the data.”

Since 2000, recreational cavers have found and mapped over 300 caves in Montana, most of them in remote areas that are hard to get to. By using recreational cavers to collect the information and the state as a storehouse for compiling all the data, the state now knows more about the bat population in Montana then they have in the past. Bodenhamer said it’s also been a great way to bring different agencies to the table and assess decisions cooperatively.

“Even if white-nose doesn’t make it here, we’re going to have all sorts of cool data on caves and bats,” Bodenhamer said. “It’s sort of a citizen’s science thing.”