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... Frank suggests the link is due to the positive impacts of bats' diets. A single bat consumes up to 40 percent of its body weight in insects every night. In agricultural areas, this means that when bats disappear, farmers might use more insecticides on their fields. In counties with outbreaks of white-nose syndrome, farmers used 31 percent more of these toxic chemicals, on average, per the study. Putting more insecticides into the environment seems to be the cause of the increased infant deaths, Frank writes.

To make sure his ideas stood up to scrutiny, Frank tells the Guardian's Rebekah White that he spent a year "kicking the tires" and ruling out other possible causes of infant mortality, like the opioid epidemic, parental unemployment, genetically modified crops and even the weather. Nothing else fit, showing "compelling evidence ... that farmers did respond to the decline in insect-eating bats, and that response had an adverse health impact on human infants," he adds. ...