Bats in the attic? Boot them out before maternity time

Flying mammals can’t be ousted in birth season

Lori Wurtzel can’t decide which was the more horrifying bat encounter in her Maitland home last month: She and her husband, Ben, awaking to a pair of winged intruders flying circles above their bed or their terrier Ollie holding a dead one in his mouth.

“Bats are unequivocally creepy,” said Wurtzel, 34, a lawyer. “I mean, think of it, they’re a symbol of Halloween.”

By the time a nuisance-wildlife specialist evicted the cluster of bats from the home, the couple and their two toddler daughters had received precautionary rabies shots, Ollie had been quarantined and they had forked out $4,000 to reclaim their house from the only mammals capable of flight.

But the Wurtzels were lucky. They discovered the bats before “bat maternity season,” which begins April 15 and lasts until Aug. 15.

Some legal options to get rid of bats are illegal during that fourmonth period, which is intended to protect the species, and a hard-toget state permit is required to get rid of them.

Do we continue to add new neurons to our brain circuitry throughout our lives? Or does our neuron count remain fixed once we reach adulthood?

The scientific debate rages on.

In a recent report published in Cell Stem Cell, scientists from Columbia University present new evidence that brains continue to make hundreds of new neurons a day, even after we reach our 70s, in a process known as neurogenesis.

Lead author Dr. Maura Boldrini, a research scientist at Columbia University’s department of psychiatry, and her colleagues looked at the brains of 28 deceased people age 14 to 79. Their goal was to see whether aging affects neuron production.

Previous research had shown that neurogenesis slows down in aging mice and nonhuman primates. Boldrini’s group wanted to see whether a similar pattern occurred in humans.

In each brain sample, the researchers looked for evidence of neurons in various stages of development, including stem cells, intermediate progenitor cells that would eventually become neurons, immature neurons that had not fully developed and new neurons.

The team looked only at the hippocampus because it is one of the few areas of the brain that research has shown can produce new neurons into adulthood.

In all their samples the researchers found similar numbers of neural progenitor cells and immature neurons, regardless of age. This led them to conclude that the human brain continues to make neurons.

But the researchers did uncover some differences in the brains of young people and older people.

They found that development of new blood vessels in the brain decreases progressively as people get older. They also discovered that a protein associated with helping new neurons to make connections in the brain decreased with age.

This might explain why some older people suffer from memory loss or exhibit less emotional resiliency, Boldrini said.

These findings were published one month after a team of researchers from the University of California at San Francisco reported in Nature that it was unable to find any evidence of neurogenesis after adolescence in humans.

In an email statement, that group said they are not convinced that Boldrini and her colleagues found conclusive evidence of adult neurogenesis.