Where are all the acorns?

At the Long Branch Nature Center, calls and e-mails have been pouring in from people who want to donate acorns they've gathered in areas where they are plentiful.

From earlier this year:

Whatever is killing the bats leaves them unusually thin and, in some cases, dotted with a white fungus. Bat experts fear that what they call White Nose Syndrome may spell doom for several species that keep insect pests under control.

And last month, mystery solved:

Something is killing the little brown bats of the Northeast, and researchers may have fingered the culprit: a fungus.

I guess it was just a puzzle:

Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much.

If things go wrong with a puzzle, identifying the culprit is easy. Mysteries, though, are a lot murkier: sometimes the information we’ve been given is inadequate, and sometimes we aren’t very smart about making sense of what we’ve been given, and sometimes the question itself cannot be answered. Puzzles come to satisfying conclusions. Mysteries often don’t.

This holiday season, remember the neediest: squirrels!