Remember back when thousands of birds were dropping dead out of the sky in Arkansas? Our very own economics professor Teresa Laughlin explained back in January that ”the reason the public is not up in arms and there is no Congressional investigation of the situation is because no one owns the fish and birds. They represent no one’s assets or pets. This is a classic example of the Common Pool Problems, also known as the Tragedy of the Commons.”

But what if we could quantify their value? That’s what a new study did concerning bats, who have recently been hit hard by white-nose syndrome, a fungus that has killed more than a million bats in 14 different states. Wired has the story of Boston University bat specialist Tom Kunz, who calculated back in 2006 that Mexican free-tailed bats saved south central Texas $74 per acre in insecticide costs doing what they do best–eating insects.

Now Kunz has extrapolated those numbers for the entire United States using conservative numbers factoring both each region’s bat population and crop output. The result? Bats save U.S. farmers at least $3 billion in pesticide costs alone every single year. Talk about all-natural pest control; bats, unlike pesticides, don’t contribute to health problems or help pests build resistance to chemicals.

What’s the point of all this? To get Congress to allot more money towards researching and fighting white-nose syndrome. Last year, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service got $2.4 million to research the disease, not a huge amount of money considering the scope of the problem. This year, with the prospect of drastic impending cuts, Kunz is worried we won’t address the problem until it’s too late.

If there’s one thing Congress understands, it’s money, and $3 billion dollars is a lot of money. Wildlife is worth preserving despite its immediate economic value; when, however, that value readily presents itself, it’s hard to see why our government wouldn’t react.

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