In an age where society’s problems seem insolvably complex, it’s nice to hear progress is being made in one of North America’s gloomiest wildlife tales.

White-Nose Syndrome has wiped out millions of bats in the northeast, and as it continues its march west and south in the U.S. and north toward Canada and Alaska, wildlife scientists are bracing for the fallout.

But tucked away in a lab at Georgia State University, researchers are finding hope in a barrel of bananas from South America.

It’s an interesting story because the grad student who stumbled upon a potential cure wasn’t even studying White-Nose Syndrome. He was actually studying ways to prevent fruit from ripening once it’s picked.

He explains that once bananas, peaches and other fruit are plucked from the fields, the plants emit their own chemical signals which tell the fruit to start ripening.

Researchers in the lab were investigating the effectiveness of VOCs — volatile organic compounds-emitted by the bacterium R. rhodochrous — in delaying ripening in fruit. If they could figure out how to delay the ripening, the amount of fruit rotting in trucks on the way to the marketplace could be significantly reduced.

While testing the volatile compounds on fruit, they noticed another effect: the growth of fungus seemed to be inhibited. And that’s when grad student Chris Cornelison had a thought: could these compounds have an effect on bats with White-Nose Syndrome?

“I was standing there looking at a bucket of moldy bananas next to a bucket of bananas with no mold,” Cornelison told a nature blogger. “If the bacterium could be so effective on fungi on bananas, could it have similar effects on fungus on bats? It was one of those leaps of thought in science that maybe only a grad student could make.”

So, Cornelison tested his theory by exposing petri dishes of the fungus to the bacterium, and right out of the gate the results seemed too good to be true.

“I had to test it five more times before I believed the results. It had dramatic effects on the fungus. It seemed like this could be a big step in managing White-Nose Syndrome.”

Bat researchers saw the potential in Cornelison’s findings and soon they were out in the wild capturing bats in caves to bring into the lab for testing.

The bats were placed in mesh bags, then put in a large Yeti cooler containing plates of the bacterium where they stayed for 24 to 48 hours.

Then the bats were placed in an enclosure in a wild cave, where they hibernated through the winter, and last spring, they were collected once again and tested for presence of WNS.

“We tested for their fungal load and compared that to the fungal load when we first captured them,” said plant pathologist Daniel Lindner of the U.S. Forest Service’s Center for Forest Mycology Research. “The bats had no detectable signs of white-nose syndrome and could be released.”

Before anyone gets too excited, more tests will have to be conducted to ensure that the bacterium they’re using isn’t going to have negative consequences on other organisms that live in bat caves, as caves have a delicate ecology.

And then there’s the question of how to deliver the bacterium into the caves spread out across rural and wilderness areas.

Researchers are considering a nebulizer that pumps the VOCs into the cave. In effect, the machine they’re considering is like a commercial grade air freshener. The goal would be to create safe havens for bats in caves, mines and bunkers.

Researchers stress this is not a cure. They still have a long way to go to eradicate WNS and this is just one tool in a long line of others that will be needed to gain better control of the disease.

When you take into consideration that despair has ruled the conversation about bats for more than 10 years, this is indeed a very good first step.

This summer, sitting in my backyard at dusk on several nights, I watched as a lone bat made his way across the yard, in and out of tree branches and across the stretches of silver sky.

I had never really given bats much consideration during my lifetime — not until they were gone.

But on these nights, I watched that bat and found myself rooting for him.

“Hang in there, buddy.”