Summary

Eleven cultural recoveries of Histoplasma capsulatum were obtained from 455 isolation attempts, utilizing individual or pooled liver and spleen emulsions prepared from 935 specimens of bats collected in the Canal Zone and Panama from 1961 to 1963. At least five species of bats have been shown to be capable of experiencing naturally acquired histoplasmosis by these surveillance studies. Attempts to demonstrate pathognomonic lesions in four of the five species of positive bats and comparative pathologic study of the tissues of bats which failed to yield cultural evidence of disease were uniformly uninformative.