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Australia is famous for wildlife from furry marsupials to scaly lizards and deadly spiders, but a scientist says our native bats are not getting the love or admiration they deserve.
Negative stereotypes and links to the outbreak of COVID-19 have given bats a poor reputation, with few people showing interest in Australia's numerous and diverse bat species.
Bat ecologist Kelly Sheldrick has spent years studying bats and working on their reputation issues, which she says are often connected to mythical creatures and supernatural themes like vampires.
"People associate bats with drinking blood," she says.
"And they're not easy to see at night, they're quite elusive … and people fear what they don't know."
In a paper published by the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales in 2011, Daniel Lunney and Chris Moon wrote that bats were "almost invisible to the public" and stories like Count Dracula had left a perception of bats as "dark, evil, bloodsucking monsters".
Pollinators and insect-controllers
Australia has more than 90 species of bats.
In WA alone there are 42 species, occupying a vast range of habitats from the densely forested South West and Great Southern regions to the deep red gorges and rangelands of the Pilbara and Kimberley.
Ms Sheldrick says many people do not know how prevalent the flying mammals are.
She says there's also a lack of awareness about the role of bats in controlling insect populations, pollinating plants and spreading seeds, much like birds and bees do.
Ms Sheldrick says popular theories about bats' role in COVID-19 are still strong, despite there being no definitive findings on the origin of the pandemic.
"There's this whole kind of misconception around bats being pests as well, and similar to rodents.
"I'm not aware of this happening in Western Australia, but I do know [in] other places around the world, people actually are going out and actively destroying roosts of bats [due to COVID-19]."
Koalas depend on bats
Rescue group ACT Wildlife's flying fox coordinator Clare Wynter believes limited media opportunities compared with animals like wombats had also contributed to bats' reputation.
"People can bring them [wombats] out for a television camera much more easily," she says.
"With a bat, even our pups that we're raising, little orphaned ones, we need to wear PPE [personal protective equipment] and we would never take them to an education talk."
Ms Wynter says people should exercise some caution around bats but she believes their reputation for spreading disease is unfair.
"Certainly people shouldn't touch bats unless they have vaccinations because there is a very low risk of ... [contracting] Australian bat lyssavirus, which is related to rabies," she says.
Ms Wynter emphasises the ecological benefits of bats.
"Flying foxes [or fruit bats] play an important role spreading pollen across eucalyptus tree forests.
"Without the bats, the koalas wouldn't have the trees. So the bats are the ones that are fertilising those big eucalypts that koalas love."
Perceptions have consequences
The Conservation Council of WA (CCWA) says more than half of the state's species are in decline, or their status is unknown, due to a lack of research.
Ms Sheldrick runs a CCWA citizen-science program, taking grassroots bat-watchers under her wing to help monitor the state's population and restore bat habitats.
She says no ecologist would favour conservation of one species over another.
But Ms Sheldrick feels there is an imbalance in how bats are thought of compared to the traditional symbolic wildlife in Australia.
"For example, everyone loves koalas. A lot of people overseas when they think of Australia, they think of koalas."
She says the species' image problem has an impact on the amount of funding available for research, which in turn contributed to bats' poor public profile.
Ms Sheldrick says there is a lack of basic data such as population numbers and distribution for several species.
"It makes it very difficult to create conservation management plans for a species when you don't even know where it exists."
Mining central to threats, but also research
Only two of WA's species, the Pilbara leaf-nosed bat and ghost bat, are officially listed as vulnerable and therefore nationally protected through federal law.
Both species are also found in the Northern Territory and Queensland, and in WA they are regularly threatened by mining as well as introduced feral species.
Mining is particularly impactful in the Pilbara, and ironically much of the information on the region's bats has come through surveys conducted by the industry in what scientists call grey literature.
Curtin University's Holly Bradley says the mining sector's work had been very useful for the Pilbara species, but more diverse sources of research funding would help plug gaps in the data.
"Some of the research priorities need [to be] more in depth and more recurring, so going back year after year and getting long-term records," Dr Bradley says.
Ms Sheldrick says improving the public's relationship with bats would be the first step in finding money for future research.
"I feel like that could start a ripple effect, because people really do influence where governments then put their funding," she says.