They're either sucking blood in horror movies, eating farmers' crops, or defecating on schoolkids in northern New South Wales. But in truth, bats play a crucial role in keeping ecosystems in balance. Australia has 90 species and they make up a quarter of all the mammals in the country. But apart from the flying foxes most people know almost nothing about them. Lindy Lumsden, a wildlife ecologist from the Arthur Rylah Institute in Melbourne has been studying the insectivorous bats in the Northern Plains of Victoria.
Land clearing is the biggest threat that bats face.
But as Lindy Lumsden found out, there are more bats in farmland than anyone had realised. We surveyed a whole lot of different types of remnant vegetation, so we were looking at large blocks of forest through to small patches in people's paddocks, roadsides, streamsides, and even just scattered trees in paddocks where there was just a few individual trees, which is what makes up a lot of the rural landscape. We found that there were a lot of species throughout these areas. And I'd say, 'Well no, there's actually 13 different species up through this area. And we found that all the species were occurring out in the small remnants in farmland as well as being in the large blocks of forest.