I've posted minor annoyances in the rant thread in the past, but given that people have serious problems it always feels weird when I do. So I'm thinking maybe a thread for things that aren't bad enough to justify a rant but aren't chronic enough to be a pet peeve is in order. A thread for the sort of things that might end up reposted with the hashtag #firstworldproblems.
Today I was thinking that maybe I could recycle some of the stuff I post in the Adorable Obscure Critters thread to articles. Figured I might start with bats, because bats are awesome. However it turns out that for a lot of the neatest bat species, there are literally no free (in the sense of freely reusable) photographs of living animals. If you can find a free image at all it's either a textbook sketch or a stuffed specimen.
I mean, it's not terribly surprising that images of bats would be rare relative to other species. Bats are nocturnal, fast moving, and elusive, and a lot of the neatest species have restricted ranges and/or are endangered. The people who are able to get pictures are generally either field researchers or professional photographers, both of whom have incentives against making their stuff freely licensable. (Professional photographers of course make money by selling their images while academic culture discourages sharing things in a manner which would allow them to be used by for-profit entities.)
As Kate pointed out, I could simply link to the ARKive pages on those bats (if pictures of an animal exist, ARKive has them). But a picture is worth a thousand words, and I've gotten so used to being able to find pictures of anything I want on Wikimedia Commons that it's annoying to realize that there are no free photographs of living New Zealand lesser short-tailed bats or Kitti's hog-nosed bats or Madagascar sucker-footed bats I could use in an article.