When you die like a dodo, mercy is only for a short time.
Research into how people react to news of extinction shows that social media users do cry, but only for a short time, Irish researchers have found.
As the world faces what experts describe as the end of the sixth, researchers investigated how people deal with animal issues, such as the last turtle of Pinta Island, Lonesome George, who is disappearing from the world.
The team, led by the University of Galway in collaboration with University College Dublin and Maynooth University, turned to data and the world of ‘culturomics’ to test how we react to the extinction of animals and plants and whether we mourn their funerals, or if we are numb to the consequences.
Dr Kevin Healy, School of Natural Sciences and the Ryan Institute at the University of Galway, said: ‘In our research we tracked changes in tweets, and visits to the Wikipedia page before the end and the end of eight species from Lonesome George, the last Pinta. The island turtle, to less known species such as the bean snail.’
The research team analyzed data from more than 2 million Wikipedia visits and more than 100,000. Twitter tweets and retweets between 2007 and 2023, related to eight brands now complete.
The Pinta turtle is one of the animals whose research was analyzed in this study
The Bramble Cay mosaic-tailed Rat is another recently extinct species
The West African black rhinoceros was declared extinct in 2011
These included the giant Pinta turtle; and Christmas Island whiptail-skink; Bramble Cay rat; Alagoas leaf picker; Captain Cook’s snail; the Oahu tree shell; the Rabbs fringe-limbed tree frog and the black rhinoceros of West Africa, to test whether courtship developed after the extinction and how it played out globally.
The study showed that although tweets, retweets and posts on X related to the species increased after its end, this was only a short-term phenomenon.
In contrast, visits to Wikipedia pages related to extinction had a longer duration.
Dr Susan Canavan, from the School of Natural Sciences at the University of Galway and lead author of the study, said: ‘Overall, it seems people care and feel sorry for the extinction issue.
‘We’re seeing words like ‘RIP’ and ‘lost’ appear more frequently, and that the scope of tweets grows from close to species, to global post-extinction.’
Dr Healy added: ‘Public engagement with conservation issues, such as extinction, is problematic, as it can drive funding, or increase support for conservation policy and even stimulate debate on controversial issues such as trying to restore species to extinction through the use of biotechnology. ‘
