Researchers Stefano Mammola and Francesco Ficetola went to an ecology conference in Prague in 2021, and met a scientist with an unusual complaint. Jennifer Anderson, an expert on aquatic fungi, regretted that her research topic was not available in emoji form.
If you are doing the important work of trying to save aquatic animals, you can use graphics to help you communicate this in a very understandable way. If you are working to save aquatic fungi, you must first let people know that yes, aquatic fungi exist and then describe in words what they look like, they generally don’t look like mushrooms, said Jennifer, a microbial ecologist at the Swedish University of Science. Agricultural.
Impressed by the conversation with the scientist and suspicious of how unusual species were ignored, Mammola and Ficetola shared with a colleague to find out if the tree of life was well represented in the emoji library. The answer was not good at all.
Emojis are a simple, colorful and direct form of online communication. The researchers found that animals were well represented by the available emojis, but plants, fungi and microorganisms were not.
In a study published in the journal iScience, the team identified emojis that represent 112 different organisms. Among them were 92 animals, 16 plants, a poisonous mushroom-like fungus and a single microorganism that scientists suspect is the gut-infecting bacteria E coli.
Our findings confirm a typical bias in biodiversity research and an intrinsic feature of human psychology. We usually have more empathy for life forms that are phylogenetically closer to us. A good representation of the tree of life on social media can go a long way in spreading the message that biodiversity is much more than just cats, dogs, lions and pandas. There is an impressive number of organisms and they all play a fundamental role for our planet, even those we know least about”, highlighted Mammola, ecologist at the Water Research Institute of the Italian National Research Council.
The researchers categorized all nature and animal-related emojis on Emojipedia, a curated online emoji catalog, and found that some large groups of creatures had no representation at all. Scientists have described more than 20,000 species of flatworm, for example, but there is no way to display the soft-bodied creature in online messages.
Arthropods accounted for just 16% of animal emojis, even though there are more than 1 million described species of arthropods, compared to less than 100,000 described species of vertebrates. In some cases, scientists identified individual species, such as eagles and giant pandas, while other emojis were only identifiable at the genus or family level, such as ants and crocodiles.
Furthermore, the researchers said that biases in the emoji representation of animal biodiversity reflect known biases in biodiversity assessments and conservation analyses, including the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
Some scientists have taken steps to represent their research on their phone keyboards with images instead of words. Andrew White, a computational chemist, came up with a proposal for a protein emoji last year after conducting research in X, then known as Twitter, asking structural biologists what it should be like. The selection committee, which includes representatives from technology companies such as Apple, Meta e Microsoftrejected the offer.
DNA is recognized as the language that encodes life, but proteins are the true agents of life. I think having a protein emoji would be useful for scientific communication, in the same way that the DNA emoji has come to represent advances in genomics and sequencing,” White wrote in the journal Nature.
Italian researchers found that emoji biodiversity was increasing. The number of animal taxa represented increased from 45 in 2015 to 92 in 2022, and over time began to better represent the diversity of creatures.
The discoveries have a strong relationship with the state of wildlife in the real world. A historical review of research carried out in 2019 concluded that nature was shrinking at unprecedented rates in human history and that species were being exterminated at an increasingly rapid rate.
Jenifer said she wanted emojis for organisms like aquatic fungi as reflections of greater public awareness and indicators of their ecological value.
Having an emoji signals that an organism is valued or in some way important enough to be part of everyday conversation, said the aquatic fungi expert.
*With information from The Guardian/ Cover photo: iStock
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