Trending extinctions: How do we react when we hear of animal becoming extinct?

On hearing the news of Lonesome George’s death, the last Pinta Island tortoise, most people are likely to think it is sad and noteworthy news. But do we really care?

As the world experiences what experts describe as the sixth mass extinction researchers have studied how people react to the news of animals, such as Lonesome George, disappearing from the planet for good.

The team, led by University of Galway in collaboration with UCD and Maynooth University, turned to big data and the world of culturomics to measure how we react to the demise of animals and plants and whether we mourn their loss or if we are numb to the effects.

The full study has been published in the journal Animal Conservation and is available here.

Dr Kevin Healy, School of Natural Sciences and the Ryan Institute at University of Galway, said, “Culturomics is an approach where we gather large amounts of online data to understand cultural patterns. In our study we tracked changes in tweets, and Wikipedia page visits before and after the extinction of eight species ranging from Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, to more obscure species such as the bean snail.”

The research team analysed data of more than two million Wikipedia page visits and more than 100,000 tweets and retweets on Twitter between 2007 and 2023, relating to eight species now extinction species including the Pinta Giant Tortoise; the Christmas Island Whiptail-skink; the Bramble Cay Mosaic-tailed Rat; the Alagoas Foliage-gleaner; Captain Cook’s Bean Snail; the Oahu Treesnail; the Rabb’s fringe-limbed treefrog and the West African black rhinoceros, to test if people increased engagement after the extinction and how global it was.

By measuring interactions on both X and visits to Wikipedia, the researchers were able to gauge how people engage with the more immediate world of social media in comparison to the expected slower paced world of an online encyclopaedia.

The study showed that while tweets, retweets and posts on X relating to a species increased after its extinction, this was only a short-lived phenomenon. In contrast, visits to Wikipedia pages relating to an extinction had longer lasting engagement.

Dr Susan Canavan, School of Natural Sciences, University of Galway and lead author on the study, said, “Overall, we found that people mentioned a species on twitter more often directly after its extinction, however this increase was quite short lived. However, when we looked at Wikipedia page visits the increase in page visits after an extinction was sustained for far longer.”

The researchers also found that the most commonly used words are strongly associated with sadness and that for a brief moment even those relatively obscure species found in highly localised parts of the world are mourned across the globe.

Dr Canavan added, “Overall, it does look like people care and are saddened by the news of extinction. We see words like ‘RIP’ and ‘lost’ commonly appear, and that the location of tweets expand from close to the species range, to across the globe after extinction.”

However, while people display a sense of caring on hearing news of extinction, where they hear it from, or how they hear it, was found to be an important driver in how they engage with it.

The researchers found that a small cohort of “influencers” drive the majority of engagement on X. For example, engagement on X after the extinction of the West African black rhinoceros were heavily influenced by posts from the comedian Ricky Gervais.

And while people respond to the news of extinction on mainstream media, there was no noticeable increase in engagement or page visits associated with official extinction announcements from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Dr Healy said, “From a conservation point of view, these results show that we can do better in communicating species extinction by more clearly linking in with media outlets and engaging with particular parts of social media. People’s engagement with conservation issues, such as extinction, does matter, as it can drive funding, or add support for conservation policy and even influence conversations on controversial topics such as attempting to bring species back from extinction using biotechnology.”