A recent paper by Berta Martín-López and colleagues in Conservation Biology reports how the size of an animal’s eyes appears to be people’s main measure for determining whether they think an animal is important enough for them to open their pocket books and pay for its conservation. This is something one needs to be wary of.
People working in the field of biodiversity are often told that they need to speak the language of economists and include economic criteria in their work in order to help them communicate with decision-makers. Assigning economic value to elements of biodiversity is fraught with problems, but many attempts have been made (e.g. this and this). The Martín-López paper above reviewed some 60 relevant studies covering 50 species to see what factors affected people’s ‘willingness to pay’ for conservation against a range of physical characetristics, usefulness to humans, and scientific factors. The researchers found that eye size (aka ‘cuteness’) was the most important measure of attractiveness and thus the best predictor of whether people would pay for a species’ conservation.
Utility (e.g. for tourism and hunting) ranked second, and scientific reasons came third. However, it seemed as though the more informed the public is about endangerment (e.g through the IUCN Red List), the more willing it is to support an otherwise non-cute and non-utilitarian species.
Something I didn’t mention in my post on tigers was how striking it was that the Global Tiger Initiative ‘sold’ itself within the Bank so (relatively) easily. There was no major need to justify attention to tigers. But then an Animal Planet survey found it was the world’s most popular animal; it’s large, has large eyes which allow it to hunt at night, and is by any measure beautiful. And its cubs are totally cute. Luckily, tigers are an ‘umbrella species’ so that if we can conserve wild tigers and their habitats then much else will be conserved too. Of course, in some areas, tigers are cattle killers and the Martín-López study found that this behavior would diminish the willingness to pay for their conservation especially, and not surprisingly, among those most affected.
The World Bank's Natural Habitats policy tells us that our projects should not convert or significantly degrade natural habitats. It’s fairly easy to get attention when the natural habitats at stake are forests or wetlands, perhaps because they contain large-eyed animals. But habitats which have been harder to fix attention on would include caves which can shelter peculiar and very sensitive ecosystems in which many species adapted to the strange dark environment are restricted to tiny ranges (see lessons on the management of cave biodiversity).
The species in question are not furry, nor feathery – and given that some of them have lost their eyes (what point is there in eyes if there is nothing to see?) they are way down on anyone’s scale of cuteness. Very few people would willingly pay anything for their conservation. Our policy does not however distinguish among habitats, and so caves must be afforded attention, but that can be easier said than done.
One of our projects in China has included some biological surveys of caves as part of a conservation component. The surveys led by Professor Louis Deharveng (one and two) of the Paris Natural History Museum found all manner of small creatures, about 90% of them new to science. Ms Niu Chang-ying of Huazhong Agricultural University was part of the survey team and took a short film which we have just put up on our YouTube channel and which shows the little critters which deserve our attention:
Meanwhile, we have other projects – dams, highways, and railways – in the southern part of China which could impact caves and their animals if no mitigation plans were put in place. The film has helped show our engineer colleagues what the fauna is we should be giving attention to, and has helped garner support much more than rather abstract and dry discussions of cave biodiversity. A group of cavers based in China has helped us and our partners to do some solid cave surveys and management plans, and we hope that these will enable us to develop more formal guidelines on what to do in these circumstances.
Cave animals won’t get attention because of their popularity. They don’t really deserve attention because of any perceived utility – although some cave life-forms living in extreme environments have been found to have pharmaceutical use. But they do deserve attention simply because they are part of natural habitats which are getting knocked by all manner of pressures. Cuteness should not control everything.
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