[imagesource:gencraftai]
During an ecology conference in Prague, an expert in aquatic fungi, Jennifer Anderson, raised an unusual complaint – the lack of emojis to properly cover the subject of her research.
Anderson, a microbial ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences lamented “If you are doing the important work of trying to save a species, you can use graphics to help you communicate this in a very relatable way.If you are working to save the aquatic fungi, you first must let people know that yes, aquatic fungi exist, then describe in words what they look like – usually not like mushrooms.”
The strange but compelling argument inspired two Italian researchers, Stefano Mammola and Francesco Ficetola, to embark on a ‘scientific expedition’ to see how well the ‘tree of life’ was represented in the emoji library. The answer, the Italian ecologists found, was not well at all.
“Our findings confirm a typical bias in biodiversity research and an intrinsic feature of human psychology,” said Mammola, an ecologist at the Water Research Institute of the National Research Council of Italy.
“We typically have more empathy for life forms that are phylogenetically closer to us.”
Emojis are a simple, colourful, and straightforward way to communicate. Animals, the researchers discovered, were well-represented by existing emojis, but plants, fungi, and microbes were not.
They’ve now even published a research paper in the journal Science. They identified emojis representing 112 distinct organisms, among them were 92 animals, 16 plants, one toadstool-like fungus and a single micro-organism that the scientists suspect to be the gut-infecting bacteria E coli.
“A good representation of the tree of life in social media can greatly help to disseminate the message that biodiversity is much more than just cats, dogs, lions and pandas,” said Mammola. “There is an impressive number of organisms, and all of them play a fundamental role for our planet, even the ones we know less.”
The researchers classified all of the nature and animal emojis in Emojipedia, a curated online emoji database, and discovered that certain large groupings of organisms had no representation at all. Scientists have described over 20,000 kinds of flatworms, for example, yet the soft-bodied organism cannot be displayed in internet messaging.
Arthropods accounted for only 16% of animal emojis, despite the fact that there are over a million described arthropod species, compared to fewer than 100,000 described vertebrate species. In some cases, the scientists identified individual species, such as bald eagles and giant pandas, although other emojis, such as ants and crocodiles, were only identifiable at the genus or family level.
Biases in emoji representation of animal biodiversity reflected known biases in biodiversity assessments and conservation analyses.
Mammola believes better representation could elicit interest in organisms that people do not know, indirectly helping conservation efforts.
“Adding 20 to 30 more emojis to represent missing but pivotal organisms will be nearly costless. Such an expansion can give a better idea of how broad biodiversity is.”
Last year, Andrew White, a computational chemist, put in a bid for a protein emoji after conducting a survey on X, then known as Twitter, asking structural biologists what it should look like. The bid was rejected by the selection committee, which included officials from Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
“DNA is recognised as the language that encodes life, but proteins are the actual agents of life,” White wrote in the journal Nature. “I think having a protein emoji would be useful for science communication, similarly to how the DNA emoji has come to represent advances in genomics and sequencing.”
The original instigator of this furious debate, Anderson, emphasised that emojis are not just for fun. “Having an emoji signals that an organism is valued or somehow important enough to be part of daily conversation.”
We support this and believe everyone deserves an emoji, whether you’re a single-celled organism or a zombie-creating fungus. If there isn’t an emoji for it, does it even exist?
[source:guardian]
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