Future of Wildlife Conservation

my heart. Uh, specifically, it's it's wildlife conservation. And uh it's important to talk about this because there's some some rough data out there that suggests that lots of different species maybe in some pretty particular danger. Right. Oh sure, And and we can never say that species are in no danger at all whatsoever. I mean, natural extinct extinction happens all the time. Yes. Well as a great both spirit who talks to me from the clouds once said,

death is just a part of life. It is, so you know, you could never expect to live in a world where no species of organisms ever dwindle or go extinct, because extinctions are pretty straightforward consequence of evolution. You know, some uh species are competing for resources. Sometimes some species are going to become ascendant, others are going to go

on the decline. Sure, if a species fills a niche that another species was heading towards, then that other species might be edged out of that ecosystem, right, may go extinct. So that there is throughout history, and we can sort of infer this from the fossil record and and different clues we have about the history of life on Earth, that extinction has pretty much been steady, except there are

periods when it sort of goes into overdrive. Oh yeah, and these have been happening for a long time, a long time before humans got hundreds of millions of years. So you've got the steady ground extinction right where some small number of species on Earth just kind of go extinct every year. But then there are periods where suddenly lots of species go extinct. And these can be bad for multiple reasons that we can get into in a minute. But so, what causes these huge extinctions that are usually

referred to as mass extinctions. Typically, I think it's it's catastrophic environmental changes. A lot of cases we don't know exactly for sure what caused them. We have some pretty good ideas. Usually it's things like space impacts, geothermal activity or volcanic eruptions or maybe even this is a weird idea coal fire eruptions. Have you heard about this? So it's just one hypothesis about what could have been partially responsible for some past extinctions if there were massive eruptions

of of coal beds on Earth. And then of course simply through climate change too, and climate change can be a result of those other things I just mentioned. We should also point out, I mean, I'm sure most of our listeners are aware of this, but mass extinctions. That doesn't mean that one day a ton of species just suddenly died out. Mass extinctions can take course over hundreds of thousands of years. Act. Yeah. Yeah, Still that that's

geologically pretty quick. Sure, geologically it's a blink of an eye. But for you know, a human being, like, it's hard for us to to, uh, to reconcile those two things, like the idea of a bunch of species relatively suddenly in the geological phase, uh going extinct, but in in human life terms, it seems like a really long time. Yeah. And so unfortunately a lot of scientists have recently come to the conclusion that we are actually in the middle of one of those periods right now what many have

referred to as the sixth mass extinction. There have been five already and we're currently in another one. Yeah, if you want to hear a whole bunch about this topic, our colleague Christian Sager did a video interview with the Gizmoto editor in chief Annale Knew It's all about it last year at dragon Con, and it's up on the house to works a YouTube channel. We'll try to remember to link it on social But but but a few

kind of basic facts in brief here. Okay, Well, one of the things is the current extinction rate grossly exceeds what has been referred to as the background extinction rate. So you have this steady, ongoing background extinction rate. When things are normal, you can expect x number of species to go extinct every year. According to a May study published in the journal Science, the current extinction rates are roughly one thousand times the background rate of extinction. Yeah.

That does seem like that's significant. Yeah. Yeah. So, according to a claim I found coming from the w WF, the Worldwide Fund for Nature or the World Wildlife Fund, it goes by both names, has nothing to do with wrestling it's a conservation group. According to their only fourteen Living Planet Report, vertebrate species on Earth, So that's going to be like, you know, tetrapods, mammals, fish, amphibians, birds had declined fifty two in the last forty years. What

that's incredible. Yeah, it's not not a good kind of incredible. No, So what would be a contributing factor to this? I mean, what, what were there conclusions about what might be, you know, causing this this extinction. Well, I think it is a very common conclusion reached by scientists who study this area that the current mass extinction event is believed to be largely related to human activity. There might be other factors, but human behavior is playing a huge role in it.

It might be the single most important driving force. And it's not that we're just like eating all the animals, no that Yeah, it's not just wrecked extermination or capturing of wildlife that that does happen, Like poaching and hunting

can play a role. I think what's thought to be more commonly the problem is the unintended consequences of human civilization and behavior, leading to things like humans bringing invasive species and new habitats, or humans destroying habitats, converting converting land into farmland, and you remove the ecosystem that supported the various species in that area, cutting down forests, draining swamps, or creating factories that are going to have an impact

on the climate. Yeah, and so climate change is also going to be a huge one when you're talking about changing the environmental conditions in the places where these animals live. You don't even have to destroy the place where they live if you just maybe make it warmer, or make the water more acidic or something like this. These long downstream changes that occur because of global warming that can

result in damage to wildlife too. All right, well, let's let's take an example of somebody who doesn't see the value of any particular species of animal. Let's say that. All right, let's say there's uh, some sort of weird amphibian that I'm just not really keen on. It's kind of ugly, it makes this loud noise at night. I wouldn't really mind if it just went away. What is

the big deal? Yeah, that's a common expression you hear, And I know that's not your feeling, Jonathan, but I think a lot of people have this kind of Oh, you know these people trying to get upset over some toad or why are people making such a big deal about some owl? I've never even seen one of these?

What does it matter in my life? Even if you are not an animal lover and you don't personally have feelings about, you know, the spotted owl or whatever animal it is that's being threatened, this should matter to you because loss of biodiversity can potentially cause unpredictable chain reaction effects on ecosystems, which might come to have a great impact on human life, even if you're not a nature lover. So I just came up with a totally hypothetical, dreamed

up example and to show the kind of thing I mean. Okay, let let me hear your example. Okay, So how about let's imagine a bat. It is the strickland reticulated bat like it already, and reticulated of course, meaning has little netting pattern on its wings. Right, So, strickland reticulated bat. It goes endangered because humans and its natural range set up a football stadium, and the amplifier system of this football stadium produces ultrasonic frequencies that interfere with the bats

echolocation hunting. Nope, the bats can't hunt. They starve and they disappear from the area. So maybe they're either just gone from their former range and they've had to move somewhere else, or maybe they're totally extinct. The primary food of the strickland reticulated bat happens to be insect prey like mosquitoes. Without the bats to control the population of mosquitoes,

the mosquito populations almost immediately spiral out of control. As the mosquito populations boom, they expand their range and swarm in on the settled locations outside the area, and that includes maybe the football stadium. So they swarm in on the sports fans and bite them, suck their blood. It's delicious blood, and I normally I would say it serves those rotten sports fans right for driving out this beautiful

creature from the region. However, that would be very shortsighted of me to say that, sure it would, because in doing so, what if the mosquitoes happened to bring in a virus that was previously only present in some reservoir species out in the wilderness where these mosquitoes were previously confined to. Because they were being hunted effectively by the bats. Yeah,

and this, and this happens a lot. There's a lot of animal disease that can transfer to humans from things like bats that don't get sick from that disease exactly. So imagine there is a mutant strain of hemorrhagic fever virus that loves to live in skunks, the mosquitoes, previous

favorite blood source. The mosquitoes drink the blood of the skunks, then they fly to the stadium, drink the blood of the humans, spread the skunk fever, and now we're all bleeding out the eyes with skunk fever because we did not care about the bats. So what you're saying is that by driving out the bats, we have inadvertently caused the zombie apocalypse to descend upon us, the bloody eyed

zombie apocalypse. Yes, I knew it. Now, I don't want to be pinned as a sensationalist, so let me remind you I just made this up, and I don't know if that specific scenario could actually happen, but it illustrates the type of thing that can happen in ecosystems because ecosystems are incredibly complex. Even animals within ecosystems that don't interact with one another directly or interdependent in complex ways based on other intermediary creatures, and removing one species can

set off chain reactions that affect the others. Right. So I actually have another example that I can give very quickly. This is when I mentioned in the video about about shark conservation, which kind of served as the inspiration for this more broad approach to the topic. And that is, Uh, if you over fish sharks, and by the way, a hundred million sharks are caught every year in various fisheries, So if you over fish sharks, then you reduce the

number of predators in various ecosystems. And in ecosystems that have sea grass, for example, that means the foraging animals will have nothing, no predators to to cull their numbers, and so they'll eat all the sea grass, which is great for one generation of animals, but then there's no more sea grass, so no more generations of those animals are going to be able to use that particular region

to forage for food, and it's all gone. Yeah, and and nothing else that would normally live in that sea grass is going to be able to live there an Yeah, right, so you you know, that's why even something like a predator is really important, because it does keep these systems in balance. Of course, So the next time you hear somebody ask like, oh, why should I care about this one animal? It's just some dumb animal. You know, there are lots of other types of owls who who gives

a care? Yeah, but remind them of the zombie apocalypse. Well, yeah, what you can remind them is that every time an animal goes in endangered or goes extinct, it's not just a threat to that species, it's a threat to system stability. It's kind of like if you said, well, I'm riding on a bus, and what if I removed at random one part from this bus. It might be a bolt somewhere, it might be something like that. Maybe the bus could

keep going fine without that part. Maybe it wouldn't. You don't know, right, And because these systems are so complex, most of the time we would say, well, we know something will happen, we just don't know to what extent, and it might be catastrophic. So that's one of the reasons why you should really care about conservation, even if for some reason you don't care about lovely cuttabool animals that are wonderful and need our love, so um one of the we wanted to talk about what we might

be doing in the future to help wildlife conservation. One of the things I wanted to cover very briefly because we don't always just talk about science and technology. I know that that often is what we focus on the show, but really we look at all elements of the future. One of the things we need to think about is policy. And there are a lot of countries out there that have various types of policies about conservation or agencies or

organizations that oversee that within that country. And then there's the United Nations, which has its own group called the United Nations Environment Program, and within that they had the World Conservation Monitoring Center, which helps coordinate studies and promote projects that support biodiversity in the protection of ecosystem around the world. And in fact, they have a very ambitious project.

They're looking to create a global connectivity conservation strategy. So when we talk about this complex web that all these different species end up being part of, they're trying to kind of map some of that out, and that's a herculean task. I mean, that's what biology has been doing for for since there's been biologists. But they're looking to

identify fragmented habitats of various species as well. So let's say that there is a region within a country where there are two different populations of the same species that used to coexist in the same general geographic region, but because the way humans have moved in, it's divided that up. Now. They're looking at ways where they might be able to reconnect these habitats to help make these populations more healthy so that it can be greater genetic diversity and biodiversity

as well. So they're looking at as to support governments and stakeholders to protect ecological systems. Stakeholders being anyone who would be affected by these sort of policies. How can you turn it into an incentive as opposed to something that people are going to oppose because it could impact their plans on either making a profit or expansion or

whatever it may be. Because these are delicate matters. I mean, it's not always a cut and dry case like we like to simplify the narrative, like it's it's the evil developer who wants to ruin a swamp in order to create a multimillion dollar complex. That's not always it's the last rainforest. No, I mean, I think in a lot of cases, these are just people who are trying to make a living and they're not thinking about it and

is not even aware of what the risks are. In some cases, it's balancing things and maybe like, no, we wanted to turn that into a state of the art hospital, which our citizens have never had in the history of ever. And it's hard to say to people like you can't have that, you can't have a really awesome neononatal wing because of a toad. Yeah, and it is difficult. It

does mean that. That's why this group is looking to find ways and strategies to help governments so that they can accomplish the goals they need to accomplish without also impacting the environment in a negative way. So they're looking to establish sound scientific foundation upon which they can build this collection of policy and legislative tools, plus the incentives to use those tools that governments can use to promote conservation.

So I think it's a really forward thinking approach. Actually, you know, just to yeah, I know, right, Hey, you said the title of the podcast um to the Future, right right, So I think it really is is a very smart way of moving forward, because it's it's establishing that, yes, we need to make sure that the decisions we make are evidence based, that they are science, they're not they're not just knee jerk reactions, but in fact have have research behind them to show that this is in fact

the best option. Sure, and there's a real need for that in these types of cases, because when animals are threatened. You know, your little cuddling monologue earlier was a good indication of the fact that these topics are likely to involve our feelings, Yes, to excite our emotions and to make us feel empathy and stuff like that, and and it's it can be tough then to make a rational

decision if you don't systematize your decision making process. Yes, the goal is to remove by us as much as possible, so that the decisions that you arrive at are are ones that that do make sense and are not again, just an emotional reaction to something. Not to say that the emotional reaction would necessarily be the wrong one, but this way, this way you can at least say no, no no, no,

this demonstrably is the right way to go. Also, even just just getting all of that information and just sharing it amongst different researchers and scientists and uh, geological services and all of that stuff is really difficult to do and of course getting easier thanks to the Internet and you know, spreadsheets and stuff like that, but uh, classically it's been very difficult to pulp to pool all of

that information in a useful way. Yeah, you would have these these these concentrated areas where research would be really amazing and deep and broad, but not necessarily connected to another region that might be geologically quite close, but as far as research is concerned, could be you know, decades away.

It's this is actually very promising, and there are other policies that could point out, like there are a lot of places around the world they're setting up various types of refugees, not just not just for land animals, but also for sharks. I mean there are areas that are specifically says aside that are protected waters for all different species or maybe not all, but most species of sharks.

And uh, that's also very very promising. And beyond policy, we do have some kind of interesting technology approaches that are helping people in efforts to conserve wildlife. And one of those is a your smartphone. Sure, and whether it's your smartphone or somebody else's smartphone, the basic idea here is apps, software and technology that help enable citizen science and citizen participation in the scientific data gathering that we

need to help protect species. That right. The first example we have is an e Naturalist, and that's actually it's it's broader than just an app. It actually it's it's an online social network that's made up of biologists and naturalists as well as citizen scientists, and they're really looking to map bio diversity. And it's a platform upon which

people can share observation. So you can have an app on your phone and when you are out in nature and you see, you know, evidence of various types of animals, you might use it to say, hey, I saw this this type of creature at this place. And this gives biologists an incredible tool, an ability to really kind of see in real time what the various density populations are, but based upon the number of reports they might see.

So as more people use it and as more people report on the animals they see, you can see either an increase in reports might show that there's a population that's on the rise. A decrease could show that perhaps there's a population that's in trouble. Could also show the evidence of of encroaching species, invasive species. So we're really interesting. It could just give you a better idea about what the natural range of a species is. I mean in some races when you think about it, like, how do

you determine the range of a species? I mean that's not as easy to do as you might think. Can you go out and walk over every square foot of ground and say, okay, don't see anymore here, so I

guess this is the end, right? Yeah. It makes me think of whenever you look up a particular species and you see where it's range tends to be, and it will give it like here in the United States, you'll usually get a list of states that that animal can be found in, and then you just think, well, what would happen if I were in a neighboring state and saw this When I just say, hey, you don't belong here. You need to pick up and move twenty miles to

the east. Buddy. These ground reclusives in my house fighting meed to be here, I think we found the next sci fi channel. We have a xenophobia, so but but yeah, this this means that biologists would have we'll be able to leverage a tool that a lot of different industries have been leveraging. The fact that using crowd generated data to help get a better understanding of what's going on.

We talk about this all the time with the Internet of things, and usually we're talking about understanding system so that you can build more efficient infrastructure or tools or whatever it may be. In this case, we're actually talking about expanding our knowledge of a particular science. That's pretty cool. Another one that we can talk about is oh Search, which is uh one I referred to in the shark conservation video. It's pretty cool. This is an app that

lets you track tagged sharks. So there are shark tagging expeditions where people will go out, catch, catch a shark, bring it on board, tag it with essentially a beacon that lets you know where that shark is, release it, and then they track where the shark goes in order to learn more about shark migratory patterns and predatory patterns where it tends to go at any given time year,

and these guys get around. So there are a lot of examples of sharks that were captured off the coast of like uh, New England and then released and then later on in the year end up in the Bahamas, which tells us that the plot to Jaws for is a little more realistic than I had anticipated. Much. It does have you know, any movie that has Michael Kaine and you have to, you know, figure, well, maybe there's more legitimacy than I originally thought. Did it explain Michael

Caine's instant clothing drying technology? It did not, nor did it go into detail about how you could ram a sailboat through a Great White shark. But at any rate spoiler alert by the way, um at any rate, it is really neat, and you can actually track lots of different sharks. You can see all of them at once. You know, essentially they're all like these dots in the ocean.

Or you can focus on a specific shark and then even set a parameter on there to say, well, let me see everywhere this shark has been over the last six months, and it'll give you kind of like that Indiana Jones travel line where the shark has been throughout that time. It's really cool. And um, I'm hopeful that a buddy of mine who is a shark marine biologist,

he does these. He goes out and does these shark tagging expeditions and and he has told me at d agon Con that if I'm interested, I should get in touch with him and I could go on one. So if you guys want to go on a shark tagging expedition, Dragon Cons coming up again, and I believe he's a guest, So I'll talk to him and see if we can wrangle ourselves a a three person shark tagging trip. I want that indescribably much. Okay, I'll talk to him. I'll

see what we can do. So is his boat called the Orca, because I think I saw one of these three person expeditions. He did come up to me and he said he said, I said, could I go? And he said, I'm talking about work and for a living, I'm talking about sharking, right. He wanted two cases of apricot brandy, yeah, and dollars um. No, he has not spoken to me about such things, but I'll try and

see if we can we can actually arrange something. Because he he was very much of the opinion that the more people who participate in this, the more they learn about how important sharks are in their various ecosystems, and the US they are prone to being afraid of them. So, of course, there are plenty more conservation apps than the ones we just mentioned. Yeah, there's some that are specifically meant to help curtail poaching and trafficking and animals or

animal parts. There's one called Wildlife Guardian. That's that's just one example that's a smartphone app that's specifically meant to help curtail that in China. Yeah, I feel like I've read that some of these are designed to let people anonymously report things so they don't feel like fear of reprisal. It's essentially kind of filing it with law enforcement so that the law enforcement officials can make a point to

to follow up on that. And it takes the responsibility off the shoulder of the person who witnesses this, and it puts it onto the law enforcement agencies, so hopefully if they are doing their duty, they can then go in and make sure that this operation stops. Yeah, and of course another great technological frontier and conservation is going to be stuff like satellite imaging and geographic information systems or g i S. Have you ever heard about the g i S field. No, but I imagine it has

something to do with tracking changes to environments. Well, it could be changes or it could be static data, but it it can definitely help us monitor changes to environments because the basic idea behind g i S is that you're combining maps and geospatial representations with data. So it's like data augmented map systems. It's for cataloging, analyzing, tracking,

and updating data about geographic areas. So you might have a g i S system that looks at a certain area and then looks at the terrain and then looks at how you know the watershed in the area works, or maybe the borders of a jungle might change over time, or whether there's been erosion or and you can combine data layers with maps like these, So if you're you're trying to track relationships between different types of data points with relation to the geography, you can combine your data

and say, oh, that's weird. Now we can look at, you know, lightning strikes happening in this area, and how that corresponds to the number of toads that begin flying. Wow. Okay. And then there are other efforts too, right, I mean there's other ways of using technology in conservation efforts, some of which would get really hands on. Yeah sure, and are also using that kind of satellite connection, but in

a slightly different way. There are some efforts that are outfitting animals like mountain lions and bears and coyotes and wolves with smart collars which are you know, kind of like your fitness tracker, but you know a little bit bigger um and for and for wolves, and you know, and equipped with a GPS trackers and accelerometers and sometimes even cameras so that they can help conservationists learn about these animals behaviors and their movements and their sleeping patterns,

and their interactions with other animals up to and including humans. The hope here is to learn enough to prevent human encroachment on really important animal territories and even to begin predicting behavior and sending out warnings like for example, uh, if a mountain lion is ranging really close to a town, they could warn locals to keep their pets inside and also you know, gently remind them about hunting loss. Yeah.

This would also be great to Uh. Honestly, one of the things that I love about technology is that it gives us so many more opportunities to capture wonderful moments in our lives. But one of the things I hate about technology is sometimes it gives us these opportunities to capture wonderful moments in our lives to the point where we will put ourselves in danger in order to capture

that moment. And by this, of course, referring to the numerous stories we have seen of people attempting to take a selfie with a wild animal in the background of that of that photo, and we've heard more than enough stories of people being hurt or worse in these sort of encounters. And my hope would be this sort of thing would also be in a way of reminding people, Hey, there are times where sometimes wildlife and human settlements are

coming into like they're overlapping because of various reasons. Uh, this is not an opportunity for you to go out and get that amazing picture of you with this wild animal. They are wild animals, and we will try and deal with this in a way that preserves the safety of both the people and the animals as much as we can, but in order to do that, we have to have you play a part in that and not try and rush out and get your bare selfie. There's so many

animals that you shouldn't try to get selfie. Yeah. I just googled running of the bull selfie. Yeah, Yeah, there's plenty. Yeah, And that's I mean, and that's a well, I have a lot of feelings about the running of the bulls, but I won't I won't go into them here. Um, but yeah, I mean, like I I've heard of ones about people who wanted to get their picture taken when they see a bear or when they see uh bison. There was a recent one, there was a ram that

that injured somebody. Yeah. So these are just reminders, right that that we need to have these systems in place so that we can try to protect everyone involved, not obviously not just the animals. That's another thing I often see that people are like, well, why don't you care about people? No, No, we we care about people too. It's it's not an either or thing, you know, this is an end thing. Um. So one of the other

technologies we can talk about our drones. Those are being used by a few different organizations to help with conservation efforts, both to just keep an eye on populations and see how they're doing, monitor their health without getting too close

to them. Also, you might be able to access areas that otherwise would be very difficult to get to through other means, and without having to use larger aircraft like helicopters or planes, because often you have to fly pretty low altitudes in order to get an eye on these

populations and with something like a helicopter. One of the points that people were making is that with a with a drone, you can fly at these low altitudes and not risk human life if something goes wrong, whereas with a helicopter, if something goes wrong because you're flying at a low altitude, you have very little time to recover. So this would be one way of keeping an eye on animals without putting human lives at danger, and you

could do it from a remote location. Uh It's still obviously takes a lot of training to be able to fly a drone effectively. Not all of these drones are rotor drones. Some of them are look more like an airplane than they do a helicopter. Um And also you can use them not just to keep an eye on

the populations, but also to look out for poachers. So in areas where poaching is a problem, you might be able to use drones to locate and identify poachers and in that way alert whatever regulatory agency is in charge of keeping a lid on that to go and investigate. Yeah, there's also some material science technology that's going into decreasing poaching wild populations. Yeah, this is really kind of interesting.

You may have heard about this story about how essentially there are people who are three D printing rhinoceros horns and they're creating synthetic rhinoceros horns, uh, using some rhino d NA as part of it, and they are physically identical to actual rhino horns, Like if you were to test them, that would be a rhino horn. It's just it's synthetic. And so there's some people who are hoping to use synthetic rhino horn to flood markets that value the rhino a horn. I mean, I think it's like

five thousand dollars a graham in some Chinese markets. So if you were able to flood the markets with synthetic rhino horn, you would devalue the horns. And if you devalue it enough, then there's no incentive to go and hunt a gigantic rhinoceros because you're not going to get any money back, you know, Comparatively speaking, However, there are critics who point out that this could have negative consequences

as well. It could be that synthetic rhinoceros horn ends up driving up the price of real, actual rhinoceros horn, so that could end up creating an even greater incentive

to hunt rhinoceros. And you mean, if people can tell the difference between people are able to if people are able to know that this is an actual rhino horn versus synthetic, I mean, you could argue that it might just create a market for people to create synthetic rhinoceros horns and call them real rhinoceros horns, which would be okay, I guess, compared to yeah, compared to killing. But the other element of this, though, is the one that is pretty easy for you to say, like, yeah, that's not

so great. It does it does nothing to weaken this. It does nothing to create a stigma against the use of rhino horn, right. It reinforces the idea that rhinal horn should be used for these cases. Yeah, and this is a broader issue in conservation because you know, it's it's clear that something needs to be done, but figuring out what exactly that is is way more difficult than

just collecting the data. Yeah, there there's a lot of you know, it is a very complex thing, and it's not like a one size fits all approach is going to work in every case. Right. There are going to be lots of different cases where very specific pathways need to be taken in order for us to be effective in conservation efforts, and those may not apply in other cases. Uh. And there's also just kind of a general this agreement

on some very basic things. For example, the idea of naming wild animals that oh search app I was talking about, a lot of the sharks that you can follow have been given names, and it makes it really easy to refer to the specific shark, right, Like you're like, oh, it's Mary Lee, it's Flipper, Yeah, whatever it may be,

but it's easy to refer to them. A lot of them even have Twitter accounts which were not made by oh search, by the way, they were made by other people, but they end up tweeting based upon where the shark is kind of what that shark is probably experiencing on any given day, because because apparently, according to the O search,

folks like, no, we didn't make this Twitter account. We're fine with them using it to talk about, you know, where the shark is and what's going on, but we didn't make it um which you know, that's the thing is that you anyone can make a Twitter account. Well, there's their pro and con arguments about naming wild animals. So on the pro side, the you would argue that naming the animals makes us think of them as individuals, as opposed to thinking of the problem of poaching of

lions in one space. If we name the lions, then we can we We we assign them an identity, we think of them as an individual, and we tend to get more emotionally invested in them as opposed to thinking about them as a larger We're not great at handling that kind of stuff. On the concite, however, first of all, naming them does create a psychological effect, right, it's but we do get that emotional investment, and like we were talking about earlier, this could create a bias for research. Right,

if you have the opportunity to I don't know. If you have to pick between saving two different lions from poachers and one has a name and the other one doesn't, you're probably going to pick the one with the aim, even if that's not necessarily the most you know, I don't know why you would need to pick one versus another, but still you need to make Yeah, but it could be that, you know, the argument you make is that, well, the one that we didn't name actually represents a different

genetic uh makeup than the other one and would have created better diversity within the population of lines. However, we concentrate the one that had the name, and you know that it is a weird example, but it's a perfectly chromulent one. Yeah, yeah, I know, But bias and science is bad. Why did we only say Flipper the lion? Right? So? Uh. The other part of this is that the animals are wild animals. They're not pets, when we shouldn't think of them as pets. We should think of them as they

are wild. They belong in the wild. Naming them takes them a step away from that in our minds, and that can be a problem. It can give the suggestion that they belong to you, because like our pets belong to us, sure, or that you should take a selfie with them, yeah, or that you're just anthropomorphizing them, which is also a problem. You know, they're they're not human. We often think of animals and human terms because we are most of us human, we're really species centric. Yeah.

Just you know, until we get all those those uh genetic modifications where we can all become cat people, this is just gonna be a problem. So there there's definitely some research that supports the idea that naming animals can

help build support. And that's because again going back to that problem that we have with what what uh good nature travel actually called the abstractions of catastrophe, This idea that when you hear about a big group thing happening, it's hard for us to to to process that information. Like we we have trouble thinking about any kind of news event that involves large numbers, whether it's animals or humans. It these stories hit us in because we have trouble

processing it. We don't have that emotional impact. So when you hear you know, ten thousand members of whatever species, be an animal or maybe it's ten thousand people are affected negatively by something that's hard for us to process. But if you focus on an individual story, we can connect to that, and that's where we have that emotional response. And this is true whether it's animals or humans, whatever

it may be. If you are able to frame the plight of any group within an individual story, that's where we have the connection. And that's where we see people willing to make a response, whether it's positive or negative, whatever the case may be. You know, it all depends

upon the scenario involved. Um and that then we might be more willing or able to participate in conservation efforts, whether it's through direct support monetarily or by volunteering or uh downloading one of these apps and participating in that we're respect whatever it might be, we'd be more willing to do it because we have that emotional connection. It's just harder to do when it's a big group, because as humans, we just have trouble dealing with that kind

of information. Yeah, well, I mean, and as you implied earlier, that even applies when we're talking about humans. I mean, I think it's it's pretty commonly accepted wisdom of psychology that you're more likely to give a dollar to help a single kid with one name than a group of

twenty people in need who don't have names. One of the examples I've seen is that when you when you see a commercial about an organization that is dedicated to helping people like children and developing countries, they always have a child. Yeah, help us, help Bruce, because we can focus on that, we can identify with that, and we see the plight when you look at a big, one, big group of people, either we have problems processing it or the problem itself seems so huge that we were paralyzed.

We feel like nothing we would do would make a dent at all, when that is not the case. So I think that the naming issue is a complicated one, and I certainly see both sides. So it's not like I'm pro name that animal camp all the way, but I I think I lean a little more toward being sympathetic towards that side, although I completely understand the concerns of the people who speak out against it. Along the same lines as naming is, I think the idea of

adopting a particular animal. I'm sure you've seen campaigns like this, right, like the Adopter Shark program, you know where they use that kind of language. What you're really doing is, you know, you make a donation or you you help support the scientific research in some way, and you can have a you know, attract animal that is like your adopted animal. Now you don't actually have any like rights or powers over it. Yeah, and you can't go out on a boat and like find it and pet it, or you

should not at any rate. Yeah, I don't know, maybe you could, but I agree with you on should not, depending on how accurate the geo data is GPS. But um, but yeah, I mean that seems like it raises similar issues, Like I can imagine how a campaign like adopt a shark or adopt a you know, whatever the animal would be could help get more people involved and raise more money for for the kinds of scientific research that could

help protect these populations. But it could also give people the wrong idea about their relationship with the animals, and a lot of this also kind of this conversation reminds me a lot of the one we had about de extincting creatures de extinction process and the concerns we have about that technology as well. So if we if we get to a point where we could reliably bring an extinct species back. The fear. One of the fears is that it would remove our sense of urgency to preserve

the ecosystems in which those creatures thrived. So, sure, you might be able to bring a creature back, but if the ecosystem it lived in no longer exists, then all you've done is given a death sentence again, possibly, or you're creating an invasive species to some system it wasn't ever meant to be in. So I've got a weird

hypothetical question. Imagine we get some kind of Singularity type future, whatever you know, unimaginable levels of technological precision, do you think humans should take steps to prevent all current species from going extinct? It will be I think it will be unimaginably difficult to make this determination. Sure, And that's why I said, you know, singular, I don't. I don't mean like technologically it'll be difficult. I mean psychologically, it'll

be a very difficult thing. Because if you think that you have the ability to prevent a creature from going extinct, and I think it'd be really hard to say no, let's let's let it go extinct. As even if it was something that you could pretty clearly say this is going extinct, and it's not because of the actions we humans have taken upon this. So if you think of it that way, like if you were able to somehow was really high uh certainty say this creature is going extinct.

We can tell from its numbers it is not due to human activity. We should probably let it have because that's just evolutions. But I don't know that we could do that. Well, there's there's also a likelihood I would I would think that if a species was going extinct due to natural events, not due to human interaction, that we probably wouldn't even know about it, because the things that we know about are generally the we just built this apartment complex here, and now we have to assume

now Flipper the toad is dying off. We have to assume that, Buddies, we're in a future where the Internet of things is so incredibly rich and robust that we have a finger on the pulse of practically every ecosystem. That that is hard to imagine because the Earth is so incredible, and keep in mind, there's a lot of it we have not explored. The oceans are still largely mysterious to us. Is that we cannot breathe. We tend

to explore less thoroughly. No, I think that the best that we could do, and and the best that we should be should look to do, in my personal opinion, is just preventing, you know, shutting down the negative human human interactions with our environment and and therefore preventing that

kind end of extinction. I'm of the same mind. I mean, it would be I'd hate to be the guy to make that call, to be like, hey, this cute, fluffy bunny that lives in this particular region is dying out, and it's completely due to natural, you know, the natural progression of that ecosystem. It would still be hard for me to say, oh, let's let's let it go. Yeah, I'd be like, let's let's let's rescue the bunny, and um, let's uh, let's let's let's let's not make some make

some changes to that ecosystem so the bunny's okay. I would that would be I would have to fight against that, which is exactly what we were talking about with the You'd make a safe space for the bunny at the expense of the algae that was formerly thriving in the swamp, that you've transformed into a bunny friend and then consequences and you'd have to see a commercial about Flipper the

algae saying please help me. Either that or you'd suddenly discover that that, you know, this other creature that depended upon the algae is now dying out because you made this this arbitrary decision to save one species over another. And thus we get back to these things are complicated. But I agree with you, Lauren completely that I think the best we could hope for is to try and end the impact that humans are having directly or otherwise

on species populations and ecosystems. Uh, But to to mitigate that as much as we possibly can. Yeah, that's the trick, right, as much as we can, because as we've said several times now, I mean it's really difficult. I would say, even with sci fi levels of technology, I think it would be really hard to understand all the complex cause and effect chains. I mean, you can understand some more

easily than others. Sometimes you'll just say like, okay, this is pretty clearly, you know, because we've built X here, we drove something out. But there are other things where you know, well, okay, so there's this new species that moved into this forest, and they're out competing the previous species that filled the same niche, and now that species is dying. Why did that species move into the forest. Well, then you'd have to go one step back and figure

out what happened there. Ultimately, it might be human causes or it might not. Yeah, I think, um, I mean, obviously, we can only do the best we can with the information we have. And the problem as I see it right now, is that we're not even doing the best

we can with the information that's currently available. And that's that's what we need to start start addressing, is to let's let's let's make that our best as opposed to having these these these islands where people are trying really hard, but there are large areas where that's either not a priority or people are just unaware of it, whatever, whatever the reason, maybe and do our best to fix that. Um. All this being said, I am generally speaking an optimist.

I think that there are a lot of very well meaning people who are trying very hard to push the message of conservation out there, and I think a lot of people are sympathetic to it. It's just that, uh, it can be again so overwhelming that it's difficult to know what you as an individual can do to make a positive impact. But there are lots of different resources out there, So I recommend people go out do a little simple research, look into the different organizations and actually

do look into them. Don't just google to find out which ones are active, but actually do research to see, you know, what sort of work do they do. Are they considered to be, uh, you know, an effective organization before you go any further, you know, putting your time or money into that obviously, because not everyone is doing a great job. Some organizations are and some aren't. So I would definitely recommend doing that research for yourself so that you can find one that's a good fit and

that you feel good about. If this is something that's important to you, and if there's some other top that's really important to you that we have never talked about, you know, something about the future that you really wanted to hear about, I recommend you, right and let's know, send us an email that addresses FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus. While it lasts are our handle at Twitter and Google Plus. Is FW thinking just searchfw

thinking and Facebook will pop right up. Leave us a message and we'll talk to you again. Really sick. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,