how the internet’s viral trends can help conservation

Have you recently opened YouTube or TikTok and immediately gone looking for cat videos? If your answer is “yes”, then you’re not alone: the global consumption of cat-related media online is simply massive. In 2015, there were over 2 million cat videos on YouTube alone, with an average of 12,000 views each – a higher average than any other category of YouTube content.

“Cats” is also one of the most searched keywords on the internet. As of 2023, there were 502 billion views of TikToks with the hashtag #cat. Clearly, domestic cats are the darlings of the digital world.

But how can this popularity be leveraged to help conserve their wild cousins? Many small wild cat species – like caracals – face threats from widespread habitat loss, poaching and conflict with people, but they are highly cryptic and therefore understudied.

Scientists have recognised the potential of widespread internet usage and harnessed it in a range of ways.

Ecologists have assessed popular search words in Google Trends to monitor the spread of invasive plant species and scraped Google Images to track changes in animal colour morphs across their ranges. And social media is increasingly used as a tool for ecology and conservation. For example, Facebook has been used to improve species distribution information, which can inform local conservation efforts, while Instagram has been used to track public perceptions of species and natural spaces.

Engaging the public in scientific endeavours fosters increased connections between science and society. However, little is known about how these projects contribute to conservation goals or environmental awareness outcomes and how this links to how their findings are communicated.

We set out to help fill this knowledge gap in a recent paper about caracals in Cape Town, South Africa. The caracal is a highly adaptable medium-sized wild cat with long, tufted ears and a reputation for eating sheep in rural areas across southern Africa.

We found that social media is an effective way to raise conservation awareness about wildlife living on the urban edges. We hypothesise that posts to our social media pages are popular because caracals are beautiful, charismatic cats that look very similar to their domestic relatives. The internet is already primed to receive cat content, and the project our research is based on has delivered.

A highly engaged audience

In Cape Town, caracals have adapted to living along the edges of urban areas. They hunt small rodents and birds that are common in these well-watered, resource-rich spaces. There are about 60 individuals in the broader Cape Peninsula’s population.

However they, like many other wild cat species, face a number of threats. These include habitat loss, exposure to common rat poisons and being hit by vehicles.

So, in 2014, one of us (Dr Laurel Serieys) created the Urban Caracal Project as a postdoctoral project.

The project, hosted by the Institute for Communities and Wildlife in Africa (iCWild) at the University of Cape Town, was initiated to understand the animals’ urban ecology, health and genetic status, and threats to the population.

What started off as a website, Facebook page and simple updates about the project has grown into a substantial social media following. The audience is highly engaged, helping researchers to collect data and samples; they’ve also raised funds and shared our research, contributing to science education.

Read more:
Cape Town’s caracals have metal pollutants in their blood — an environmental red flag

The project now has more than 16,900 Facebook followers and more than 7,500 on Instagram. These figures represent what the platforms classify as “micro-influencer” status (an account that has 10k–100k followers). Most are from people in South Africa but there are also followers in the UK, India and the US.

As we outline in our paper, these social media platforms have given the public an opportunity to make important contributions to the project’s core research aims. They have helped report sightings of well-camouflaged and elusive caracals all over Cape Town. Some have reported deaths we may not otherwise have known about, allowing our team to conduct postmortems that offer insights into threats to the population. Others have collected prey samples that allow us to characterise the caracals’ diet patterns through stable isotope analysis.

Read more:
How we found out that rat poisons are killing wildlife in Cape Town

A “caracal network” of eyes and ears has linked scientists, conservation agencies and animal welfare organisations to conserve the species in an isolated area where they are rapidly losing habitat and face threats from all sides.

A ‘beautiful, amazing’ animal

The posts we write have contributed to the awareness of caracals and urban ecology globally. For instance, we found that the search interest of the term “caracal” has almost doubled since the project was founded, with a 91% increase in interest on Google Trends. This is compared to a similar wildcat, the serval, for which search interest rose by 76% in the same period.

We also analysed the language used in sightings reports and in comments on our Facebook posts to assess people’s sentiments about Cape Town’s caracals – and found these were remarkably positive.

The species is persecuted elsewhere in the country as “vermin” or a “pest” animal, so this is quite a shift. Some of the most common words used to describe caracals were “beautiful”, “amazing” and “gorgeous”. Interestingly, the most common negative word was “sad”, which was mostly used on posts announcing caracal deaths or threats to the population, such as vehicle collisions or exposure to pollutants and disease. This reveals strong emotional responses from our followers and suggests increased care for the species.

A tool to aid research

Our research shows that the hard work and effort of continuous science communication on research projects through social media channels pays off – it can successfully aid robust research and raise conservation awareness for underrepresented species in rapidly changing landscapes.

The journal paper in Environmental Communication on which this article is based is due to be part of a special issue titled “Affective Encounters: Storying in South African Ecological Communication” edited by Mehita Iqani and Meghan Judge.