by Italian ecologist Francesco Ficetola was at a conference two years ago when it emerged that emojis can help power global conservation efforts.
Ficetola does a lot of research on salamanders. But with no salamander emojis available, it’s hard to send a quick message to his colleagues when he’s busy.
He realized he was not alone during the ecology conference, when an aquatic fungus expert bemoaned the lack of a digital icon for the microscopic organism.
Therefore, Ficetola and his colleague, Stefano Mammola, started working on a comprehensive survey of the animal and nature icons on Emojipedia, a global library of emojis that is widely recognized internationally. Their quest included finding out how much of it represents Earth’s “branch of life” — a metaphor and model that groups living entities and maps their evolutionary relationships.
Their research, published Monday in the journal iScience, highlights what they call a bias in biodiversity research.
The study found that animals are better represented on Emojipedia, compared to plants, fungi and other organisms.
Although people tend to empathize more with living things that are closer to them, the results were concerning, Ficetola said. With people always on their phones, the scientists said, the emoji biodiversity of animals and organisms helps create awareness about unknown species — and efforts to save them.
“Communication is the first step. If people know that organisms exist, they start to appreciate them. And it’s much easier to convey the importance of preserving them,” said Fiketola, professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Milan.
“As researchers or people working on animal biodiversity, we often use emojis for our communication. And when we realized that there are not enough animals (in the emoji library), we started to ask, what is missing or why is it missing?” Fiketola told CNN. “This was important to help communicate on biodiversity.”
Analysis of emojis reveals biodiversity bias
After chatting with the aquatic fungus expert, Mammola said he and Ficetola decided to do a quantitative analysis of emojis.
The topic may seem “a bit random,” but the results were eye-opening, said Mammola, a researcher in underwater ecology and biology at Italy’s National Research Council.
Ficetola, Mammola and a third colleague, University of Milan researcher Mattia Falaschi, studied icons representing plants, animals and nature on Emojipedia.
They found that the emojis represent 112 distinct organisms, including 92 animals, 16 plants and one “toad stool-like fungus”. But very few of the emojis were with marine animals, even though 70% of the planet is ocean, Fiketola said.
The study showed that animals and vertebrates are over-represented, and plants, fungi, microorganisms and arthropods such as spiders and scorpions are under-represented. Some species such as starfish, water bears – tiny aquatic animals also known as tardigrades – and flatworms were observed in full.
Ficetola said that there is an assumption that fungi are not that important, but that they play a vital role in the soil. “Life on the planet depends on fungi,” he said.
The lack of attention has a ripple effect, scientists say
Not surprisingly, large mammals such as monkeys, cats and dogs are well represented among emoji.
“Humans tend to be more empathetic and aware of organisms close to us, such as vertebrates, with awareness decreasing in inverse proportion to the evolutionary distance of a group from Homo sapiens,” the researchers noted in the study.
The abundance of animal emojis and the scarcity of plant, fungi and microorganism emojis influence society’s awareness and prioritization of species.
“That zoocentrism in biodiversity conservation has led to unequal attention and funding for plants and fungi compared to animals, despite the fundamental ecosystem services these organisms provide,” the study noted.
Even among animal emojis, there was an imbalance. Vertebrates, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, accounted for 76% of the available animal emoji taxa.
At just 16%, arthropods were the second most represented organism in the emoji library, although they are the most biodiverse group of the tree of life, according to the study.
But even with the shortfalls in emoji variety, the study struck a positive note: The number of animal and nature emojis has more than doubled in the past eight years, with 214 currently available on Emojipedia.
The coauthors hope the study will provide a lesson that emoji biodiversity isn’t just about lions, monkeys and pandas.
Ficetola said they have not contacted the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, which decides which emoji should be added. But he hopes the study will push people to rethink biodiversity communication in the digital age and the tree of life emoji. The committee, he said, uses strict criteria based on popularity and interest.
On its website, the subcommittee said it reviews proposals for new emojis and makes a decision based on a variety of factors, including level of use, compatibility with existing social media platforms and specificity.
But if he had a choice between adding two emojis at once, Ficetola said he would choose the starfish and the tardigrade.
His colleague, Mammola, said his choice was fungi or moss. “It’s a popular group, but it doesn’t exist,” he said of the latter, a non-vascular flowering plant in the Bryophytes family.
Emojis may be a ephemeral form of communication, the scientists said, but their simplicity and internality are important for documenting biodiversity and conservation efforts as some animals become extinct and disappear from the collective memory.
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