How much of what we know about the world around us is influenced by things we see in popular media, and could that mean trouble for science?
The short answer is yes, according to new research by researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), which reveals a concerning trend in modern scientific research.
According to a pair of recent UNSW studies, the topics that often become the research focus of many career scientists are largely driven by exposure to popular media like films, television shows, and other cultural factors that cause areas of the sciences that receive less attention to remain unexplored.
The result, according to the UNSW research team, suggests that some of the most important phenomena in the natural world remain unexplored.
“We don’t know what we don’t know,” says Dr Pietro Pollo, a UNSW researcher and lead author of one of the new studies.
A Scientific “Blind Spot”
Along with researcher Michael M. Kasumovic, Pollo says that people’s fascination with animal species that appear in popular films may drive their scientific interest to the point of influencing their career trajectories. However, that presents problems when the majority of the media addressing such topics focuses on larger mammals, birds, and other more obvious species.
As a result, Pollo argues that some of the remaining big questions about smaller and often less attractive species often fall to the wayside.
“In nature documentaries, the focus is usually on polar bears, lions, elephants, and other mammals,” Pollo recently said of the phenomenon he and Kasumovic characterize in their research. “And that is where most research interest and funding ends up.”
Presently, the largest populations of unknown animal species belong primarily to insects, microscopic roundworms, and marine invertebrates or fish. According to some estimates, up to as much as 80% to 86% of all species on Earth—roughly 7 to 8 million species—remain unnamed and undescribed.
Pollo and Kasumovic say that among these species, creatures like spiders, slugs, insects, and worms receive less attention for fairly obvious reasons: they are smaller, less attractive, and receive far less attention in popular media.
The result, however, could be more damaging for science than many are aware, since these cultural factors that drive people’s research focus appear to be leaving major gaps in our knowledge about the world around us.
An Unpredictable Issue
Further complicating things is the fact that, according to Pollo and Kasumovic, this apparent “blind spot” emerges in ways that researchers can’t easily predict, due to the difficulty in attempting to predict long-term outcomes from essential, yet often very basic research efforts.
One example they point to involves research into saliva from lizards, which became instrumental in creating modern weight-loss drugs like Ozempic. Another example involves fluorescent proteins discovered in jellyfish that helped transform the study of individual cells.
Such seemingly obscure research focuses reveal how often unlikely areas of study can have a significant impact on scientific advancements that may include more than just knowledge about the natural world: they may also drive innovations in technology, treatments for various diseases, and a range of other beneficial scientific advancements.
“The next major discovery could be in an organism we currently ignore because we don’t find it cute or exciting,” Pollo said in a statement.
A Call for Diversification
In their research, Pollo and Kasumovic looked at more than one million science papers in the fields of ecology and evolution. What they found was alarming: in more than half of all these publications, the focus was primarily on vertebrates, with a main focus on larger mammals that make up less than 5% of all known types of animal species.
The research suggests that vertebrate studies not only become the focus for many researchers in their careers, but also that they garner more citations and greater amounts of media attention, thereby compounding the problem.
By contrast, studies and related media exposure of invertebrates remains overwhelmingly low by contrast. Fundamentally, Pollo and Kasumovic argue that science training needs to focus on helping to broaden scientific interests and emphasize the possibilities in the lesser-explored areas of invertebrate biology and related fields.
“We have millions of species and limited time and funding,” Pollo says. “So we need to diversify our research as much as we can.”
The recent research article, “Drivers of Taxonomic Bias in Ecology and Evolution: Insights From Ethologists and Behavioural Ecologists,” appeared in Ecology and Evolution.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.