Social media poses a new and increasing threat to vulnerable species and habitats around the world.
A new paper "Liked to death: the impacts of social media and photography on biodiversity" in the Science of The Total Environment, Volume 949, November 01, 2024, informs us that the advent and everyday prominence of social media is fueling a rise in nature tourism and photography to share experiences online.
This is increasingly resulting in disturbance to natural environments and causing a range of direct and indirect impacts to native species. Direct disturbances arising from social media use include behavioral and physiological impacts, such as disruptions to breeding and feeding and increased predation risk. The use of call playback, drones and baiting of animals for photographs also have a range of negative impacts. Other direct impacts include the capture and handling of animals for photographs and damage and trampling to plants. Indirect impacts include the spread of diseases and increased poaching of flora and fauna.
Robert Davis (left), a senior lecturer in wildlife ecology at Edith Cowan University, Australia and the paper’s lead author, says the research was “driven by collective rage” at having seen pristine natural spots and vulnerable species negatively affected by visitors.
“There’s actually probably never been a time in human history where you can share information so rapidly to so many people, and with that has come this immense pressure to systems”, he says.
The capercaillie (Scientific name: Tetrao urogallus) is a birders’ dream. Only about 530 of the large woodland grouse survive in the UK wild, most in Scotland’s Cairngorms national park. But in recent years, those tasked with saving the species from extinction have had to walk a line between calling attention to the birds’ plight and discouraging people from seeking them out.
Although it is illegal to disturb capercaillie during the breeding season from March to August, that hasn’t deterred birders and nature photographers, motivated by the possibility of a prestigious spot – or shot. Over the 2022 season, 17 people were found on or around the “lek”, where male birds gather to compete for the attention of females in spring, says Carolyn Robertson, the project manager of the Cairngorms Capercaillie Project.
That same year, a birdwatcher was caught on camera, flushing six capercaillie from the breeding site. The man was arrested, but let go with a verbal warning. By then the damage may have already been done.
Even fleeting disruption can “make the difference between birds breeding, or not”, says Robertson. “We know that it increases their stress levels, so there’s a high chance they didn’t come back to the area to breed that morning; they might not have returned for days”.
With so few birds remaining in the wild, human disturbance could be “catastrophic” for the species, Robertson says – but discouraging nature enthusiasts from seeking them out has proved challenging. “When people have taken photographs of capercaillie and put them online, they’ve been liked thousands of times. By the time we ask them to take them down, it’s got them so much kudos, they don’t want to do so”.
In 2022, packs of photographers turned up in Shetland, seeking a sight of the elusive lanceolated warbler (Scientific name: Locustella lanceolata) potentially causing the bird to abandon the area.
This August, a photographer was fined more than £1,600 for disturbing a nesting European honey buzzard (Scientific name: Pernis apivorus) in Wales.
In China, populations of the critically endangered blue-crowned laughingthrush (Scientific name: Garrulax courtoisi) restricted to a small area of Jiangxi province, are believed to have changed their nesting habits in response to “severe” disturbance from wildlife photographers.
Davis and his wife, Belinda, a biologist and co-author of the paper, live in Perth, Australia and they know only too well how online attention has proved especially problematic for Western Australia’s endemic orchids.
The Eastern Queen of Sheba orchid (Scientific name: Thelymitra speciosa) which can take 10 years to bloom and is found only in a small area of south-west Western Australia, is such a desirable find for orchid hunters that plants in the wild have had to be put under protection.
“They’ve had to fence that orchid, put cameras on it and have guardians for it”, says Davis. “That really exemplifies the extreme end”.
Sometimes, only one post about a flowering orchid can result in hundreds of visitors to the site, Davis says, putting the plants at risk of being damaged or poached.
He acknowledges that the impact on vulnerable species is minor relative to the broader threats posed by habitat loss and invasive species. But social media perpetuates the problem, Davis says. “Ultimately, it fuels demand: the rarer something is, the more people want to see it”.
It highlights a mounting conflict between conservation aims, and those invested in seeing a species before it’s too late.
