When Stefano Mammola and Francesco Ficetola went to an ecology conference in Prague in 2021, they met a scientist with an unusual complaint. Jennifer Anderson, an expert on aquatic fungi, lamented that the subject of her research was not available in emoji form.
“If you’re doing the important work of trying to save the 🐳, you can use graphics to help you communicate that in a very relatable way,” says Anderson, a microbial ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. “If you are working to save the water fungi, you must first let people know that yes, water fungi exist, and then describe in words what they look like – usually not like mushrooms.”
Struck by their conversation with Anderson and wary of how unusual species are being ignored, Mammola and Ficetola set out with a colleague to find out how well the “tree of life” was represented in the emoji library. The answer, the Italian ecologists found, was not good at all.
“Our findings confirm a typical bias in biodiversity research and an intrinsic feature of human psychology,” said Mammola, an ecologist at the Water Research Institute of the National Research Council of Italy. “We usually have more empathy for life forms that are phylogenetically closer to us.”
Emojis are a simple, colorful and direct way to communicate online. The researchers found that animals were well represented by available emoticons, but plants, fungi and microorganisms were not.
In a study Published Monday in the journal iScience, the team identified emojis representing 112 different organisms. Among them were 92 animals, 16 plants, one mushroom-like fungus and a single microorganism that the scientists suspect is the gut-infecting bacteria E coli.
“A good representation of the tree of life in social media can go a long way in spreading the message that biodiversity is much more than just cats, dogs, lions and pandas,” said Mammola. “There is an impressive number of organisms, and all of them play a fundamental role for our planet, even the ones we know less about.”
The researchers categorized all the emojis related to nature and animals in Emojipedia, a curated online catalog of emojis, and found that some large groups of creatures had no representation at all. For example, scientists have described more than 20,000 species of flatworms, but there is no way to display the soft-bodied creatures in online messages.
Arthropods made up just 16% of the animal emojis, even though there are more than 1 million described species of arthropods, compared to less than 100,000 described species of vertebrates. In some cases, the scientists identified individual species such as bald eagles and giant pandas, while other emojis were only identifiable at the genus or family level, such as ants and crocodiles.
The researchers said the biases in emoji representation of animal biodiversity mirror known biases in biodiversity assessments and conservation analyses, including the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
Better representation can spark interest in organisms people don’t know about, Mammola said, indirectly helping conservation efforts. “Adding 20 to 30 more emojis to represent missing but crucial organisms would be almost costless. Such an expansion could give a better idea of how wide biodiversity is.”
Some scientists have taken steps to display their research on their phone keyboards with images instead of words. Andrew White, a computational chemist, then submitted a bid for a protein emoji last year perform a survey on X, then known as Twitter, structural biologists ask what it should look like. The selection committee, which includes representatives from technology companies including Apple, Meta and Microsoft, rejected the bid.
“DNA is recognized as the language that encodes life, but proteins are the real agents of life,” White wrote in the journal Earth. “I think having a protein emoji would be useful for science communication, similar to how the DNA emoji represented advances in genomics and sequencing.”
The Italian researchers found that emoji biodiversity is increasing. The number of animal taxa represented rose from 45 in 2015 to 92 in 2022, the researchers found, better representing the diversity of creatures over time.
The findings contrast sharply with the state of wildlife in the real world. A landmark review of research in 2019 found that nature is deteriorating at rates unprecedented in human history, and that species are being wiped out faster and faster.
Anderson said she wants emojis for organisms like aquatic fungi as reflections of increased public awareness and indicators of their ecological value. “Having an emoji indicates that an organism is valued or important enough to be part of daily conversation,” she said.
