The world is experiencing what experts describe as the sixth mass extinction with a number of endangered species disappearing from the planet for good.

But how much do people really care?

That’s the question posed and answered by a team of researchers, led by University of Galway in collaboration with UCD and Maynooth University.

They turned to big data and the world of culturomics to measure how we react to the demise of animals and plants and whether we mourn their loss or if we are numb to the effects.

“Culturomics is an approach where we gather large amounts of online data to understand cultural patterns,” revealed Dr Kevin Healy, School of Natural Sciences and the Ryan Institute at University of Galway.

“In our study we tracked changes in tweets, and Wikipedia page visits before and after the extinction of eight species ranging from Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, to more obscure species such as the bean snail.”

In all, the research team analysed data of more than two million Wikipedia page visits and more than 100,000 tweets and retweets on Twitter between 2007 and 2023.

These related to eight species now extinct – including the Pinta Giant Tortoise; the Christmas Island Whiptail-skink; the Bramble Cay Mosaic-tailed Rat; the Alagoas Foliage-gleaner; Captain Cook’s Bean Snail; the Oahu Treesnail; the Rabb’s fringe-limbed treefrog and the West African black rhinoceros – to test if people increased engagement after the extinction and how global it was.

By measuring interactions on both X and visits to Wikipedia, the researchers were able to gauge how people engage with the more immediate world of social media in comparison to the expected slower paced world of an online encyclopaedia.

The study showed that while tweets, retweets and posts on X relating to a species increased after its extinction, this was only a short-lived phenomenon.

In contrast, visits to Wikipedia pages relating to an extinction had longer lasting engagement.

Dr Susan Canavan of the School of Natural Sciences, University of Galway, is lead author on the study.

“Overall, we found that people mentioned a species on twitter more often directly after its extinction, however this increase was quite short lived,” she said.

“However, when we looked at Wikipedia page visits the increase in page visits after an extinction was sustained for far longer,” she added.

The researchers also found that the most commonly used words are strongly associated with sadness and that for a brief moment even those relatively obscure species found in highly localised parts of the world are mourned across the globe.

“Overall, it does look like people care and are saddened by the news of extinction,” said Dr Canavan.

“We see words like ‘RIP’ and ‘lost’ commonly appear, and that the location of tweets expand from close to the species range, to across the globe after extinction.”

However, while people display a sense of caring on hearing news of extinction, where they hear it from, or how they hear it, was found to be an important driver in how they engage with it.

The researchers found that a small cohort of “influencers” drive the majority of engagement on X.

For example, engagement on X after the extinction of the West African black rhinoceros were heavily influenced by posts from the comedian Ricky Gervais!

The full study has been published in the journal Animal Conservation and is available at https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acv.12997.

Pictured: Dr Kevin Healy of the School of Natural Sciences at University of Galway, in a selfie in front of a T.Rex at the Senckenberg Nature Museum in Frankfurt in 2017.