This post is part of a series about “uncharismatic” species in environmental history, emerging from a workshop at Universität Augsburg in September 2026.

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Even though we lived very close to my school, my mother would always have to budget an extra ten minutes of travel time. This is because her only child would spend ages patiently flipping over all the helpless beetles he found laying on their backs along the way (in such a rainy city as Bogotá, there were a lot of them). My care and curiosity towards these usually ignored, or even despised, critters was one of the reasons that I became a biologist. During my career, I’ve gotten to know all kinds of creatures. Getting to know is the first step towards falling in love; a love that made me care about the protection of all wildlife and nature.

However, my idealism as a young student soon crashed into the wall of the real world. I quickly understood that even a very well-supported study might not inspire conservation initiatives and policies. Making change at that scale is like a huge boulder that cannot be pushed by a small group of scientists alone. We always require the participation, or at least approval, of many other people. 

This is a story about despised animals, how they can become perceived as monsters, and how science communication can fight back against those perceptions.

A good way to understand the effects of these potentially harmful public perceptions is through the concept of “charisma.”

What do we mean by the charisma of a species? It is the charm and appeal of a species in a human society. On one hand, we have charismatic species: popular and charming creatures (usually large vertebrates) that arouse sympathy and public interest, making it easier to draw public and financial support for their conservation.¹ On the other hand, we have uncharismatic species that are non-appealing  to a majority of people in a society and are usually given less attention in conservation efforts.² The influence of charisma can be so strong that people have given direct financial support to conservation efforts based on charisma instead of endangered status.³

However, there is a group of species that have a bigger problem than just being ignored: they are actively despised. If we think of charisma as a continuous gradient, on one positive extreme we have the charismatic species, and in the neutral center we have the “purely” uncharismatic species. On the opposite negative extreme we would have what I call, the “monster.” None of these categories are fixed, objective or permanent. A species could be located in the grey spaces between some of these labels. It could be located in different places according to different human societies. Or it could even drastically change its position for the same society over time. Despite its flexibility, this perception of charisma can still have a big impact on the conservation of wild species. And yet there are no clear criteria for  how an animal can become a monster. What might a pathway to monstrousness look like? 

First, we must consider that each human society has a set of rules regarding what they consider acceptable, clean and desirable: an established order that defines their priorities and their values, what they admire and what they despise. When these societies interact with nature, sometimes they find a species that challenges that order in one way or another. 

The result may be a process of abjection; through fear, disgust or ugliness perception, people start to reject this species.⁴ The process could be triggered because of a direct harm that the species has on public health, economic interests, or other human activities, such as wolves predating on livestock in agricultural societies.⁵ But it could also emerge from the mere perception of threat, either because of resemblance to another problematic species, as when a crane fly is confused with a mosquito, or because of some symbolic association such as the case of barn-owls, which are associated with witchcraft in some regions of Latin America.⁶

If the conflict persists, the process of abjection could worsen. Our targeted species goes from being an unpleasant animal to a rejected beast. Its negative traits are stressed in the public view, gradually creating and exaggerating a myth around the creature. More and more of the animal becomes alien, even un-natural. When the myth around the creature has grown enough, the targeted species has been completely stripped of its original identity. It becomes what we can categorize as a monster: a creature that doesn’t match with what we consider normal or natural.⁷

After this, the final outcome is tragically predictable. Given the anti-natural, impure, and sinful identity of a monster, purging this “evil” becomes a moral duty within the society that has created it because of the necessity of avoiding contamination by that evil, or for fear of not being able to control a supernatural (and therefore unknown) creature, which is itself a challenge to the established order.⁸ 

These purges could be a threat to biodiversity. A good example of this is the case of sharks, in which the change in public opinion about them during the 20th century (mostly driven by “Jaws” novel and later movie released in 1975) has caused a drastic reduction in their population numbers. This process could potentially lead to local, or even global, extinctions.⁹

Even if this path to “monsterification” starts from real afflictions to public health or economic activities, the process is strongly driven by public perception. The creatures that a society builds through stories and reinforces with strong visceral feelings becomes as real as the actual natural species. So, given that public perception plays an important role, science communication could be a useful way to participate in this cultural debate and re-shape these created creatures. 

Any science communication project has two main components: content (the body) and shape (the soul). In this case, the “body” is the specific messages or narrative strategies that specifically tackle the abjection process that leads into the creation of a monster. First, debunk the false beliefs that have risen around these species (e.g. the false idea that most bats feed on blood). Next, put into perspective the real level of threat that some of these species represent (e.g. more people die by cows than by shark attacks). Finally, “re-naturalize” the monsters by showing that they are not supernatural entities, but instead are like any other animal: they eat and could starve, they bleed and avoid death, they think, they feel, and in some cases, they could even have emotions. An additional strategy is character storytelling, which is a good way to develop sympathy towards an entity.¹⁰ Then we have the “soul” of the project, which is determined by the format, the mood and the style. Elements such as voice modulation can have strong affective power.¹¹ Considering that abjection is a process driven by emotions, how to say things becomes almost more important than what is said.

An example of character storytelling, threat-reduction, and “soul” in practice is the case of the Proboscis monkey in Poland. This animal has seen its charisma increase thanks to the creation of internet meme. Although they are portrayed negatively in the memes, people were more willing to give direct financial support for their conservation. Humor has the power to ease tensions and reduce perception of threat, while constant exposure increases familiarity and builds up a character with whom you develop some complicity. A creature that was before alien and weird looking became an acquaintance, and then a friendly face.¹²

Following these ideas, I created my own project: a podcast to help people reconsider their thoughts, and more importantly, their feelings about wildlife that are traditionally considered unpleasant, ugly or hated. Not just the monsters, but also other creatures with the potential to become them.

However, one podcast alone is not enough to turn the tide on the sea of public perception. There are always too many beetles upside-down along the road and I cannot flip all of them back over, at least not by myself. Luckily I am not alone; “love the unloved ones” is a social media hashtag that aims to raise awareness about this topic. Science communication is not unidirectional. It is a cultural process in which the whole society builds consensus, and each of us have a say on how this discourse is driven.

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1. Frédéric Ducarme et al., What Are “Charismatic Species” for Conservation Biologists?, 2013. ↩︎
2.  Mattia Brambilla et al., “Species Appeal Predicts Conservation Status,” Biological Conservation 160 (April 2013): 209–13, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2013.02.006. ↩︎
3. Agathe Colléony et al., “Human Preferences for Species Conservation: Animal Charisma Trumps Endangered Status,” Biological Conservation 206 (February 2017): 263–69, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2016.11.035. ↩︎
4. Emily Snyder, “The Ugly Animal: Aesthetics, Power, and Animal-Human Relationality,” Humanimalia 5, no. 1 (2013): 1, https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9970; Wagner, W., Kronberger, N., Berg, S., & Torgersen, H. (2006). “The monster in the public imagination”. In G. Gaskell & M. Bauer (Eds.), Genomics and society: Legal, ethical and social dimensions. London: Earthscan. ↩︎
5. Nicholas. J. DeCesare et al., “Wolf-Livestock Conflict and the Effects of Wolf Management,” The Journal of Wildlife Management 82, no. 4 (2018): 711–22, https://doi.org/10.1002/jwmg.21419. ↩︎
6. Ken Stone, “Creepy Crane Flies Drive Folks Crazy But Aren’t Harmful, County Expert Says,” Times of San Diego, April 6, 2019, http://timesofsandiego.com/life/2019/04/05/creepy-crane-flies-drive-folks-crazy-but-arent-harmful-county-expert-says/; Paula L. Enríquez and José Luis Rangel-Salazar, “Conocimiento Popular sobre los Búhos en los Alrededores de un Bosque Húmedo Tropical Protegido en Costa Rica,” Etnobiología, Etnobiología 4, no. 1 (2004): 41–53. ↩︎
7. Wagner et al., “The Monster in the Public Imagination.” ↩︎
8. Wagner et al., “The Monster in the Public Imagination.” ↩︎
9. Beryl Francis, “Before and after ‘Jaws’: Changing Representations of Shark Attacks,” The Great Circle: Journal of the Australian Association for Maritime History, January 2012, https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/ielapa.995176603668553. ↩︎
10. Michael F. Dahlstrom, “Using Narratives and Storytelling to Communicate Science with Nonexpert Audiences,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. supplement_4 (2014): 13614–20, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1320645111. ↩︎
11. Siobhan McHugh, “The Affective Power of Sound: Oral History on Radio,” The Oral History Review 39, no. 2 (2012): 187–206. ↩︎
12. Magdalena Lenda et al., “Effects of Amusing Memes on Concern for Unappealing Species,” Conservation Biology 34, no. 5 (2020): 1200–1209, https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13523. ↩︎

Feature Image: “It’s Not a Monster!” podcast banner, created by David A. Quinche Giraldo