That’s actually insane. I wonder how many of these unobserved species may be entirely untraceable being outnumbered by invasives.
For me, I think it would be tied between American Robins, House Sparrows, and European Starlings. They’re everywhere, and two of them are invasive and detrimental to native birds. Western and Mountain Bluebirds are particularly vulnerable to nest predation by sparrows and starlings.
Starlings are kind of pretty, but not enough to make me enthuse about them.
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Fair enough. I’m just not very optimistic that our traits will help us survive for as long as other animals, such as dinosaurs. That’s the one thing that makes humans so special, but flawed at the same time; our mental ability. It makes like a lot more complicated, but also helps us thrive. There are pros and cons to our intelligence.
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*sad bonobo noises*
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Exactly! Those little fellas got wings, Armour, and a few the ability to shoot acid! Where are my Elytra, nature?
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My L.I.A (least interesting animal) would probably be something like a horse. A common, everyday animal. Then again, horses are pretty cool. So idk, I don’t really have a ‘least’ interesting animal. All of them have cool things and quirks about them. Heck, even Rock Pigeons got magnetic minerals in their brain to help navigate using the earth’s magnetic field! So I don’t really think there is a Least Interesting animal. My two cents (not adjusted to inflation).
Maybe something like a tiny, soil-dwelling nematode
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Then again, some soil-dwelling nematodes can help control pesky weevil populations in your yard.
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Do beetles have emotional armor? I’m aware many humans do. But do not claim that beetles have no emotion. That hurts their feelings. And why would one want to hurt their precious little feelings? Not a soul.
Edit: sorry moderators, that might have been a little sidetracked…
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TLDR: it depends!
The phrase “least interesting animal” says more about the person using the phrase, than it does about the animal.
Take something like geology or history. If you have a good teacher (and I don’t mean a schoolteacher; I mean anyone who knows about the subject)
If you have a good teacher, then they will MAKE it interesting and fascinating while you’re with them. They will get you excited about it, because THEY are excited about it, and it’s “emotional contagion”, in a good way.
The question is, do you sustain your fascination once they leave?
It depends where you are in your life. Sometimes you’re not ready for something. Sometimes you’ve got your hands full with something else. Sometimes it’s a matter of “customer touches”, where you need to be exposed to it a certain number of times before it sticks.
Many people were turned off of very cool subjects by terrible teachers, and it took them decades to figure out that they actually LIKED that subject.
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A good teacher can make their favorite topic a lot more interesting and engaging. My point is not to make a case that there is an animal that intrinsically uninteresting to most people. It is that there is an animal out there with the fewest number of potential teachers or students.
There are some animals that have few teachers because not much is known about them. But the mystery is what may entice potential students, who can in turn become teachers. All teachers were at some point students for every animal.
So if we find animals who don’t have a lot of students, maybe it will inspire a student to become a teacher of that animal.
I don’t think anyone did.
I particularly like how the often-quoted discussion between Srinivasa Ramanujan and G. H. Hardy illustrates the roles of both subjectivity and increasing knowledge in this type of question.
Ramanujan was in hospital in Putney, London, suffering probably from malnutrition due to the challenges of upholding vegetarian Brahmin religious restrictions while living alone in wartime England and focusing on mathematics. His mentor, the British mathematician G. H. Hardy, went to visit Ramanujan and remarked that the number the taxicab he had ridden—1729—was a “dull” number and “hopefully it is not an unfavourable omen”.
Ramanujan, however, replied that “it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways” (13+123) and (93+103). To me, this nicely shows that how interesting one finds something may depend greatly on one’s knowledge and personal interests.
A few years ago, I might have nominated termites as the dullest animal. Sure, there may be about 3,000 species, but they all seemed just about as uninteresting to me. If someone had told me that their area of study was the microscopic animals living inside the guts of termites, I would probably have admitted that I now realized there were animals even more dull than termites themselves. But then I viewed one of Jared Leadbetter’s videos and I realized that these critters are really interesting and that termite guts form a complex environment all of their own.
Complexity is probably more inherently interesting than simplicity, but I think we have to admit that pretty much every organism contains enough complexity to inspire interest in some researcher, and so is interesting in some way.
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And that makes me quite glad indeed :)
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