Last year, I watched the movie “Balto”, a character called Boris arouse my interest of snow goose. Boris is a rare character able to influence the interest of real bird species. Like Canada Goose and Trumpeter Swan, Snow Goose is also a pillar species. Two years early, my interest of Snow Goose influence by a documentary called Earthflight.
8 Likes
I think “Finding Nemo” got lots of people interested in clownfish.
9 Likes
The blue macaws in Rio.
5 Likes
Master Crane from Kung Fu Panda series also influenced my interest of several crane species. The first time effected Red-crowned Crane, Siberian Crane, and Black-necked Crane. The second time it effects Red-crowned Crane, Siberian Crane, Whooping Crane, Black-necked Crane, White-naped Crane, Sarus Crane, Sandhill Crane. Only a few species hasn’t been effected (Demoiselle Crane and Common Crane).
Another character in Kung Fu Panda series called Lord Shen, but I don’t see it influenced my interest of peacock like Master Crane.
However, even if I’m Chinese person, I’m not interested in panda. I hear about many other people from other countries loves panda very much.
5 Likes
I think if you’re already interested in nature (like most iNatters are), and you can already “put a name” on most animals that you see in the media, then you get curious about new things. Things that might be ai, or species that you don’t recognize.
For regular people who aren’t obsessed with nature, it’s kind of like plant blindness. Most people have, not only plant blindness, but animal blindness as well. And animal deafness!
They hear a bird in a movie set in the tropics, and their brain goes “Makes sense”. They don’t say — wait a minute, that’s a temperate bird!
For iNatters, any plant or animal that they see, in any media, could lead them down a rabbithole, even to the point of becoming a world expert in that taxon.
Whereas for most people, their brain just goes, animal. They don’t know enough to even be curious about it.
6 Likes
we looked for evidence of increase of sale of blue tangs after the movie Finding Dory came out. We found increased online searches but not sales. You can read our paper
Did the movie Finding Dory increase demand for blue tang fish? https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s13280-019-01233-7.pdf
11 Likes
I remember seeing the ‘Man-Eating Flower Pods’ in the first Jumanji film (1995) when I was a kid. The scene of the large blossoming jaws and spreading vines coming from out the fireplace freaked me out! That was my first exposure to the concept of a carnivorous plant so when I later learned about venus fly traps, pitcher plants and sundews I immediately had a piqued interest at that time.
4 Likes
This is an interesting idea for a topic because it demonstrates that media can affect the perception of a species. In some cases, unfortunately, instead of piquing people’s interest, it can negatively portray a species and lead to misconceptions.
Such as the misrepresentation of hyenas in The Lion King. A hugely popular movie, especially with kids, that just fed into the negative stereotypes that already existed about hyenas, which is extremely disappointing and unfair, coming from a person studying hyenas.
Life of Pi (the movie and the book) also features a hyena as a character but it’s more complex. Without giving away the plot, the hyena symbolizes some pretty awful stuff, such as cruelty, violence, and selfishness (if you’ve watched the movie you’ll get it). However, I wouldn’t say that Life of Pi really misrepresented hyenas, because in the book the narrator, Pi, describes them realistically as clever and excellent hunters (spotted hyenas hunt most of their food), whereas The Lion King portrays them as dumb scavengers, which they aren’t. Still, there’s a hefty paragraph in the book which discusses their unpleasant appearance, describing them as “ugly beyond redemption”, followed by a whole page of graphic description of how hyenas eat: voraciously and gluttonously. I’m certainly not condemning Life of Pi though, because these descriptions are necessary in context of the story. But I just think about how this could potentially contribute to more harsh feelings towards hyenas in the public, as the book is a common reading assignment in high school (at least in the US). Most students won’t think so deeply into it and just read these repulsive descriptions of hyenas, then couple that with the symbolism in the story AND their prior memories of how hyenas were portrayed in The Lion King (if they’ve watched it)? Let’s just say they probably won’t look at hyenas so fondly. And on top of that, you see how the examples I gave both are about spotted hyenas? There is also the problem of generalization. People who aren’t that interested in wildlife probably won’t know that the hyenas that are commonly portrayed in media are just one species, spotted hyenas, and that there actually are other species of hyena (brown hyenas, striped hyenas, aardwolves (Eastern and Southern)). This can lead to the generalization of hyenas as a whole, as a family. There needs to be more media in which hyenas are the GOOD characters, where hyenas symbolize intelligence and resourcefulness; we need to properly educate the public on the TRUTHS of hyenas… and while we’re at it, let’s put some other hyena species in media, instead of the well-known spotted hyena. Sorry for the long response; I’ve been extremely hyperfixated on hyenas. They are my special interest.
8 Likes
Edit: I think I was thinking of this thread that Jason started:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/does-your-nature-knowledge-spoil-fiction/ (100 replies)
The first reply in Jason’s thread (in 2020) was also about Finding Nemo:
Another relevant thread:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/trying-to-id-when-watching-shows/ (46 replies)
4 Likes
Not a movie, but a video game, Minecraft added axolotls to the game and after that I saw a lot more about them afterwards.
4 Likes
I remember IDing the creatures during “Under the Sea” in The Little Mermaid! (The animated version, not the live action version.)
3 Likes
I was at an aquarium the other day and the kids were still all saying “I saw Nemo!” “I saw a Dory fish!” just as enthusiastically as ever, 23 years after the movie came out. I was always disappointed in this because it seems like they ignore all the other beautiful fish and only focus on the two they can stereotype. Better than no enthusiasm at all I suppose.
8 Likes
Padak is an animated film about Chub mackerel and other fishes! highly recommend it if you want to cry
1 Like
A couple months back I was leading a school group in a interp walk, and mentioned biomes, and one said “I know that from minecraft”. Cant say I know minecraft, but it seems legit that it probably has different maps.
1 Like
I definitely didn’t identify the plants in Vecna’s mind lair in Stranger Things…
1 Like
23 years!!!
1 Like
minecraft is open world, so to switch things up there will be different sections of the map split into biomes, with different animals and monsters. there are new ones added all the time– ex. in 2013 they added the savanna biome (which would tend to occur near deserts or plains, if i recall correctly), which i remember taught a lot of my peers about acacia trees for the first time.
the biomes are generated by random noise representing temperature & altitude & probably some other variables (no relation to earth’s latitude and longitude). it takes about 10ish minutes for a player to walk through an entire biome and get to the next one, so a kid who’s played the game probably gets the idea that some animals live in cold areas and some live in hot areas and some are in the middle.
not sure if you wanted the minecraft explainer lol
3 Likes
I think the effect is most marked when you see a less famous animal suddenly become popular or at least Googled more often. Before Jurassic Park, surprisingly few people knew what velociraptors were, or any carnivorous dinosaur smaller than a Tyrannosaurus for that matter. Of course, those were the 90s and it’s a bit harder to quantify internet searches then, but I definitely don’t remember very many raptors in childrens’ dinosaur books until after the movie came out.
Madagascar got people curious about lemurs.
Though these days I think video games do more to cultivate interest since there is more scope to interact with the animals(s). Red Dead Redemption 2 has been praised for extraordinarily lifelike north American fauna, for example.
5 Likes
Thats probably about the level I figured. Either way I am cool with something that kids are doing anyway introducing ecological concepts.
2 Likes
The level of true ecological detail in RDR2 is nearly unmatched compared to other fictional media in my opinion. You could bypass most of the game and just roll play being a naturalist during the turn of the 20th century. I wonder of the broader impact that game has had alone on peoples interest in flora and fauna.
4 Likes