While running a biodiversity workshop at a local primary school, Kate Howlett, a zoologist, encouraged children to turn over the bricks and logs at the edges of their playing field to see what was living underneath.
That’s when one child asked her if she had come to their school early that morning to plant the woodlice for them to find. Even after insisting that the bugs were living there all along, the suspicious pupils were reluctant to believe her.
“It struck me as sad that no one had encouraged them to [do this] before,” says Howlett, a PhD student in the Insect Ecology Group at Cambridge University’s zoology department.
From the classroom to mainstream media, many invertebrates are often overlooked when educating younger generations about the natural world, she says. And that is especially true of nature documentaries, Howlett and her colleagues found in a study published in the journal People and Nature this year. Big, cute or charismatic animals often bask in the limelight while less dramatic species are relegated to bit parts.
“How people perceive the natural world will affect how they value conservation, how they prioritise it in terms of donating to NGOs or valuing that when they go to the ballot box,” says Howlett. “People deserve to know what the natural world is like.”
Howlett’s team searched the IMDb database and found 945 wildlife documentaries produced between 1918 and June 2021 and then randomly chose 100 of them to look at which habitats, organisms and species they focused on.
They found that 81.1% of all organisms mentioned were vertebrates – mammals, birds or reptiles – while just 17.9% of mentions were reserved for invertebrates. Yet an estimated 97% of all animals are invertebrates.
“Obviously, if you look at the actual makeup of the natural world, that’s almost entirely the reverse,” says Howlett. This overrepresentation of vertebrates has been true since before the 1970s, the data shows. “So it’s giving us this very skewed perspective, thinking that the whole of the natural world sort of looks like us, which it doesn’t.”
The language used to speak about the animals was also different: vertebrates were referred to according to their species for 41.8% of mentions, while invertebrates were referred to in more general terms more often, with their species mentioned only in 7.5% of cases.
Howlett acknowledges that the creative narrative and entertainment value are criteria producers need to consider, but suggests there may be a way to redress the balance.
“We can talk more about ecosystem function as a whole and biodiversity as this complex system,” says Howlett. “Rather than just these big flagship species.”
David Attenborough’s Wild Isles series, for instance, has been widely applauded for zeroing in on what some might consider less glamorous ecosystems such as grasslands and woodland in the British Isles and featuring the oak tree, dormouse and squirrel rather than big beasts.
Shining a light on how ecosystems work together is what wildlife film-making needs, according to Wendy Darke, founder of the documentary production company True To Nature and former head of the BBC’s Natural History Unit. Invertebrates also deserve to be shown as heroes and have their stories centre stage, she says.
“They need to be seen as an integral part of a healthy ecosystem,” says Darke. “They’re part of the story of the apex predators, and they’re part of ours – because we live on the planet alongside the small stuff.”
When it comes to invertebrates, things have started to improve. Advances in technology make it much easier and more accessible for documentarists to bring small creatures to the big screen. And there is a growing interest in insects generally.
“I think if you were writing this article 40 years ago, people would be saying ‘what is an insect? Isn’t it something that we need to kill?’,” says Jane Hill, president of the Royal Entomological Society.
“There’s much better recognition now that not only are insects beautiful and amazing in their own right but also how much value they are in terms of the ecosystem services that they provide for us.
“The difficulty with some of the nature programmes is that perhaps the narratives are a little bit simplistic,” says Hill, noting that maybe the many nuances that characterise the insect world are harder to relay to a general audience.
Janet Walker, professor of film and media studies at UC Santa Barbara, argues that even if film-makers were to feature less well-known or charismatic species more, there is no evidence that would change the public’s perception of them.
“I don’t actually think that the crux of the matter and the solution is authenticity in greater proportional representation of animals,” says Walker.
“If authenticity and representation of species led to awareness, and therefore change, we probably would already have realised greater change. But that isn’t happening.”
More critical awareness by the producers and the viewers is necessary, according to Walker. She would like to see more films recognise that nature does not exist in a silo, but that society, economics, politics and culture are also part of that ecosystem. Giving an audience more “pristine nature” and hoping they will fall in love with it is not enough, she says, it’s up to documentary makers to complement their films with calls to engagement and action.
“Now, nature documentaries are so popular, they cause a big splash,” says Howlett. “But equally, when I talk with my friends, they’ll say ‘oh, it’s really nice to have on in the background, because it’s relaxing.’ So even though they might be watched a lot, why and how are people engaging with them?”
What to watch:
Kate Howlett: The Green Planet; Life in the Undergrowth; and Insect Worlds on the BBC; and Little Matters: Insects; and Fantastic Fungi on Netflix
Wendy Darke and the True to Nature team: Microcosmos; Planet Insect; and The Secret Life of Rockpools; Life in the Undergrowth; and Hidden Kingdoms, all on the BBC
• This article was amended on 12 April 2023. An earlier version said that “almost 75% of the animal kingdom is made up of invertebrates”, when in fact the number is estimated to be around 97%.
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