Why Conservationists Should Heed Pokémon

Abstract

Why Conservationists Should Heed PokémonAccording to E. O. Wilson's Biophilia hypothesis (1), humans have an innate desire to catalog, understand, and spend time with other life-forms. This in turn provides a powerful aesthetic argument for combating the present extinction crisis. Yet, as industrialization and urbanization reduce our direct interactions with nature, our interest in the variety of living things is perhaps becoming redirected toward human artifacts, with potentially grave consequences for biodiversity conservation (2-5). As Robert Pyle writes, "what is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never seen a wren?" (6, p. 147).To quantify children's knowledge of nature and shed light on the premise that their innate interest in diversity is nowadays being met by man-made variety, we surveyed 109 UK primary schoolchildren aged 4 to 11 to assess their knowledge of both natural and unnatural history. Each child was asked to identify from flashcards 10 types of British wildlife and 10 "species" of Pokémon, characters in the card-trading game invented by Satoshi Tajiri to give today's urban children a chance to collect creatures in the way he did as a child (7). Each child's set of 10 wildlife cards included at least two plants, two invertebrates, two mammals, and two birds picked randomly from a set of 100 common UK species, and the 10 Pokémon cards were drawn randomly from among 100 of the basic set of 150 Pokémon types; the order of presentation of Pokemón and wildlife cards was randomized, and a different card set was used for each child. Children aged 4 to 7 were interviewed orally, whereas older children wrote their answers down. For wildlife, the level of detail needed for identifications to be scored as correct varied across taxa, with mammals requiring genus level identification (e.g., "hare") and invertebrates requiring only ordinal classification (e.g., "beetle").Overall identification scores varied markedly across children, but there was only a moderate correlation between individuals' scores for wildlife and for Pokémon (r s corr = 0.31, N = 109, P < 0.01), with the effects of pupils' age and sex differing between card types. A generalized linear model of overall score with a Poisson error structure and with child's age, age 2 , the child's sex, the organism type (wildlife or Pokémon), and their interactions as possible predictors accounted for 43.2% of the deviance in scores. Identification success showed a hump-shaped relation with age (age + age 2 : χ 2 = 105.0, df = 2, P < 0.001; see figure). On average, boys scored slightly better than girls (sex: χ 2 = 19.59, df = 1, P < 0.001), but only because of girls' poorer performance at Pokémon (organism type * sex: χ 2 = 23.92, df = 1, P < 0.001). The effect of age differed with organism type (organism type * age + organism type * age 2 : χ 2 = 18.85, df = 2, P < 0.001). For wildlife, mean identification success rose from 32% at age 4 to 53% at age 8 and then fell slightly; for Pokémon, it rose from 7% at age 4 to 78% by age 8, with child...

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