Beauty is an advantage, and so is the fish.
Recently, French scientists have discovered that the "appearance" of coral fish is closely related to their survival.
The more beautiful the reef fish, the safer they are, in a state of no danger and low risk;
The uglier the reef fish, the harsher the living environment and the endangered state.
Oh, is the fish doing well, and do you still look good?
Judging by the data, this is true, and it all blames humans for being members of the Appearance Society...
The researcher was Nicolas Mouquet, an ecologist at the University of Montpellier in France, who published the paper this month in the journal Public Science Library: Biology.
For years, Mukai has been interested in the impact of human aesthetic preferences on animal studies.
For genetic reasons, humans have a consistent response to whether animals look good or not, cheetahs, parrots, and butterflies are usually considered beautiful, while earthworms, bats, and shells are not very cute.
Those good-looking animals receive the most attention from humans, and research resources and public donations are prioritized to flow to them.
Not good-looking animals, sorry, even if they are endangered, few people care, there is much less research, and the public knows nothing about them.
In 2016, scientists collated zoological papers in Australia and found that the number of studies on terrestrial mammals was much higher than other animals.
Among terrestrial mammals, good-looking animals (such as kangaroos) have received the most research, and rodents and bats, although 45% of this type of animal, have received little attention.
A 2020 study on reef fish was even more intriguing to Mukai.
Coral fish refers to the fish that inhabit the coral reef, because the coral reef is rich in color, and the coral fish have evolved different colors in order to camouflage, some gorgeous and some dull.
To find out whether the appearance of coral fish would influence the researchers' choice of topics, the scientists collected all the papers related to coral fish in the academic journal Coral Reef from 1982 to 2018.
It turned out that the number of papers on yellow reef fish was much higher than that of other coral fish, and black coral fish was the most neglected.
Hey, is it really a look at the face?
In order to further study, Mu Kai selected 481 photos of coral fish in this experiment and asked 13,000 ordinary citizens to rate their "appearance".
Mukai then fed the scores into an AI system that had people predict how people would rate another 4,400 photos of reef fish, including the 2,417 most common species of reef fish.
It was found that human beings most like coral fish with bright colors, rounded bodies and repetitive patterns, and they are well-deserved "Yan Ba".
Typical representatives are the frontal spotted butterflyfish (also called the Queen Fairy, from the name you can see how much humans love it)...
Golden six-sided box pufferfish...
Clownfish...
Most of the coral fish with lower appearance scores have slender bodies, dull colors, and no obvious patterns on their bodies.
For example, mackerel...
Trevally...
Mukai found that whether fish look good or not has something to do with evolutionary history.
The younger the fish in the history of evolution, the more beautiful its appearance. But their evolutionary uniqueness has become less, meaning they have more genetic similarities with other fish.
The two species of fish also have great differences in living environment, beautiful fish like warm waters, are active during the day, feed on corals, and live close to coral reefs;
The unsightly fish live in the ocean belt, are active at night, eat other fish or plankton, and prefer colder waters.
In addition to the above, Mukai also found that the appearance and endangerment of fish were significantly correlated.
According to the IUCN rating, 190 species of reef fish in the study were threatened (i.e., critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable), 1602 were not to be feared (i.e., non-hazardous, near-threaten), and 556 were not assessed.
The analysis shows that most of the unsightly fish are threatened, and the good-looking fish basically do not have to worry about humans.
In other words, the lower the value, the more endangered.
This is not in line with the inherent impression of human beings, beautiful fish, people will feel that they are more fragile and more in need of protection, ordinary-looking fish seem to be stronger and do not have to deal with much.
However, because humans do not care much, basic protection and monitoring are very little.
They are also victims of overfishing. In modern fisheries, low-value fish are highly commercial species, born to be eaten, while high-value fish are very commercialized, and at most a few are placed in aquariums.
"Our research demonstrates that there is a serious misalignment between public support for animals and between animals that need it." Mukai wrote in the paper.
"Average-looking fish are worse off on the IUCN Red List, but humans don't give more protection. This is a 'debt of appearance' that we humans owe. This debt will cause damage to the entire coral reef ecology, because ordinary-looking fish have higher ecological specificities and can provide more diverse ecological functions. ”
"So we believe that as the risk of extinction of common-looking fish increases, coral reef ecology will be affected by a wide range but easily overlooked."
Everyone loves beautiful things, but in nature conservation, it can be a big mistake to focus only on beautiful creatures.
What's wrong with being ugly? Ugly fish also deserve to be cared for and loved,
I hope that in the future, there will be more and more research and protection on them...