Small Fry — How to Tell Compelling Stories About Obscure Species

An orange fungus grows out of leaf debris at Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine. Photo: National Park Service/Alyssa Mattei (public domain).

Feature: Small Fry — How to Tell Compelling Stories About Obscure Species

By Bethany Brookshire and Douglas Main

Charismatic animals like pandas and lions and eagles get a lot of press. Humans tend to gravitate to the large, the pretty and the predatory, and journalists are no exception.

That’s all well and good, but these animals, often situated toward the apex of the food chain, are nothing without every lesser-loved organism below them — from rodents to insects to microbes. Not to mention hundreds of thousands of species of plants and millions of fungi, protists, viruses and more, many of them not yet known to science.

 

In the midst of a climate and

biodiversity crisis, it’s more important

than ever for journalists to cover obscure

or unsexy organisms and biomes.

 

Now, in the midst of the current climate and biodiversity crisis, it’s more important than ever for journalists to cover obscure or unsexy organisms and biomes, for without that coverage, we cannot really understand the planet we live on.

But how can we bring seemingly unlovable species and ecosystems to life and get our audiences invested in their stories?

 

Intertwined narratives

Often, the most compelling way to report on the non-human world is to talk about people — about how we are like those creatures or why we need those plants or ecosystems.

That might seem a little self-centered. But looking closer, it becomes clear that what this kind of coverage cultivates is not self-obsession. It’s empathy.

Maya Kapoor, an engagement manager at Covering Climate Now and freelance journalist, is among those who regularly face the dilemma of writing about oddball organisms. She says one useful technique is to find the bigger story that the organism is a part of. Stories about other species almost always involve humans — and our narratives are intertwined.

For example, in a feature Kapoor wrote about the fungal pathogens devastating the American chestnut, she focused on Native Americans who are trying to bring back this species.

Douglas Main, a freelancer and former writer and editor with National Geographic, also recommends finding the larger stories that odd species are embedded within.

A National Geographic feature he wrote about ice worms, tiny invertebrates that live on glaciers (requires subscription), is equally a tale of how climate change is fueling extinction.

Main’s story also highlights an ice worm trait that could have wide-ranging applications in other fields. A slight tweak in the protein that makes ATP, the cellular currency of energy, helps these creatures stay active at very low temperatures.

People might not care about ice worms. But they care about the effects of climate change on biodiversity, and they care about potential human benefits from other species’ quirks.

 

Finding common ground

It also helps to find parallels or correspondences between nonhuman organisms and humans.

In her chestnut story, Kapoor spoke with sources who compared the loss of the chestnut tree to the forced loss of culture that Indigenous people experienced as their children were taken away to boarding schools.

Bethany Brookshire, a freelance science journalist and author of “Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains,” also uses human examples. For instance, she cites the many species that produce milk-like substances — including nonmammals like pigeons and limbless amphibians.

“That’s something we have in common,” Brookshire says. “You can bring readers in,” by finding such unexpected similarities.

Benji Jones, an environmental correspondent at Vox, believes that another way to get people to care about obscure organisms is to make them their own characters in a story — as he recently did when writing about Appalachian salamanders.

That often means emphasizing that these organisms — whether plants or animals or yeast — are really not as different from us as they seem, Jones says. They, too, have wants and needs and challenges.

A tree or salamander can’t speak for itself, but the people who care about these species can.

 

From curiosity to caring

Each of these journalists agrees that it’s tough for journalists to “sell” unsexy organisms to audiences on their own merits. Putting a human spin on a story often seems to work better.

At first, it might seem sad that people — journalists and audiences alike — are this self-obsessed.

 

Why can’t we be pure, caring about

pigeons or ice worms for their own sake?

Why can’t we relate to an ecosystem

without making it about us?

 

Why can’t we be pure, caring about pigeons or ice worms for their own sake? Why can’t we relate to an ecosystem without making it about us?

But there’s another way to see this self-centeredness — as empathy in waiting.

Empathy is easy to elicit for large, charismatic animals. We want to see ourselves in the “bravery” of a lion or the motherly solicitude of an elephant or whale. And furry, cute faces are always an easy empathy hack.

It’s harder to get audiences to care about the small, the spineless, the aesthetically unappealing.

But seeing ourselves in other creatures sparks curiosity. And from curiosity, it’s only a short step to caring.

Journalists might have to dig a little deeper to find the common ground humans share with other species. But it’s there if you dig deep enough.

Making those connections can open the door to understanding and compassion.

We all live on the same planet. We all have needs — even if some organisms’ needs might be a bit foreign to our human eyes. And we all have conditions in which we thrive.

The many links we can make between ourselves and other living things can show our audiences that we’re not so different, after all.

[Editor’s Note: Material for this story was drawn in part from a panel session at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual conference in Philadelphia in April, whose sponsors are listed here. Brookshire and Main were speakers for this session. Listen to the panel’s full audio recording here and watch the video recording here (intelligible starting ~09:20). Read a write-up from SEJournal’s student newsroom coverage. And for more on this topic, check out our Topics on the Beat: Biodiversity page, with nearly two dozen SEJournal stories, plus biodiversity headlines from EJToday.]

Bethany Brookshire is an award-winning science journalist and author of the book “Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains.” Her work has appeared in Science News, Science News Explores, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, The Atlantic and other outlets.

Douglas Main is a freelance journalist covering wildlife, science, nature and a range of environmental issues. His work appears in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Hakai Magazine, MIT Technology Review, The New Lede, The Guardian and elsewhere. He is a former senior writer and editor at National Geographic.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 9, No. 40. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.