Photo bombing

Wildlife is being harmed by our need to get the perfect shot - and share it

- James Fair

JONATHAN AND ANGIE SCOTT HAVE been documenting the lives of predators in Kenya's Masai Mara since the late 1970s, with shows such as Big Cat Diary popularising the ecosystem and its worldfamous wildebeest river crossings.

There have always been tourists that break safari protocols, they say-standing on top of vehicles to get a better view of a big-cat kill or getting out of the Jeep at a river crossing to snap a selfie.

But two things have exacerbated the impact of this behaviour. One, the sheer numbers visiting the Mara every year; and two, our smartphones and how we use them. "Social media is turning us all into paparazzi," says Jonathan. "Images are so transitory snap, forward to our feed and never look at that image again."

According to a group of Australian scientists, promoting wildlife experiences on social media - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and, if you're young enough, TikTok - is now having a negative impact on the very wild species we claim to love.

Smartphones and social media heighten the 'honeypot' effect, says Rob Davis, a senior lecturer in vertebrate biology at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, and lead author of a paper entitled Liked to death: the Impacts of Social Media and Photography on Biodiversity. They enable us to promote to thousands the delicate habitats or species that are unable to cope with the avalanche of visitors that this precipitates.

As an example, Davis cites a mindnumbingly rare orchid called the Queen of Sheba, which (partly due to habitat loss and fragmentation, and partly due to taxonomic splits) is now entirely restricted to a single site in Western Australia. When a Facebook group promoted this site to its 15,000 followers, the result was catastrophic.