For years, researchers and broadcasters have highlighted the risks of social networks dominated by immediacy, disinformation, noise and the logic of entertainment and profit. However, amidst this tidal wave of stimuli, a constant and spontaneous flow of images begins to emerge. reveal biological patterns which would otherwise be almost impossible to observe on a large scale.
A good example is from a team from the University of Campinas, in Brazil, which has just demonstrated that TikTok and even image banks like iStock can become valuable tools for understanding what happens in our cities when a domestic predator encounters the smallest and most fragile fauna. Since it’s not a secret, cats kill thousands of birds and small mammalsas is abundantly stated in the scientific literature. But its impact on urban invertebrates remained until now almost unexplored territory.
Study analyzes photos and videos uploaded by users and reveals that domestic cats hunt an unexpected and surprising diversity of arthropods, from crickets to dragonflies, including cockroaches, mantises and even scorpions. This is not an isolated or anecdotal behavior, but rather a global urban pattern that affects groups essential to life. ecosystem balance. And the most ironic thing of all is that this information, inaccessible to scientists until recently, comes precisely from the space where we most tend to trivialize everyday life: social networks.
Social networks as an urban laboratory
To understand the extent of the phenomenon, the Brazilian team followed more than 17,000 images and videos published on TikTok and iStock. From this audiovisual ocean, they extracted 550 reliable recordings of arthropod predation by domestic cats. What is relevant in the analysis is not just the volume, but the type of information that these platforms allow to capture as is. spontaneous episodes, recorded without scientific intentionwhich show interactions rarely observed in experimental or field contexts.
Lead researcher Leticia Alexandre sums up the team’s surprise when analyzing the content: “The most exciting thing is that we were able to use social media data to reveal an impact of cats on biodiversity that the scientific literature had not consideredHis colleague, ecologist Raul Costa-Pereira, adds that the collected material documents groups of arthropods that had never been identified as feline prey in previous studies.
A diverse and invisible prey catalog
The analysis identified 14 different orders of arthropods preyed upon by domestic cats in urban areas. The most common group was orthoptera (grasshoppers, crickets and locusts), which represented 20.7% of reports. Below those of the order Hemipterasuch as bedbugs (14.5%) and blatodeos (cockroaches and termites), with 14.4%.
But the distribution area is much wider and predation on butterflies and moths (order Lepidoptera), beetles (Beetles), hymenoptera such as bees and wasps, dragonflies (Odonates) and even occasional prey like mantises, spiders or scorpions. Each image shared on networks provides a visual record what are urban cats like? opportunistic predators capable of attacking almost any invertebrates that cross their path.
What is surprising is that this pattern partly coincides with what was already known about their diet from scientific publications, but it also reveals gaps, since several of these groups had never been formally recorded as prey for cats. And not because it didn’t happen, but because no one was there to see it. However, The desire to share everything on social networks fills this void.
A huge impact by accumulation
From an ecological point of view, arthropods are a fundamental element of urban balance because they are responsible for pollinate, aerate the soil, recycle organic matter, nourish birds, bats and small vertebrates. Their decline, documented in numerous recent studies, is considered one of the most worrying symptoms of the global biodiversity crisis.
As unpleasant and uncomfortable as it is, the domestic cat adds another pressure factor rarely taken into account in impact studies. Each individual can kill few invertebrates, but when we add the millions of catsAmong community, feral, stray and owned cats with access to the outdoors, a problem is emerging on a scale that has not yet been properly measured. This work in no way demonizes cats, it simply provides data where previously there were only hunches.
One of the main conclusions of the study is that social networks provide a huge, global, spontaneous and relatively inexpensive data stream to processthat no academic project could generate on its own. This unexpected trove of images could become a crucial tool for documenting ecological interactions that would otherwise go unnoticed.
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