This year’s Threatened Species Bake-Off comes to an end this weekend. The annual event aims to raise support for Australia’s threatened species, but does “threatened species” mean “mammal”? In a paper in Austral Ecology, Eliza Middleton and colleagues discuss how they aimed to increase awareness of other species, including plants, by changing the theme of the bake off.
The Threatened Species Bake Off is a public competition that encourages the public to create cakes based on listed Australian threatened species. Each year, the bake off has a theme which varies. Nonetheless between 1997 and 2021, mammals were the most popular taxonomic group in the competition. To see if they could change this, the organisers set a new theme for 2023, ‘Loving the unlovely and getting to know the unknown’ to increase the number of plant and invertebrate-themed bakes.
The researchers compiled entries from social media platforms and emailed submissions. The team compared the entries with data from previous years to assess the impact of the theme change. The results were striking.
Plant representation increased from 14% to 23%, while mammal representation decreased from 27% to 16%, showing the public responded to the theme. The top five species represented in the bake off also became much more diverse. Unfortunately, that list still has no plants. The authors record that no plant species has ever been represented in high enough numbers to reach the top five.
Social media platforms demonstrate significant utility and impact for conservation messaging and awareness-raising campaigns, however, to ensure maximum engagement, it is essential to understand users and target audiences to have the messaging hit the mark.
Middleton, E.J.T., Au, E., Hayes, A.-L. & Forster, C.Y. (2024) The importance of competition theme in reducing taxonomic bias in the Threatened Species Bake Off. Austral Ecology, 49, e13590. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/aec.13590 (OA)
