Scientists are philosophers, explorers, data collectors and number crunchers. They are also storytellers, placing data within a broader scientific and societal context. How they tell these stories matters.
In our work as ecologists, we find that the “hero-villain” narrative trope is a popular tool in ecology and conservation writing. For example, wild pigs – a hybrid of human-introduced wild boars and domesticated pigs – are often characterized in science articles as “pest animals” that “devastate” or “destroy” ecological communities by preying on “vulnerable” species. One study deemed them the real “big bad wolf.”
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