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Why conservationists should heed Pokémon

March 27, 2002

Could you tell a Pikachu from a Pidgeotto or a Jigglypuff? The average eight-year old can identify 80 per cent of all Pokémon characters – but is much less expert at identifying real wildlife species.

A team of Cambridge University scientists has, found that children were much less knowledgeable about wildlife than they were about Pokémon, the card trading game invented by Satoshi Tajiri to give today’s urban children a chance to collect creatures in the way he did as a child.

The team, led by Dr Andrew Balmford of the Department of Zoology, argue that if conservationists - who are interested in protecting the earth’s remaining species - are to succeed, they need to re-establish children’s links with nature. This is because people tend to care about what they know.

"Our findings carry two messages," said Dr Balmford. "First, young children clearly have tremendous capacity for learning about creatures (whether natural or man-made), being able at age eight to identify nearly 80 per cent of a sample drawn from 150 synthetic ‘species’.

"Second, it appears that conservationists are doing less well than the creators of Pokémon at inspiring interest in their subjects: during their primary school years, children apparently learn far more about Pokémon than about their native wildlife and enter secondary school being able to name less than 50 per cent of common wildlife types."

Tim Coulson, another member of the team, adds:

"As many parents will tell you, it is not difficult to encourage a child’s interest in wildlife. It is also important that we do – why should a child care about the extinction of a species, if he or she has no idea what it is?"

The team came to their conclusions after showing primary school children aged between four and 11, 10 cards of common British wildlife species and ten cards of Pokémon characters. The children were asked to identify the animal or plant (e.g. "beetle", "deer", "oak tree"), and the Pokémon character had to be named.

At age four an average child could correctly identify about 1/3 of wildlife species but less than one in 10 Pokémon characters. By age eight these scores had changed and the average child could correctly identify just over 50% of wildlife species and nearly 80 per cent of Pokémon characters.

Cambridge, University of