Samantha Bee says that it is not a good thing that people tend to only get enthusiastic about efforts to save cute species and ignore the ones that are not as photogenic. She makes a convincing case for why we should care about the ugly ones too.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Well, one person’s ugly is another’s cute.
More to the point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species
Anyway, it’s probably too late to recover what has already been lost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
Many people consider the Waldrapp (northern bald iris in English) to be ugly. It does look a bit like something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
The bird has been reintroduced to Germany, but the birds don’t know the right direction to migrate in. A project has been set up to guide the birds to their usual winter feeding grounds in Tuscany by training them to follow microlights.
You can read about the project here: https://ec.europa.eu/easme/en/news/wing-northern-bald-ibis
Who thinks that axolotl are ugly?
Since when are bees ugly?
That is true, pandas are cute, and they know, somehow, how to be screamingly adorable 100% of the time.
But there are efforts ongoing to preserve less cutesy species, and here are a couple of examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachnocampa_luminosa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C4%93t%C4%81
the Weta can be called “cute” only by avowed insectophiles, and the A.Luminosa larva is, by any meter, every kind of disgusting. Yet despair not, help is on the way! Even if they may be “not conventionally attractive”.