Celebrate new year with great animals!

Happy new year everybody! I hope you all had a lovely time watching the new year eve firework while drinking festive beverage! Alright, great. Let's go back to talking about some animals shall we?

I reckon quite a lot of you around my age would be familiar with the anime Pokémon (Pikachu, Goldeen...ringing any bells?).
Balmford and his colleagues (2002) conducted a survey on testing children's knowledge on biology, with a twist. They asked 109 children who are in UK primary schools aged from 4 to 11 to identify 10 common UK wildlife species including plants, invertebrates (that are animals without backbones such as dragonfly and starfish), mammals, and birds picked at random and also 10 ‘species’ from Pokémon. The scores are  gained by successfully identifying the species. The result seems to be varied with the effects of participants’ age and gender. In general, boys scored slightly higher than girls but only because that boys were better at recognising Pokémon species. It is considered controversial whether Pokémon is more for boys or girls. I’d like to say that both boys and girls enjoy watching them, but a matter of fact is that when I was in primary school, there were more boys watching Pokémon than girls. The pupils’ age also have a positive correlation with the score. For wildlife, mean identification success rose from 32% at age 4 to 53% at age 8, and slightly dropped over the age of 8; however for Pokémon, it rose from 7% at age 4 to 78% by age 8, (Balmford et al., 2002). The figure proved that older children would perform better at identifying both wildlife species and pokemon. However, at the age of 8, a child could recognise nearly 80% of the pokemon but could only being able to identify about half of the natural species shown. Balmford pointed out that "children have a great potential of learning about creatures regardless of whether it's natural or man-made". At the same time, he expressed the concern that conservationists are on the edge of failing at sparking interest in their subjects. It's understandable why children are more interested in remembering the names of the species in Pokemon. There isn't always a interesting story line to follow when learning about names of animals and plants. People care about what they like and learn about what they care, naturally. Balmford also suggests that it is vital for conservationists to re-establish the link between the nature and the nation especially those of the young age . It could be achieved through investment in creative productions such as educational films, documentaries, books and apps (softwares on phones and tablets). It's shocking how many hours a day a kid nowadays could spend on mobile devices. But it could actually become a good thing when they could spend some time learning about the nature.