Habitat Fragmentation: Tungara

Intro

Habitat Fragmentation: Tungara was a collaboration with with Dr Rachel Page, researcher working on sensory and cognitive ecology and behavioural biology. She is the principal investigator of Smithsonian Bat Lab, also known as the Noseleaf Laboratory, in Gamboa, Panama.

We approached Dr Page to offer a short-form video (reel) based on the Nature Ecology and Evolution paper titled “Adaptive changes in sexual signalling in response to urbanization”, published in 2019. At time time of publication, this paper received quite a bit of attention from such publications like Smithsonian Magazine, Phys.org, and even with a short documentary on YouTube. However, Cooked Illustrations noticed that none of the online communications for this paper had used short-form video or animation to help increase awareness of the work.

By 2019, several social media platforms had undergone a culture shift that saw short-form vertical video content (Reels, YouTube Shorts, TikToks) rise in priority. However, institutions and especially laboratories with small teams do not have the resources or institutional know-how to see how media consumption habits are changing. Since then, short-form video has become a crucial part of any laboratory or researcher’s communication and outreach strategies.

Habitat Fragmentation: Túngara, was an opportunity for Cooked Illustrations to build a case study in the short-form animated explainer space and to test out assumptions about how to publish such short-form science explainers. We reached out to Dr Page about collaborating on this project, which she readily accepted. Our team wrote a script and provided concept art, which Dr Page edited for scientific accuracy. Once we decided on the wording of a script and the visual style, our team proceeded to record voice over audio, choose music, and animate the video.

The video was published on YouTube as a two part YouTube Short as well as Instagram and Twitter in October 2023.

And this is where the results revealed a principle about social media: any investment in developing content has to come hand-in-hand with a strategy to maximise the reach, engagement and results of said investment in the development of content.

At the time, Cooked Illustrations did not did not understand the YouTube Algorithm well enough. We posted three videos: one normal, full-length YouTube video showing the full story; to be able to upload the video as Shorts, we had to split it in two parts. Our assumption regarding the Shorts was that YouTube Shorts would immediately show audiences the second video after they had watched the first video, or that they would be curious enough from the first part to check out our YouTube Channel. Watch numbers on both YouTube and Instagram suggest that, regardless of platforms, a video split in parts has a measurable drop in watch numbers and engagement. However, Instagram provided the highest number of watchers and engagements (likes).

Collaborative projects like this are key to research and develop not just effective science communication content, but to develop the methodologies and publishing systems that would ensure that investment in time and resources on any outreach project reaches its full potential.

Since then, Cooked Illustrations has partnered up with a Digital Marketing Specialist to support us in providing essential expertise when it comes to publishing animated explainers like this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5pWrBYf7IQ