Lenny the baby elephant charges towards the camera, rearing his head and waving his tiny trunk, before backing away as if to give viewers the full take on his cuteness.

The wild-born calf is just visiting the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust’s Umani Springs facility in Kenya. He was brought there by his mother, who was rescued in 2013, successfully rewilded, and wanted to introduce her offspring to the humans who saved her.

It’s easy to love these majestic animals, as well as their playful offspring. SWT’s Instagram posts and YouTube videos featuring Lenny quickly garner thousands of views, likes, and comments.

Social media “helps people connect with animals – especially the orphaned elephants, rhinos and other animals in our care – in a new way,” says Sean Michael, SWT’s director of communications.

However, he adds, “through this connection, more people become invested beyond the individual. They become curious about the challenges facing our natural world, what organizations are doing to protect wildlife and preserve habitats, and they want to support the mission.”

Since its founding in 1977, the animal charity has saved more than 300 orphaned elephants, tracked down injured animals in the wild for veterinary treatment, stopped poachers and removed their snares.

Animals like elephants, lions, tigers and pandas are known as charismatic megafauna – large species that have widespread public recognition and are often used by conservation groups to appeal for support.

But are these charismatic species causing the public to ignore their less photogenic counterparts, like snakes, bats and iguanas?

After all, thousands of species are under threat from the illegal wildlife trade and the devastation of their habitats through agriculture, logging and climate disasters.

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Are we focusing too much on charismatic megafauna?

Some conservationists and scientists question the reliance on charismatic megafauna to tell the story of disappearing wildlife.

While certain species can make great ambassadors for conservation, these experts argue that this tends to oversimplify the true complexity of ecosystem interactions.

In scientific research, there also appears to be a bias towards studying charismatic species.

According to a 2025 study in People and Nature, research on charismatic species is more likely to be funded and published, as well as receive greater media attention.

Lead author Laura Tensen, an assistant professor at Greifswald University in Germany, found that competition to study certain species can be fierce, with researchers less likely to share research opportunities with young academics entering the field.

This increases the gap between research and conservation needs, often because a scientist has spent an entire career studying a certain animal, or because they develop an emotional attachment to it.

“People get much more attached to charismatic species,” says Tensen. “I don’t think people do it intentionally, but sometimes people get so involved with the species, they tend to not only monopolize research but also centralize their opinion.”

“I’ve seen some management decisions being made by people who have been working on these species for decades, and I’m not seeing the scientific data to back it up,” she adds.

When a researcher has another view, or a critical opinion about certain management applications, she says, “I sometimes feel that the science doesn’t really matter anymore.”

Protecting charismatic species protects other species

For Thomas Sharp, a wildlife ecologist with India-based Wildlife SOS, the concept behind protecting keystone species is that it helps protect many other species that fall under the same umbrella.

Animals like tigers, he points out, “need huge range, they need a lot of prey, so you’ve really got to protect the ecosystem. It’s not just protecting that tiger – it’s protecting everything they could possibly eat, [protecting] all the habitat those other species need.”

“And therefore, [for] a lot of the smaller species, which may not have a huge direct effect on tigers or vice versa, it still protects habitat for them,” he explains.

For other animals, such as Asian elephants, Wildlife SOS also promotes the establishment of corridors to allow them to migrate back and forth, Sharp says. “For an elephant, it might just be a corridor. For other species, this is their entire home range.”

However, he adds, if an ecosystem doesn’t overlap with that of an umbrella species, it could become vulnerable to infrastructure projects such as roads.

“But that could be a critical habitat for a much smaller species,” he says, a phenomenon he refers to as leakage.

Wildlife SOS does advocate for some animals unlikely to make it onto a brochure cover or a social media post.

“We actually do a lot of snake conservation,” Sharp says, including 24-hour snake rescues in Delhi, where the slithery creatures have found their way into homes in one of the densest urban centers in the world.

Those stories may occasionally appear on the organization’s website, but it’s best known for working with charismatic species: tigers, elephants and sloth bears.

“If we are being realistic, if you want to pull in money and get the attention of the general public, you need these flagship species,” Tensen admits.

“I study a charismatic species and notice how interested people are. They want to hear my stories. When I talk about non-charismatic species, I lose attention from my friends, my students or family members pretty quickly.”

Focus on conserving ecosystems, not individual species

Clearly, the key to effective conservation is protecting habitat as much as possible. While that’s not necessarily an effective marketing tool, it still forms an important part of conservation work.

A 2020 study in Nature Communications, for example, looked at whether it was possible to choose habitats for conservation that are important for broader biodiversity and also host flagship species.

“This allows organizations and private ventures, whose role in conservation continues to grow, to maximize public awareness and attract funding while accommodating important attributes of both species- and place-based conservation that are relevant to their conservation goals,” the authors wrote.

One example they identified was the Hengduan Mountains subalpine conifer forests in southwestern China. This ecosystem is home to not only the giant panda but also other potential flagship species like the takin, the golden snub-nosed monkey, snow leopard and the Chinese softshell turtle.

It’s one approach among many criteria that The Nature Conservancy uses to inform how it prioritizes place-based conservation decisions, according to James Fitzsimons, its senior advisor on global protection strategies.

“While it can be useful from a communications perspective when one of these locations also happens to play host to charismatic wildlife, there are other conservation-critical habitats across the planet that warrant protection that may not necessarily have charismatic species,” he explains.

These habitats are home to species “that have very low representation, those that are important for connectivity and those that play an important role in carbon sequestration,” he adds.

“Every species is worthy of protection”

Back at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, while it’s the elephants and rhinos that take center stage, the organization also sees ecosystem restoration as a big part of its mandate.

“Habitat preservation is the foundation of successful wildlife conservation,” says Michael. In addition to nationally protected parks and reserves, the trust and its partners protect over 800,000 hectares of wilderness.

“In places like the Kibwezi Forest, which was severely degraded when we started our conservation work there, the change has been transformative,” he says.

“When we first began our work there, the forest had been decimated by illegal poaching, charcoal burning, and logging. It was rare to see a single bushbuck, let alone a buffalo or an elephant. Today, these sightings are everyday occurrences.”

What’s more, he adds, communities living alongside the forest are reporting higher crop yields from improved rainfall and no wildlife incursions.

“We don’t subscribe to the ‘charismatic species’ divide,” says Michael. “Every animal exists for an ecological reason, and each is worthy of protection.”