The story began in 2018, when the study’s author conducted undergraduate fieldwork in the La Tatacoa Desert, a seasonally dry tropical forest ecosystem in the municipality of Villavieja. Over twelve months of sampling, the research analyzed how vegetation cover and seasonality shaped the diversity of native bees in this harsh environment. The results were striking: approximately 82 bee species were identified, with clear seasonal patterns and shifts in species composition between dry and rainy seasons and across different vegetation types. When combined with earlier inventory work that had documented new country records and even species new to science, the regional tally rose to 110 native bee species, roughly one fifth of all bee species known from Colombia.

That number surprised nearly everyone. Locals and tourists alike were skeptical that more than 80 bee species could survive in a landscape that appears almost lifeless compared with Colombia’s lush rain forests. This skepticism, rather than discouraging the project, became its catalyst. During a hot morning of bee collecting, two local brothers, Andrés and Rubén Vanegas, self-taught paleontologists whose childhood fossil collection had attracted the attention of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and led to the formal establishment of the Tatacoa Natural History Museum, proposed dedicating a small section of their collection to bees. The researcher agreed, and what had begun as a conventional thesis project gained a second life as a public-facing exhibition.

The technical work behind the exhibition was substantial. After fieldwork concluded and the thesis earned its author a biology degree in 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the outreach phase through 2020 and the first half of 2021. Once back at the Biodiversity and Ecology of Wild Bees Lab at Universidad Militar Nueva Granada, where the collected specimens are officially housed, the team photographed bee specimens from La Tatacoa, including material from the earlier inventory project, and selected representative specimens for display. In total, 120 specimens representing 60 species were curated and permanently donated to the museum, organized into two Cornell-style entomological drawers. All 110 bee species recorded in the region were photographed and assembled into a large-format poster measuring 7.5 by 39.7 inches, designed to show details invisible to the naked eye in a group of insects that are often tiny and difficult to observe closely.

The exhibition opened on November 26, 2021, with a reception at the museum, which until then had been dedicated almost entirely to fossils. Dozens of residents from the rural community of La Victoria and local high school students attended a 20-minute talk on bee diversity and the role these insects play in dry forest ecosystems and crop pollination. Within days, photographs of the poster and the drawers were shared on social media, and the content went viral, reposted more than a thousand times in a single week. The story then crossed into national media when Radio Nacional de Colombia covered the research and the outreach effort, amplifying the message far beyond Huila: more than 110 bee species inhabit the Tatacoa Desert, and the arid landscape is far richer than it appears.

The viral moment translated directly into museum visits. In the weeks that followed, many visitors arrived drawn by the fossil exhibits but recognized the bee poster from social media, and some came specifically to see the bee display, still curious and skeptical that so many species could thrive in such an environment. The author notes that although official scientific reports had already documented the region’s high bee diversity, the exhibition proved instrumental in raising awareness among hundreds of visitors in a way that peer-reviewed publications never could. The experience highlighted a persistent gap in science: researchers publish primarily for other academics, using technical language, while outreach is often undervalued, perceived as low-status work carried out mainly by early-career researchers, disproportionately women.

Perhaps the most durable impact has been educational. A local teacher, Zamary Olaya, took the lead in promoting environmental education across Villavieja, and children in different grades now use the poster and the specimen collection to identify bees they observe and capture in their own backyards. With support from the local government, her initiatives have included creating a garden for bees and other pollinators planted with native flowers of La Tatacoa. Students cross-reference the collection, the poster, and online plant identification guides to recognize the most common plants and bees in the region, turning a museum drawer into a working field guide and grounding conservation in direct, personal experience with local species.

The museum itself has continued to evolve. By the end of 2024, still managed by the Vanegas brothers, the Tatacoa Natural History Museum earned an exhibit award from Parque Explora, an interactive science museum based in Medellín, which funded a renovation of its major exhibitions. The updated bee exhibit now features striking illustrations of native bees and plants from La Tatacoa, complementing the two display cases of specimens collected during the original research. Today, dozens of visitors explore the museum daily, leaving with an appreciation for both the ancient biodiversity preserved in the region’s fossils and the living diversity that persists in its dry forest.

From this case, the author distills two practical recommendations for researchers. First, every fieldwork-based project should incorporate the social needs and perspectives of local communities, whose generational knowledge of the landscape can enrich research design, improve site selection, and anchor conservation efforts in local stewardship. Second, visual media and social networks should be treated as core scientific tools rather than afterthoughts; engaging infographics and photographs can dramatically broaden the reach of research findings and improve public understanding of topics that are difficult to grasp from technical papers alone.

The broader lesson is one that resonates far beyond entomology. Scientific knowledge confined to journals rarely changes how people perceive the places they live, but accessible, visually engaging formats can bridge the gap between academic research and societal awareness. A pair of wooden drawers, a large poster, and a well-timed social media post turned a regional biodiversity survey into a community conservation movement in one of Colombia’s most threatened ecosystems. When knowledge is presented clearly and attractively, the study concludes, it can transcend academic boundaries and become a catalyst for environmental awareness, proving that the distance between a data table and a viral phenomenon is shorter, and more consequential, than most researchers assume.

Subject of Research: Public engagement with native bee biodiversity through museum outreach in Colombia

Article Title: Outreach drawer collections and visual science communication enhance public engagement with native bee diversity in Colombia

Article References: Herrera-Motta, A. F. (2025). Outreach drawer collections and visual science communication enhance public engagement with native bee diversity in Colombia. Natural History Collections and Museomics, 2, 1-8. https://doi.org/10.3897/nhcm.2.157562

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/nhcm.2.157562

Keywords: native bees, La Tatacoa Desert, Colombia, science communication, entomological exhibition, natural history museum, biodiversity, pollinators, tropical dry forest, community engagement, social media, conservation education

The pilot study was conducted during the summer of 2023 at two very different UK institutions: the small Fenn Bell Conservation Project in Kent, where 76 visitors observed a pair of Asian small-clawed otters (Aonyx cinereus), and the much larger Twycross Zoo in the Midlands, where 155 visitors studied two Rothschild giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis rothschildi). Participants were recruited through posters with QR codes at the enclosures and asked to watch the animals for two minutes before completing an online questionnaire built on a pre-defined ethogram, a structured list of species-typical behaviours including positive, negative and neutral welfare indicators. The questionnaire also invited optional sections on how the animals seemed to be feeling, what animal welfare meant to the visitors themselves, and how they had found the citizen science experience.

Technically, the design was deliberately cautious. Because visitor observations could not be paired with simultaneous video observations from the same individual, and because the two data sources differed in duration, the researchers did not treat the comparison as a validation exercise. Instead, they used systematically coded CCTV footage as a reference dataset, applying instantaneous scan sampling with one-minute intervals between 11am and 3pm, and summarising both datasets as hourly and daily presence or absence records. At the daily level, both data sources captured walking or running in the otters on all study days and chewing the cud, eating and drinking, standing and locomotion in the giraffe, while the largest discrepancies appeared for infrequent or harder-to-identify behaviours such as grooming and social interactions.

The psychological results proved equally instructive. Visitors scored the animals on eight qualitative terms, including content, relaxed, agitated, frustrated, comfortable, wary, confident and distressed, and then gave an overall welfare rating from 1 to 10. Spearman’s rank correlations revealed a coherent pattern at both sites: welfare scores rose alongside positively valenced adjectives such as content, comfortable, confident and lively or engaged, and fell alongside negative terms such as frustrated, agitated and wary. For the otters, the correlation with contentment was particularly strong, while for the giraffe even wary and agitated scores tracked downward with welfare ratings. Although participants were told in advance which terms indicated positive or negative welfare, the authors note these exploratory associations provide preliminary evidence of construct validity in public assessments of animal affective states.

Perhaps the most encouraging finding concerned how visitors conceptualised welfare itself. Asked to define or describe animal welfare, most respondents produced answers that mapped cleanly onto the Five Domains model, the contemporary framework covering nutrition, environment, health, behaviour and mental state. At Fenn Bell, 86 percent referenced physiological welfare, 64 percent mental state and 41 percent behaviour; at Twycross the figures were 93, 54 and 24 percent respectively. Fifteen otter visitors and thirteen giraffe visitors touched on all three broad themes, offering definitions such as meeting an animal’s emotional, physical, mental and health needs as naturally as possible through diet, environment and enrichment. The researchers observed, however, that visitors leaned towards input-based measures such as food and space rather than output-based measures such as behaviour, and that behavioural domains were the hardest for the public to articulate.

Where visitors learned their welfare concepts also carried a clear message for the zoo sector. Zoos themselves ranked among the most frequently cited sources of knowledge, with 45 of the Twycross respondents attributing their understanding to that zoo alone, ahead of television documentaries and educational facilities. The authors interpret this as evidence that educational material provided by zoos is being positively received, and they recommend that zoos place greater emphasis on positive behavioural interactions within their welfare science communication. Given that negative public perceptions of welfare can erode trust in zoos and reduce willingness to engage in conservation efforts, effective communication of welfare science is not a luxury but a strategic necessity for modern institutions.

Engagement levels were striking. At Twycross, where a researcher was present at the enclosure to encourage participation, an average of 27 visitors per day completed the survey; at the smaller Fenn Bell site, where participation was self-directed, the mean was 3.4 per day. Across both sites, 93 to 95 percent of respondents said they would take part in a similar activity again, and 79 percent overall described the process as rewarding. Crucially, the majority of participants were infrequent zoo visitors, with the largest group attending less than once a year, suggesting that citizen science could reach beyond the committed membership base of season-pass holders. Most participants also expressed confidence in their ability to identify the behaviours on the ethogram, which the researchers attribute to the deliberately simple design of the observation task.

The study is candid about the limitations of visitor-generated behavioural data. The otters were out of sight of the cameras for 67 percent of video observations, and both visitors and cameras faced blind spots and varying viewing opportunities. Behaviours that were infrequent or complex, such as positive social interactions in the otters or grooming in the giraffe, showed the greatest divergence between the two datasets. The authors stress that their analyses are exploratory descriptions of behavioural occurrence rather than measures of observer accuracy or reliability, and they call for future studies using time-matched designs, cameras positioned to replicate the visitor’s view, and controlled comparisons with trained observers to enable formal inter-rater reliability assessment. Training, structured prompts and simplified measures such as active versus inactive states are proposed as ways to improve data quality.

Beyond the data, the researchers argue, the process itself may deliver benefits that matter to the mission of the modern zoo. Watching animals closely is known to foster empathy and a sense of connectedness, visiting zoos has been linked to improved human wellbeing, and citizen science participation has been associated with gains in scientific understanding. Longer dwell times at exhibits may not automatically translate into learning, but they can deepen the visitor experience and support lasting connections with nature. As biodiversity losses reach unprecedented levels and conservation science becomes an ever more urgent discipline, the authors conclude that engaging zoo visitors in behavioural citizen science deserves far wider consideration, both as a source of data on how animals spend their opening hours and as a pathway to a more empathetic, conservation-minded public.

The study sits within a broader rethinking of what zoos are for. Traditional frameworks described zoos through four pillars of conservation, education, research and recreation, but more recent models have proposed adding a fifth pillar of wellbeing that applies to both animals and people, alongside a ‘sphere of influence’ recognising that zoos operate at local, national and global scales. Within that framing, communicating welfare science to the public is not peripheral but central, since public trust depends heavily on whether visitors believe the animals they are watching are thriving.

Citizen science itself is usually understood as having two distinct strands. In one, the priority is collecting usable data at scale, as in large wildlife monitoring programmes; in the other, the priority is engaging citizens, with data quality a secondary concern. The zoo project deliberately straddled both, and the tension between them explains much of the authors’ caution about the behavioural records. Previous zoo-based citizen science in the UK, such as campaigns encouraging visitors to log native species seen on site, has built ecological awareness but stopped short of fostering connections with the zoo’s own animals, a gap this study sought to address.

The choice of study species was pragmatic rather than incidental. Asian small-clawed otters and Rothschild giraffe were selected because they were consistently visible from public viewing areas, attracted longer dwell times, and could accommodate camera installations allowing simultaneous remote observation. Behavioural research is already the dominant form of zoo science, valued for capturing real-time information about animal experiences at low cost, yet large-scale data collection can be impractical for busy animal care staff. Distributing observation across millions of annual visitors offers one possible solution, provided questions of validity and reliability are resolved.

Earlier work also suggests the timing matters: visitors report more positive experiences and stronger feelings of connection after watching animals, particularly active ones, meaning the observation task itself may amplify the very engagement the projects aim to cultivate.

Subject of Research: Citizen science engagement of zoo visitors in animal behaviour and welfare assessment

Article Title: Exploring citizen science as a tool for engaging zoo visitors with animal welfare

Article References: Stephens, D., Wright, D., Rowden, L., Frost, N., Carter, A., Ward, S. J., & Williams, E. (2026). Exploring citizen science as a tool for engaging zoo visitors with animal welfare. Discover Animals, 3(1), Article 85. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44338-026-00247-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44338-026-00247-2

Keywords: citizen science, zoos, animal welfare, animal behaviour, Five Domains model, ethogram, visitor engagement, giraffe, Asian small-clawed otter, conservation education, public engagement, affective state