![]() ![]() “Our study highlights likely important mismatches between potential public support for conservation and the species most in need of this support,” said Mouquet. ![]() The more “unattractive” species have adapted to look this way because they often live in the water column and have to hide within a more homogeneous habitat, but this also makes them of greater commercial interest and more likely to be overfished, according to the study, published in PLOS Biology. Photograph: Georgette Douwma/Getty Imagesįish species that were lower in the aesthetic rankings and were deemed “uglier” by the public – usually “drab” fish, Mouquet notes, with elongated body shape and no clearly delineated colour patterns, like the telescopefish or the round herring – were also more ecologically distinct, at greater ecological risk, and listed as “threatened” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List. ‘Our study highlights likely important mismatches between potential public support for conservation and the species most in need of this support,’ said Mouquet. The queen angelfish was rated as more aesthetically pleasing. But they were also the less “evolutionarily distinct” species – meaning they are more similar, genetically, to other fish. The combined results suggested that bright, colourful and round-bodied fish species – such as the queen angelfish and the striped cowfish – were most often rated as more “beautiful”. The scientists fed the data into an artificial intelligence system, enabling them to generate predictions for how people would probably have rated a total of 2,417 of the most commonly known reef fish species from 4,400 different photographs. Mouquet’s team first conducted an online survey in which 13,000 members of the public rated the aesthetic attractiveness of 481 photographs of ray-finned reef fish. This discrepancy between aesthetic value and extinction vulnerability could have repercussions in the long run, he said. Visualizing NGC 3256 in this way demonstrates the usefulness of the JWST, the most powerful telescope ever placed into orbit around Earth, in understanding the growth of galaxies and the evolution of the universe.“There is a need for us to make sure that our ‘natural’ aesthetic biases do not turn into a bias of conservation effort,” said Nicolas Mouquet a community ecologist at the University of Montpellier, and one of the lead authors of the study. The stunning image of this galaxy was created by the JWST using data from its Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and its Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI). Visible in the JWST image of NGC 3256 are threads of stars that were wrenched free of their home galaxies as a result of gravitational interactions between the colliding galaxies giving rise to incredible tidal forces. But it isn’t the case for all the stars in those galaxies. That's because of large voids between stars. When galaxies collide, most stellar bodies escape the violent collisions unscathed, unlike the gas and dust content of those galaxies. James Webb Space Telescope sees 1st starlight from ancient quasars in groundbreaking discovery James Webb Space Telescope discovers 717 ancient galaxies that flooded the universe with 1st light James Webb Space Telescope will help Euclid spacecraft investigate dark energy and dark matter ![]()
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