Sir

“That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, but it seems that our perceptions of animals are affected by their names in interesting ways.

Visitors to London Zoo were asked to rank eight photographs of animals in the order that they would choose to help their conservation. The study included 57 taxa and was designed so that, after 57 respondents, each picture had been displayed with every other exactly once, and had appeared once in each position on the display. The design was repeated, with different visitors, but with common names added as captions to the pictures.

The two sets of rankings showed good agreement in general (r > 0.8), with the ‘named’ and ‘unnamed’ ranks of most species being within six places. In common with other surveys, we found that big cats were extremely popular choices: the Sumatran tiger and Persian leopard topped both charts, with the Asiatic lion always in the top five. Polynesian tree snails were a fixture in last place.

In contrast, the name had a marked effect on the positions of several species (Table 1). Names including words with obvious negative connotations (such as poison, spider, bat) seemed to affect species' rankings adversely. Inspection of species whose rankings moved the other way suggests unexpected insights into the national psyche — the highest climber was also the only species whose name indicated it to be British. And the Diana monkey rose by 12 places into the top ten when named. Interestingly, this climb is only half that managed by the royal python — and indeed only on a par with the performance of the pallid gerbil.

Table 1 Species showing most difference in rankings between the two surveys
Full size table