Look carefully at the most uppermost branches upon the great family tree of life on Earth, and near the top you will see a tiny twig labelled “panda”. It is re-growing. Slowly, it is getting sturdier.

Pandas are doing better than they were. In fact, this week, they have been officially downgraded in their conservation status from “endangered” to “vulnerable”, in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s latest “red list” update. The IUCN’s annual announcement details the survival fortunes of every leaf upon life’s great tree. It is nature’s version of the FTSE 100, turned on its head.

There was a distinctly mammalian feel to this year’s coverage. The IUCN itself chose to focus on the encouraging prospects of the Tibetan antelope and the greater stick-nest rat, as well as the bridled nailtail wallaby. Many news outlets (including the Guardian) instead chose to focus on the story of our closest cousins, the great apes, who appear to be continuing their downward spiral toward extinction. I find this global coverage interesting. The tale of apes is immensely sad, of course, but apes represent only a handful of creatures on a critically endangered list that now numbers more than 5,100 species.

Where was coverage of the nubian flapshell turtle?

Where was coverage of the nubian flapshell turtle, a funky looking reptile which has declined by 80% in just two generations courtesy of reckless fishing and collection for the pet trade? What about those of us who quite fancied something on the Kurdistan newt, with skin like a starry night, which lives in only four streams on Earth? Then there’s the Fitzroy falls crayfish, a disappearing resident of Australia upland freshwater? All of these creatures have been updated to critically endangered status this year, yet I suspect this is the first time you will have heard of them. It certainly was for me, writing this article.

These are animals worthy of having a look at, surely, so I am delighted to be able to share them with you. Might I encourage you (anyone?) to check out the epirus dancing grasshopper or the variable cuckoo bumblebee? Or scan your eyes over the incredibly rare fungus, the fuzzy Sandozi, which produces fruiting bodies weighing up to 130kg? Many of you won’t care about organisms such as these, and that’s OK. Hell, these are organisms so uninspiring (to some) that they have been given interesting names like “the geometric tortoise” to gee up the international interest. Yet they are all critically endangered, as of this year.

These are animals about which we rarely speak when it comes to conservation. They lack the appeal, somehow. They are less interesting. Less worthy of our concern, maybe. They’re just not mammals.

There is a word for what we’re talking about here. It is speciesism. Speciesism like this is by no means a new phenomenon, particularly when it comes to the conservation of invertebrates. In Britain, for instance, we spend far less money on conserving such creatures compared to bony animals and, globally, we spend far less time researching their conservation. It’s no wonder they barely get a look in during coverage of the IUCN’s annual red list updates.

So are we human beings committing a form of animal racism when it comes to global conservation? Undeniably, I think the answer is yes. But a different question might be: does a bit of speciesism really matter, when it comes to conservation?

Eastern gorilla now critically endangered while giant panda situation improves Read more

The common argument for speciesism is that saving bamboo forests for pandas or saving rainforests for orangutans benefits a whole host of invertebrate species and helps conserve hundreds of overlooked geckos and snakes on the side. (Essentially, the argument goes, saving the A-listers also saves the production staff and the catering crew). This might be true. But the problem with accepting this worldview is that it does little to change attitudes, and this is something that frustrates me immensely as someone with an interest in such creatures.

You can roll your eyes at this, of course, but accepting speciesism is short-sighted and damaging in the long-term. It is like marketing a library as a place to read airport novels; it downplays and cheapens the wealth of material there to study and marvel at. Invertebrates and newts and tortoises and fungi offer us new perspectives on the human experience and keep open the windows of potential to learn new things that one day might be good for us, even if they don’t seem much use right now. Biodiversity is about more than just biology. It’s really a story of diversity. Of shared ancestors. Of shared branches.

So let’s celebrate, if we can, the conservation of all species and focus our minds further across the tree of life. Fungi, newts, dancing grasshoppers and mountain crayfish – the unspoken nature of their downward spiral probably says more about what it is to be human than we care to consider. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be ready to change.