EOC 120: Badger Buries Cow REDUX - How the Story went Viral and What it Means for Badgers

Today on the podcast we are discussing a particularly interesting viral media story that I’m guessing a bunch of folks out there in the audience may have come across recently. Researchers Evan Buechley and Ethan Frehner recently published a scientific paper about an interesting and previously undocumented behavior of a very common species here in the North American West - the American badger.  Evan and Ethan captured time-lapse footage showing a badger bury an entire cow carcass. Now not only did they publish a scientific paper about the discovery of this behavior of badgers, but they also released a clip of the timelapse video footage showing this badger bury the carcass over the course of several days. The video, and the entire story went viral.  The original video clip uploaded to the University of Utah’s YouTube channel now has well over 1 million views, and the story has been covered by the New York Times, National Geographic, NPR, Science Magazine, USA Today - and countless other mainstream news outlets. So Evan and Ethan have been busy giving interviews and talking about a species that they didn’t even intend to be the subject of their research!  Luckily for us - Evan is a close friend of mine - we worked together as California condor field biologists 10 years ago, and Evan actually joined us for an early episode of the EOC podcast - episode 16 about his research on Egyptian vultures in Ethiopia. So I was able to convince Evan to join us again for today’s episode - but I also wanted to take this opportunity to talk about the reasons why this story went viral.  As scientists and science communicators, we’re constantly striving to reach people beyond our inner circle with important research and information about science and conservation, and this story presents an unique example that we can learn from. To aid in this learning process I also invited Dr. Brad Okdie, who studies the psychology behind viral media at Ohio State University. Join private conversations with top authors and access exclusive bonus content! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Get full access to Earth to Humans Podcast's Substack at earthtohumanspodcast.substack.com/subscribe