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Protists in science communication
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This paper presents strategies for improving public awareness of protists, single-celled organisms that are largely unknown outside scientific circles. The authors highlight how protists can be used to teach the public about environmental threats, including how microplastics accumulate through aquatic food webs and ultimately reach organisms consumed by humans.
Despite their high abundance and wide distribution in ecosystems, most protists remain unknown to the public. Although science communication approaches were developed in historical times to raise public awareness of these 'enigmatic' taxa, many aspects have not been considered in the spotlight of modern techniques. We present selected ideas and activities on how to attract the public to unicellular eukaryotes. We give examples of how protists can be included in educational work. We explain that trained non-experts can understand and teach others how to recognize protists, where they live, in which habitats they can be found, what they look like and why they are important. Consequently, members of the public can learn how environmental threats impact not only the lives of protists but also ours, e.g., by the accumulation of microplastics through an aquatic food web, up to fish used for human consumption. We suggest age-appropriate methods for application in workshops on protist recognition.
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Research digests by email
When a large batch of papers lands in the Atlas, we read through it and send a short write-up of what stood out.