Trends in the Brazilians' engagement with insects on the internet

Abstract

It is estimated that the tropical and south temperate regions harbour approximately 85% of the total entomofauna, and Brazil, which is the largest country in the Neotropical region, shows the greatest insect diversity in the world. However, to the best of our knowledge, the Brazilian population's interest in insects is yet to be investigated. We use Google Trends platform for prospecting temporal variation in the public engagement with nature. From searches in this database, from 2012 to 2020, using common names of 21 insect groups, we evaluated: (I) Brazilians' internet interest on insects over time, (II) the highest search themes for each insect group and (III) which pairs of insects are positively or negatively correlated regarding the public interest through years. Our findings demonstrate that Brazilians' internet interest regarding the studied insect groups is constant over time, which may be linked with the low attention these organisms generally receive, and that Brazilians are prone to perceive them as harmful, as we can observe in many of the top queries related to studied groups. We observed a considerable synchronous growth in interest regarding pairs of insects considered as domestic pests, medically important and charismatic, and the searches on these groups referred mainly to their biological, ecological and cultural aspects. Our results indicate that investment in environmental education in Brazil can motivate public engagement with insects. Also, our data can be crucial for directing conservation policies for insects in the tropical region.