Conservation and comedy

What's the Ugly Animal Preservation Society all about?

It all started about two years ago. I suppose I was combining three of my favorite things which are comedy, conservation and democracy. The group was set up for two reasons. First, I wanted to raise the profile of Mother Nature's more aesthetically challenged creatures. We all know about the panda, the snow leopard and the tiger, but there are so many more wonderful animals out there with an incredible and weird biology that just get neglected. But they are also endangered and they still need our help. So, the other reason was to get people talking about these heavy issues of conservation. We think about 250 species are perhaps going extinct every day. And that's a depressing topic. So if we're going to talk about it, we have to lighten the tone a bit.

You do that with comedy nights. How do they fit in with your conservation effort?

You know it has to be fun first and educational second. Roughly one-third of the acts at our stand-up nights are professional comedians. One-third are people like myself, who do lots of comedy but have a scientific biological background. And the remaining third are researchers who luckily enough are funny. People are coming along because they want to laugh and if they learn something, then well and good.

Why don't we pay attention to ugly animals?

Just because we are that shallow. If you think about it, only one fifth of the animals on the planet have backbones - the mammals, the fish, the amphibians, the reptiles and the birds. The vast majority who live out there are insects. And if we were to disappear tomorrow, the world would probably be better off or it wouldn't even notice. But if the beetles were to disappear, all the ecosystems would crash.

Which cute animals get all the attention? And are they really worthy?

Definitely the panda. That's the famous one. And the panda is actually sort of worthy. Everybody knows about it already. The WWF has it as a mascot. They're not stupid. They know exactly what they are doing. They're using the panda as a poster boy. And from that they then conserve the panda's habitat. And conserving the panda's habitat, they look after a whole host of other species, which might not be as cute and cuddly as the panda. So in these areas there are various kinds of monkeys, there is the red panda and there all the amazing plants and fungi which also live in the in the bamboo forests. So by conserving that one species they are actually conserving an entire habitat. That's the way it has to be. We have to move away from focusing on species to focusing on habitats.

Are ugly animals at greater risk of being endangered than the more beautiful creatures?

Yes, definitely. They don't show up as much in the zoos, they are not as well known, they are not as well studied. The thing we call the charismatic mega fauna, the very large scale mammals are the ones that are best funded and birds to an extent because we think they're beautiful. There are so many of these creatures that we talk about where there is actually very little research about their biology or their lifestyle. So many things are even uncategorized as of yet.

The blobfish was voted last year as the official mascot of the Ugly Animal Preservation Society. Tell us a little bit about it.

It just looks like a melted depressed blob. The name blob fish is quite apt. A bit jelly-on-a-plate appearance, and this is because it has no muscle. It can barely move. It kind of floats around neutrally because of its jelly-like skin and it just waits for food to come to it. Unfortunately, deep sea trawling off the coast of Tasmania and Australia is driving it extinct.

What's your favorite ugly animal?

If I had to choose I would go for this thing called the Canadian blue-grey tail dropper slug which is amazing for a couple of reasons. For a start, it is smurf blue which is incredible in its own right. But, if you scare it, its bum drops off. It leaves behind its tail. And the purpose of this is if anything is grabbing the tail, it's no longer holding the slug and the slug can leg it as much as something with no legs can.

You've claimed in an article that zoos tend to have lots of cute animals. Do you think we should create Ugly Animal zoos as well?

Yes, or at least everything zoos. We're lucky here in Britain, and probably in the rest of Europe, because the zoos here are good and they are involved in active conservation schemes. But we should perhaps focus on the things that are most harmed. I know a lot of zoos in Britain that are focusing a great deal on frogs because frogs are probably the most endangered group of animals. Two thirds are declining. Half of all the amphibians are declining. And not many people look at frogs and think they are cute and wonderful. I think they are brilliant. I've actually got an entire solo standard show about frog biology. But they are neglected because they are amphibians; they are a little bit slimy. But they are perhaps the most under threat and therefore we have to do better work with them.

I suppose zoos always have to have things like giraffes that aren't endangered, just because they do bring in crowds and because there is an educational merit as well. But fundamentally, we have to focus on the wild. The most important thing is conserving habitats. If you look after the place, the animals tend to look after themselves.

Simon Watt is the president of the Ugly Animal Preservation Society, a UK-based touring comedy night that gets people to vote for their favorite ugly animal, which then becomes the mascot of the area. Winners have included the proboscis monkey, the humphead wrasse, the scrotum frog or the gob-faced squid. Watts is also author of the book "The Ugly Animals: We can't all be Pandas."