Scientists are philosophers, explorers, data collectors and number crunchers. They are also storytellers, placing data within a broader scientific and societal context. How they tell these stories matters.
In our work as ecologists, we find that the “hero-villain” narrative trope is a popular tool in ecology and conservation writing. For example, wild pigs – a hybrid of human-introduced wild boars and domesticated pigs – are often characterized in science articles as “pest animals” that “devastate” or “destroy” ecological communities by preying on “vulnerable” species. One study deemed them the real “big bad wolf.”
This framing does not reflect technical terms but storytelling decisions meant to help readers understand the data and results to come.
But this way of storytelling has costs. In our recent paper, Beyond hero and villain narratives in ecology and conservation science, published in 2025 in the journal BioScience, we demonstrate that simplifying complex ecological stories into good guys and bad guys is limiting the way ecologist and conservation scientists understand and communicate science.
When villains don’t fit the script
In our paper, we show that using the hero-villain trope in ecology and conservation writing has three problems.
First, by definition, a villain is not only doing bad but is morally bad. As a result, villains are judged and held accountable for their deeds. But plants, animals and ecosystems are not morally responsible for their actions because they do not operate within human-constructed moral frameworks. The hero-villain trope therefore invites an inappropriate moral interpretation of nature.
When species are reported as destructive or harmful without careful context, the audience can easily internalize the species as inherently “bad” or “malicious,” which informs how we treat them.
For example, human-introduced predators such as rats and stoats in New Zealand are often villainized in academic literature, described as “disaster on four paws” and pitted against the “fragile populations of unique birds, lizards and insects.”
This framing then can convince people that excessively painful or violent eradication methods, such as slow-acting poison, are justified.
No clear-cut roles
Second, real ecosystems don’t have clear-cut heroes or villains. Rather, species’ roles in ecosystems are complex. For example, white-tailed deer perform ecosystem functions such as helping disperse seeds throughout their habitat, yet their presence can also lead to biodiversity loss due to high levels of plant consumption.
Therefore, reducing a species to “good” or bad” can misrepresent the multidimensional roles of animals in ecosystems, which frequently shift.
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For example, due to the complex interplay between animals and soil properties, in wet tundra environments musk ox can lead to an increase in ecosystem carbon storage, while in dry tundra environments they can lead to a decrease in ecosystem carbon storage.
‘Good’ or ‘bad’ depends on human values
Finally, the hero–villain framing embeds cultural and ethical assumptions without always acknowledging them. These assumptions often reflect culturally specific beliefs about which species and ecosystems are valued.
For instance, many cultures value native species – typically meaning a species that has evolved in and occupied an ecosystem without human introduction. As a result, introduced animals are frequently deemed responsible for native species extinctions, even when evidence is lacking.
But whether a species is “native” is not automatically good or bad. Nonnative species can change ecosystems in ways that people value, such as restoring ecosystem diversity and functioning that was lost from human-driven extinctions. At the same time, nonnative species can also cause changes that people do not value, such as reducing abundance of native species.
The key point is that deciding which of these outcomes is “good” or “bad” depends on human values. When scientists describe species as villains without explaining these values, the framing can present values as objective scientific conclusions.
A different way to tell the story
Our paper highlights alternative narrative structures that scientists can use to engage readers without creating heroes and villains in academic writing and storytelling.
For example, a place-based narrative structure focuses on the description of a place and the characters within – think “Planet Earth,” the BBC’s landmark nature documentary series that immerses viewers in different ecosystems around the world.
This narrative structure guides the audience through a landscape and allows for the exploration of many characters in a nuanced, value-neutral and compelling way. A classic ecological example is Henry Chandler Cowles’ study of the Michigan sand dunes, which frames ecological dynamics through the instability of place itself. “Perhaps no topographic form is more unstable than a dune,” Cowles wrote, as plants must adapt “within years rather than centuries, the penalty for lack of adaptation being certain death.” The drama within the narrative comes from place – its constraints, its pressures, its opportunities.
Another powerful narrative tool we highlight that can be applied to academic storytelling is the “Will they, or won’t they?” structure, the kind of tension you see in “Pride and Prejudice” or “When Harry Met Sally.” This structure can work surprisingly well in ecology.
In our paper, we highlight partial migration – whereby some animals in a population migrate while others don’t – as an example of how someone could use this narrative tool.
Scientists are still figuring out why certain individuals make different choices. Is it driven by food availability, the presence of predators, or behaviors acquired by social learning?
Framing research narratives around that central, unresolved question – will an individual animal migrate or won’t they? – builds suspense and keeps readers engaged, without casting a hero or villain.
There’s no final battle scene in conservation. No singular villain to defeat, no final victory for the hero. Scientists know that understanding nature requires humility and a willingness to revise their stories as new information is gained.
By moving beyond heroes and villains, scientists can tell narratives that make space for nuance, recognize their own biases, and acknowledge conflict without caricature.