First published: 19 November 2025.
An exciting and unusual article published in RES journal Insect Conservation and Diversity explores how social media can help provide data for cat predation on arthropods: “Social media highlights the overlooked impact of cats on arthropods”.
Social media has become an increasingly important part of daily life for millions of people. Users often share their daily routines, work, leisure activities, and, of course, their pets. Cats, in particular, are common figures on social media. Corresponding authors, Leticia Alexandre and Raul Costa Pereira, explain that their idea, therefore, was to harness this publicly available social media data to identify patterns of domestic cat predation. This innovative research approach, known as iEcology, involves using internet-published data as input to study ecological processes.
The scientific community has long acknowledged the negative effects of domestic cats on biodiversity. Cats are generalist predators that kill a wide variety of animal species. However, most research has mainly focused on the predation of vertebrates, such as mammals and birds. Indeed, the effects of cat predation on invertebrates, including insects and arachnids, have been somewhat overlooked. The goal in this study was to shed new light on domestic cats’ predation on arthropods and to spark discussions about how to reduce these impacts.
After analyzing more than 17,000 photos and videos on two online platforms, iStock and TikTok, the authors found 550 instances of arthropods being attacked by cats.
Their findings reveal that domestic cats prey on a wide variety of arthropods, especially crickets, grasshoppers, cicadas, and cockroaches. These new findings emphasize the significant predatory ability of cats when targeting arthropods.
The most interesting aspect of the research is that they were able to use social media data to reveal an impact on biodiversity that has been relatively overlooked by the scientific literature. Indeed, their results document cases of cats attacking groups of arthropods that have never been identified in scientific papers as cats’ prey.
Therefore, social media platforms can offer much more than cute cat photos and videos, aiding in understanding and reducing their effects on biodiversity.
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