Introduction

In the early '80s, infamous drug trafficker Pablo Escobar imported to Colombia different species of animals and built a zoo in his ranch, Hacienda Nápoles. After Escobar’s death, in the nineties, those animals were neglected and some of them escaped from the zoo. Particularly, hippos thrived around the Magdalena River, causing all types of ecological problems. Since then, and because of the population growth of hippos and the increasing risks associated, a part of public opinion in Colombia has been immersed in a controversy about conservation measurements and possible strategies for controlling the species: culling, sterilization or relocation.

In this article we intend to show how, concerning the case of hippos in Colombia, particular stakeholder social groups have different, sometimes opposing, visions of nature; how the interaction of the discourses of such groups have developed into controversies and pressure in the design and implementation of conservation measurements; and, also, we intend to propose a new discursive approach to the conflict that can be useful to establish common grounds for negotiation between stakeholders, and, consequently, a way of taking better conservation decisions and construct better informed visions of nature. This discursive approach is based on a displacement from the metaphor of the invasiveFootnote 1 species, used extensively in conservation theories, to an understanding based on the ecosemiotic concept of semiocide, which, in general terms, explains the process of elimination, voluntary or not, of the meaning possibilities of an agent by reducing the spectrum of signs that it can enact, thus making unlivable the environment of that agent (Puura, 2013).

Furthermore, the problem we address here is twofold: on the one hand, human discourses and cultural practices are ecological in the sense that, depending on how humans make sense of nature, they actually transform and reshape the environment, as we will see with the impact of animalista, narco-cultural, and conservacionista discourses in the measures taken to control hippos population growth; on the other, hippos in Colombia make part of a complex cultural phenomenon, and their representations have particular iconographies, intertextual relations, and mediatic images. Such phenomena encompasses multiple visions of nature that intertwine moral philosophies, technocratic assessments, economic factors, and national imaginations.

Following these ideas, first, we will present the social and ecological context around the case of the hippos in Colombia; second, we will summarize the visions of nature theory and how such visions impact on conservation measures regarding so-called invasive species; third, we will describe the most salient discourses and visions of nature of the human stakeholders and public opinion in the hippos case: animalista, narco-cultural, and conservacionista; fourth, we will present a computational analysis of discourse dynamics and controversies in Twitter between the different visions of nature around the case; and fifth, we will reflect on possible courses of action and recommendations about addressing the close interrelation of public discourses and ecosystem conservation.

This article follows a mixed methods approach that has been developed iteratively: to characterize the visions of nature described in the following sections, we have conducted a close reading discourse analysis by consulting historical, artistic and journalistic sources, but also developed computational quantitative analysis of user publications in Twitter as an empirical account of these discourses. Thus, although presented linearly, the visions of nature introduced in Sect. 3 informed the search strategies and readings of the Twitter data analysis in Sect. 4, and, at the same time, the results of the computational analysis helped to define a more refined categorization of the discourses and visions of nature described before. In this line, this article is data-assisted, in contrast to data-driven, as it intends to: “enable alternative readings via a computational defamiliarization strategy” (Escobar Varela, 2021, p. 9). In other words, the use of computers and algorithms allowed us to view discourse in different ways and scales, to transform perspectives of the phenomena under analysis, and to produce a new paratext (Ramsay, 2011), that is, additional contextual information that complemented and enriched other sources of our analysis.

The Introduction of Hippos in Colombia and its Consequences

In the 1980s, multiple non-native species were introduced in Colombia by drug trafficker Pablo Escobar in his attempt to build an ostentatious zoo in his ranch Hacienda Nápoles, in the outskirts of the town of Doradal. Among these species, Escobar brought four hippos from a zoo in the United States. After Escobar's death in 1993, many animals, hippos included, were left unattended in the ranch. At the time, because the Colombian government, and specifically the National Drug Enforcement Agency, did not have the economic and administrative means to maintain the animals, they were put in custody of the local environmental authority, CORNARE. The animals remained unmanaged for a long period of time and, consequently, the initial population of four began to grow inside an area of around 2,000 square kilometers and reached estimated numbers between 40 and 60 in 2017 (Subalusky et al., 2021), and numbers between 93 and 102 in 2022 (Castelblanco-Martínez et al., 2021).

The development of their fast and exponential growth is associated with special environmental conditions they found in the middle Magdalena River basin, where they do not face deaths caused by predators or diseases and are protected by some human communities. Such fast growing constraints and limits technical management of the species. Until now, population control measures like sterilization, capture, and relocation are implemented by CORNARE, but are expensive and dangerous activities to field teams, and are implemented in a delayed manner, ultimately ineffective to control the population (Subalusky et al., 2023). In this scenario, the consequences for the local ecosystems are 1) threats to specific species of flora and fauna, for instance, manatees; 2) changes to lakes and waterways, including biochemical changes like shifts in oxygenation levels; 3) potential spread of diseases caused by viruses; and 4) adverse impacts on people’s livelihoods such as fishing, farming, and livestock production with high risk of human injury and fatalities (Castelblanco-Martínez et al., 2021; Shurin et al., 2020; Subalusky et al., 2021). There is current evidence of ecological damage around the pools and wetlands outside of Nápoles (Shurin et al., 2020), as well as accounts of hippo attacks on people and property damages. For instance, in May 2020 a farmer was seriously injured, in December 2022 a man got injured after hitting a hippo with his motorbike, and in April 2023 a hippo was hit by a vehicle and died.

As one of the world’s “megadiverse countries” (UNEP-WCMC, 2016), Colombia exhibits great biodiversity and a high number of unique species. For the tradition of conservation biology, an invasive alien species is “an organism introduced —intentionally or not— into an area outside of its natural distribution range, then establishing a population and spreading autonomously, and often representing perilous repercussions for the invaded ecosystem” (Castelblanco-Martínez, 2021; Simberloff, 2010). As Magnus and Remm argue (2018), “[i]n the ecological paradigm, the designation of certain species as alien in contrast with native species reflects a concern about the effect those species might have on ecosystems” (p. 320). Thus, from a conservation point of view, and for the challenge of maintaining Colombian biodiversity, as well as the goods and services derived from its unique variety of species, eradication of invasive species is a valid strategy. This eradication strategy has been supported by researchers in the country as well as by peers around the world, especially those who are linked to the International Union for Nature Conservation (IUCN). The problem is so critical that the IUCN urged the national Environment Ministry to implement population control as a measure to deal with hippos (Alves da Rosa et al., 2020; Jiménez et al., 2019). However, actual measures do not depend entirely on conservationists' will, but on the way society relates with nature and how this affects productive and environmental policies. This became evident in the multiple roadblocks Colombian institutions have encountered due to public opinion backlash against the eradication of hippos. Animal rights activists and conservation biologists have been involved in a discursive controversy about measures to control hippos in public media and social networks, and the discussion has created multiple difficulties for the actual application of conservation measurements. Policy decisions regarding management of alien invasive species can in practice be difficult and expensive to implement, and depend strongly on the values people express in their relationship with nature (Claus et al., 2010). The moral postures, emotions, ideological attitudes, and other forms of sense making are key elements in conservation strategies (Brechin et al., 2002; Claus et al., 2010). Thus, peoples' perceptions must be taken into account for better decisions about the best ways to deal with the management measures.

The Theory of Visions of Nature and its Impact on Conservation

From an ecosemiotic lens, the concept of semiocide (Puura, 2013) is useful to understand, on the one hand, the problem of hippos from an alternative point of view to the concept of invasive species, and, on the other, the visions of nature of human stakeholders and its impact on policies and the actual environment. As Maran (2020) affirms “[s]emiocide can take place in a situation in which one’s own semiotic sphere is actively aggressive towards the other semiotic sphere and brings along the destruction of the latter’s “signs and stories” (p. 146). This concept is applicable to hippos, as a species that aggressively hoards space and changes ecological dynamics: “destruction of the land or even changes in the habitat can prove fatal for its inhabitants, as the established semiotic connections become severed alongside the destruction on the material plane.” (Uslu, 2020, p. 241), but is also applicable to humans and their own visions of nature, which can also take the form of polarizing discourses that tend to cut pathways of communication and thus eliminate spaces for agreement and for solving urgent problems.

A vision of nature, a concept originally proposed by van den Born et al. (2001), is the cognitive frame under which a social group makes sense of and enacts with nature. That is, a semiotic construction that influences our attitudes and behavior towards the environment. A vision of nature is usually structured by the conceptions people have about:

  1. 1

    values of nature, or why people consider nature is important (whether instrumentally or intrinsically);

  2. 2

    images of nature, or the notions that people have about what is nature and what they know about it; and

  3. 3

    images of relationship, or how people think humankind should relate to nature.

Verbrugge et al. (2013) have studied how, according to their visions of nature, different groups of people accept or reject specific conservation measures used to manage so-called alien invasive species: “environmental attitudes can be used as indicators of support for non-native species management. For example, the belief that all living things have a right to coexist appears to result in a preference for hands-off management, while people who feel that some degree of intervention in nature is necessary were more supportive of no-site management and eradication of non-native species” (p. 1563). A study by Miralles et al. (2019) showed that people feel more empathy —the belief in understanding feelings or emotions of others— and compassion —a drive to spare the life of the organism as a priority— towards species to which they can project anthropomorphic qualities and are more closely related phylogenetically. This is important in regard to the preference of certain conservation measures for particular species, say, extraction or sterilization instead of culling, as we have seen in the case of hippos.

Human discourses in the public sphere, informed by different visions of nature, affect the decisions that institutions make about ecological policies and how conservation measurements are conceived and applied. This circumstance has been used positively in conservation efforts, for example, in the designation of flagship species that are used as representatives, or ambassadors for a habitat or environmental cause (Simberloff, 1998), but also has been a source of social conflict in the management of invasive species. For instance, in a study about the perceptions of people about wall lizards in the UK, Williams et al. (2019) defined three types of discursive postures regarding this species and their management: “Innocent until proven guilty” defending the need to get more information about the lizards before making and assessment about their harm, “Precautionary, informed concern”, which viewed lizards as a definite ecologic threat, and “The more the merrier”, which implied strong positive feelings about the lizards and a belief of them being harmless. These authors concluded that “the analysis flags early signs that opposing views between a subset of the public opinion and decision-makers has potential to present obstacles should management of the species ever be justifiable and practical” (p. 163). From a general perspective, Estévez et al. (2015) showed in a classification of 124 articles related to conservation and invasive species that sources of conflict were connected with various values of nature: “Aesthetic: physical attraction and appeal of nature; Dominionistic: mastery and control over nature; Naturalistic: emotional, spiritual or symbolic affection of nature; Negativistic: fear or aversion toward nature; Scientific: systematic and empirical study of nature; Utilitarian: practical value or material benefit of nature” (p.22). These examples and difficulties show a double problem for conservation: first, a need for helping non-expert people understand the ecological implications of introducing non-native species into an environment, and also a need for biologists to understand the visions of nature of such people in order to enter in fruitful dialog instead of opposition and conflict. In a way, such conflict is also an ecological effect derived from miscommunication and lack of intent of semiotically putting oneself in the perspective of other people concerned about ecology.

In the particular case that this article explores, while the numbers of hippos in Colombia may yet be manageable, an exploding population is sure to drastically affect the environment and pose a danger to local residents in the future. To prevent such future dangers, it is important to elaborate a general understanding of the visions of nature around the case. As a precursor of the work presented in this paper, in a survey conducted in 2017 by a group of researchers from the universities Javeriana and Florida International, two groups of human communities were identified in terms of their value relationships with hippos in the Magdalena watershed. One group of people who economically benefit from hippos and think the animals are a good, gentle, and quiet species; and other group, composed especially of farmers and fishermen, that lives in fear of their unpredictable and dangerous neighbor, and see the expanding hippo population as a potential threat to their livelihoods, activities, and safety. The latter group claims for measures to reduce possible ecological and socio-economic conflicts (Jiménez et al., 2019; Subalusky et al., 2021).

Discourses and Visions of Nature Related to Hippos in Colombia

Timo Maran argues that “nature is essentially important for the culture due to nature’s otherness, strangeness, hiddenness, and partial inconceivability” (2020, p. 35), such otherness derives in a myriad of iconographies, literatures, arts, moral and political positions, and insights about the conception of the human and the conception of what nature is. These rich cultural and social productions inform how societies will form their own visions of nature. For understanding the impact that our conceptions of nature have on our relations with other living beings, and also the place of culture in the whole semiosphere, we can take a biosemiotic approach that, like Wheeler and Westling (2015) defend, “can provide a way into an interdisciplinary engagement with the sciences that unites literature, and philosophy with the communications and agencies and activities —including cultural behaviors— of other organisms” (p. 216). Here we will point towards that interdisciplinary goal. The case of hippos has been interpreted by different social groups with particular points of view and interests. Making them explicit can help us to understand how visions of nature have been represented in public opinion and have had an impact on conservation measurements for controlling them:

Animalista Vision. The Animal as Sentient Individual

The first important cultural locus is animal rights activism, or animalismo,Footnote 2 which in Colombia has come a long way in the last four decades. What started as a disperse movement focused on consumption practices —like veganism and vegetarianism— and collective organized action —like manifestations in places where animal suffering is caused, or voluntary work in beneficiary institutions like adoption shelters— has steadily permeated policies in State institutions. In their own words, in recent years animal rights activism has taken a ‘judicial turn’ (Padilla Villarraga, 2015) and has become ‘pragmatic activism’ (Salazar, 2019). That is, it has focused on changing laws in Colombia in order to protect animals from suffering, resulting in multiple laws and Constitutional Court rulings: “animal activists from this movement focus on the incidence in public policy, using different management strategies with public and private actors in order to obtain concrete results”Footnote 3 (Salazar, 2019, p. 70). In this line, there have been multiple advances in Colombia concerning animal rights protection. Most saliently, Law 84 of 1989, Court Ruling C-666 of 2010, and Law 1774 of 2016 (for an exhaustive analysis of animal rights laws in Colombia see (Cárdenas & Fajardo, 2007)). In more concrete terms, these animal rights struggles have seen diverse and paradoxical wins and losses, like the relative successes in regulating the substitution of blood traction vehicles in cities (Estrada-Cely & Pinto-Díaz, 2018), or the failed attempts in passing laws that forbid cruel traditional practices like bullfighting (Vega, 2018), in spite of the contradictory general prohibition of animal mistreatment. There have been also attempts to declare legal personhood on animals in Colombia, like the case of a bear nicknamed Chucho, which was dismissed by the Colombian Constitutional Court. Also, in 2021 misleading announcements circulated in news and animal rights activism websites about, supposedly, a Federal Court in the United States recognizing hippos in Colombia as legal persons (see Wise, 2021). Ideologically, animal rights activism in Colombia has been strongly influenced by various moral philosophies, but most saliently, utilitarianism à la Peter Singer’s classic book Animal Liberation (2009), in which “the only important moral criteria could be the capability to experiment pleasure and pain” (Vesga Gaviria, 1998, p. 153). In consequence, for the animalistas, sentient beings are subjects of rights, and the non-recognition and active oppression of non-human animals is a form of discrimination they call speciesism. Although animal rights activism originated in urban areas and has focused its activities mostly on problems related to pets and animals used in spectacles, the issue with hippos has become one of their recent causes. Consistent with their beliefs, animalistas have opposed the practice of culling for their control, preferring other strategies like sterilization. However, their point of view, focused on individual sentient beings instead of the population scale of the ecosystem, has prevented them from seeing the bigger picture of the issue and its ecological impact in the longer term. Importantly, as we saw, hippos are causing a disequilibrium in the ecosystem and causing possibly irreparable effects for other organisms, including humans.

As an important example of the preoccupation related to hippos as subjects who suffer, here it is worth revisiting one important stamp of the Colombian hippos iconography: it was particularly shocking for public opinion the image, published in 2009, of soldiers posing behind the corpse of PepeFootnote 4 the hippo after it was messily hunted, because it resembled a very similar and iconic image of policemen and DEA agents posing behind Pablo Escobar´s body after he was shot and killed during a rooftop persecution in 1993. After the 2009 picture, and the inadequate management of the situation, public backlash promoted by animalistas made local politicians stop the plans for culling hippos in order to avoid further polemics (Figs. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

An iconographic relationship. The picture of soldiers posing in front of Pepe the Hippo elicited collective memories of a famous picture of Pablo Escobar’s death and produced a public opinion backlash

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Additionally, animalistas arguments are related to a new field of intellectual development called compassionate conservation, which is part of a current debate in conservation science (Coghlan & Cardilini, 2022). Compassionate conservation implies respecting the rights of animals, seen as individual sentient beings, and trying to ensure that management actions do not affect the health and well-being of these animals. For some authors, this approach is compatible with traditional conservation practices (Bobier & Allen, 2022), and for others it ends up being more harmful than beneficial (Griffin et al., 2020). Mainly, the discussion revolves around the focus on individuals in compassionate conservation, rather than a systemic view —for example, an examination of the profound implications of invasive species on ecological systems— but also on the overemphasis of traditional conservation on pragmatic results at the expense of harming particular species.

Narco-Cultural Vision. Nature Domination and Ostentation

The second cultural locus is what we could call the Colombian narco-cultural and narco-aesthetics. Built upon the stories of drug traffickers, or, in the local jargon, traquetos like Pablo Escobar and others, Colombia has produced since the late seventies a cultural explosion of increasingly sophisticated books, films, soap operas, music and other popular representations related to mafias and their particular aesthetics. Internationally, a somewhat similar cult of money and crime has developed in parallel, creating an exoticizing vision of Colombian culture. For the mass media critic Omar Rincón, narco-aesthetics are “made of exaggeration, are formed by the big, noisy, and strident; it is an aesthetics of objects and architecture; scapular and virgin; music at maximum volume at all times; silver narco-Toyota; money exhibitionism” (Rincón, 2009, p. 151). One particular iconographic feature of narco-aesthetics is a pretension of overachievement built over “tinsel and mock” (Solano Cohen, 2016, p. 200), a drive to demonstrate the overcoming of social class limitations, manifested in a Kitsch imitation of bourgeois and aristocratic paraphernalia, but reinterpreted by the flavor and style of the popular classes of the tropics. Hacienda Nápoles, Pablo Escobar’s ranch that hosted the zoo, and the place where the original hippos landed, is one of such mixtures of simulated, exotic ostentation. The pictures of Escobar riding an elephant, or adding extravagant paraphernalia to the ranch, like an airplane originally used for drug smuggling displayed in the entrance, show an understanding of nature as a resource to be dominated or to get profit from.

Iconically, a hippo called Vanessa is one of the attractions of Hacienda NápolesFootnote 5 in the present, now a theme park, and in the place an enormous pink statue is erected in her honor (Fig. 2). In the words of Naef (2018) it is a place of narco-heritage. Namely, “objects, sites, and practices embodying and representing the illegal production, as well as consumption, of narcotics” (p. 486). Naef argues that narco-culture has become touristified, and has taken the shape of an exotic and somewhat grotesque attraction for visitors: “tourism entrepreneurs tend to cash in on events, practices, objects, and sites that detach the tourist from their own everyday life. Drug trafficking—already well covered by popular culture and diffused in Western tourists’ imaginaries—can thus represent a certain source of estrangement for them” (Naef, 2018, p. 490). It is a paradox, however, that Vanessa’s color is maybe the product of genetic degradation derived from endogamy.

Fig. 2
figure 2

Vanessa, the pink hippo, who got her color maybe due to genetic endogamy problems, is the official mascot of the current, renovated Hacienda Nápoles. This picture represents a sculpture of Vanessa. Photo courtesy of Nicolás Urbina

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Addionally, traquetos have been ambivalently portrayed in popular culture as both, and simultaneously, villains and heroes. A romanticization of the acquisition of money and prestige by means of violence is one of the profound layers of the sixty years long Colombian armed conflict. For Rincón, “if narco-culture legitimates a particular way of inhabiting the market society, if its symbolic and ritual logic certifies that the real sin is having no money […] then narco stuff is not a problem, but a patriotic pride and the best alternative for success for those who have been expulsed from the kingdom of capitalism, from the landscape of opportunities and the welfare state” (Rincón, 2013, p. 5).

Conservacionista Vision. Scientific Stewards of Diversity

The third cultural locus is the representation of Colombia as a place of extraordinary biodiversity, and thus a critical environment for the conservation of species and environments. We will call this discourse conservacionista. Indeed, as was mentioned before, Colombia is recognized as a megadiverse country, and, historically, the rich flora and fauna present in Colombia has been an important part of its national identity. For instance, Mutis and Pettinaroli (2016) have identified multiple hints of visions of nature in the literature and scientific writings about Colombia from the colonial period to the nineteenth century: the mixed sense of amusement, discovery and will to control in Crónicas de Indias (diaries written by colonizers like military or priests in their travels through the Americas) —like El Orinoco Ilustrado by Joseph Gumilla—, the scientific endeavors of categorizing the species of the new world in order to assess their economic value for the colonial power —like the Botanical Expedition of José Celestino Mutis— or the will to understand the complex geographic, agricultural and climatic conditions of the newly liberated country by independentists like Francisco José de Caldas —nicknamed el sabio, or “the wise man”. All these sources represent a mixture of scientific interest in classifying and establishing theories about Colombian nature, a legitimate preoccupation for conserving diversity, but also a pragmatic interest in controlling the State resources and making the best use of them (See Fig. 3). These are the scaffoldings for the vision of nature found in current scientific experts in the country. In a sense, the naturalist tradition has developed the belief in scientists as the proper stewards of the ecosystem, the technocrats with the adequate knowledge, and, thus, the people in charge of defining the standards and accepted policies for conserving the natural richness of the country. Although, in practice, such policies are subject to many political roadblocks.

Fig. 3
figure 3

Iconographic examples of national representations of biodiversity. From left to right: Amerika, by Adriaen Collaert, after Maerten de Vos, Circa 1586; Thaliana Vargas, Colombian Miss Universe beauty queen of 2008; and a painting depicting José Celestino Mutis, the director of the Botanical Expedition that took place in Colombia in 1783

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Iconographically, we could point to the fact that the main institution of biodiversity research and decision making in Colombia is called the Alexander von Humboldt institute. In fact, the German naturalist von Humboldt visited Colombia in 1799 and produced an influential travel diary with multiple descriptions of the, for him, exotic nature and culture of the country. For Mutis & Pettinaroli “Humboldt’s Romantic approach to nature and his holistic way of envisioning it would enjoy enormous popularity in the foundational literature of Colombia throughout the later nineteenth century. That literature would inherit from the scientific expeditions an interest in depicting the region’s natural specificity and would exploit its capacity to exalt patriotic fervor.” (2016, p. 418).

Additionally, the present branch of conservation biology practiced in Colombia has its roots in a western tradition that was established in the US in the beginning of twentieth century. Its conceptual basis claims the necessity to preserve biodiversity as a reaction to the threats it faces. For this branch, there are moral and ethical principles that guide conservation actions that get structured from a combination of social, political, economic, biological, and ecological consideration, and with the premise of an articulation between them. In its ideal, conservation biology is an interdisciplinary field which was born to confront a crisis created by human actions over biodiversity, with the intent to reach solutions with the human communities’ involvement (Meine, 2010). However, as Büscher (2021) affirms, we must not forget that “environmental conservation is also an industry or “sector” with dominant actors, particular cultures, narratives, networks, meeting spaces, politics and so forth” (42).

In summary, Table 1 shows the visions of nature derived from the discourses that surround the case of hippos in Colombia:

Table 1 A classification of visions of nature of animalista, narco-cultural and conservacionista discourses
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Visions of Nature and Hippos in the Virtual Semiosphere

In internet social networks, discussions about nature, and about what to do in particular ecosystems, pressure against or support institutional decisions that have impact in the actual ecosystem. Thus, we could assert that discussions in social networks are indeed ecological factors in the sense that they affect ecological systems by means of human discourse and public discussion. As Timo Maran affirms: “[n]ature is semiotically open to culture and has always been so” (2020, p. 14). The concept of visions of nature examined before is particularly important here as many discussions in social networks may occur from a distance from the actual ecosystem in question. In other words, positions about how to manage an ecosystem become mediatized. In social networks, one could show an opinion about a place one has never visited, and still have an impact on it by pressuring State institutions or communities. In this line, we agree with Timothy Morton’s reflection on the effects of globalization and taking a critical approach to global ecological relations: “[g]lobalization compels us to rethink the idea of place, not in order to discard it, but indeed to strengthen it, and to begin to use it properly in a yet more thorough critique of the world that brought about mass hunger, monocultures, nuclear radiation, global warming, mass extinction, pollution and any number of harmful ecological phenomena” (Morton, 2008, p. 180). In the case of hippos in Colombia, discussions coming from different visions of nature occurring in traditional media and social networks have had an impact on the policies and conservation measurements that have been taken throughout the years since the species first arrived in the 1980s: changing national laws, stopping the practices of culling, reducing budgets for conservation, touristifying the environment, etc.

As was mentioned in the introduction, this article was constructed by an iterative process. On the one hand, by a revision of the literature and the context related to the three discourses and visions of nature described in the previous section, and, on the other hand, by a computational analysis of Twitter networks of users that have tweeted about the case of hippos in Colombia. As Nguyen et al. (2020) assert “[c]omputational text analysis is not a replacement for but rather an addition to the approaches one can take to analyze social and cultural phenomena using textual data” (7). This section describes the methods and results of such computational analysis, and proposes a controversy mapping of the visions of nature around hippos management: “controversy analysis as a digital method involves the use of computational techniques to detect, analyze, and visualize public contestation over topical affairs” (Marres, 2015, p. 657). We base our analysis on the digital methods approach, which consists in reading natively digital data in internet social networks as traces that open a window of interpretation for understanding social phenomena (Rogers, 2019).

The Methods for Twitter Controversy Analysis

We created a Python script for accessing the Twitter API V.2.0 —with authorized credentials from an academic research account— to collect tweets and metadata related to our research topic. We created a dataset of historical tweets in the time range between January 1st 2007 and March 27 2023. For our search strategy, we constructed a query based on a set of representative words and hashtags related to the discussion around hippos in Colombia.Footnote 6 The query contains the words in Spanish, Portuguese, and English for hippo and a set of other words connected to the visions of nature we described before.Footnote 7 We obtained a total of 111,167 tweets and other metadata.Footnote 8 Figure 4 shows a zoom of the timeline. Notably, most of the tweets were published in different waves of interest and public attention. The most salient one is the publication of a viral thread about the hippos by a Brazilian influencer in June 2018. Other waves are related to news about different milestones or special moments in the development of the hippos’ case: intents in culling or sterilizing the animals (like the case of Pepe), news of animals attacking people in towns, journalistic pieces talking about the case, changes in legislation concerning animal rights, official statements of conservation institutions, etc.

Fig. 4
figure 4

Zoom of the range between 01/01/2018 and 27/03/2023 of the waves of public discussion of the hippos in Colombia case in Twitter according to our dataset (We could not find a clear explanation regarding the peak of publications on march 19.)

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With this data, we then conducted a computational textual analysis of the tweets by using a vector semantics approach, that is, creating a numerical representation of the contexts of words in our dataset: “vector semantics highlights the relational, continuous structure of the lexical field, wherein meaning is negotiated across innumerable lines of similarity and difference” (Gavin et al., 2019, p. 256). For reducing the complexity of our dataset, we preprocessed the tweets and obtained lemmatized versions of the nouns, adjectives, and verbs used in all of the tweets using the python library SpaCy (with the es_core_news_md pipeline). A lemma is a standardized, non-inflected version of a word. Then we used the python library Gensim to vectorize the lemmas using the Word2Vec algorithm in its skip-gram model version. This algorithm creates a vector for each one of the lemmas in the dataset, a multidimensional space representation based on a neural network that positions closely all the words that appear in similar contexts (Word2vec in the skip-gram version takes the latent space, that is, the set of weights in the network, that was trained to predict the most likely neighbors of a word in the defined window). In this case, after different trials, we found meaningful results with a vector size of 320 and a window of 3. After that, we tried to find groups of discourses by classifying the lemmas using the sklearn library implementation of the unsupervised learning K-means clustering algorithm; we used this method to obtain a total of 20 clusters (Annex 1 of this paper contains the clustering). K-means is an algorithm that finds groups in a dataset by defining a set of k centroids, first randomly selected, and subsequently updated by finding the means of all the closest data points to those centroids, and then classifying all data points by their closeness to such centroids. With this data, we reduced the vectors dimensionality, now each vector composed of only two numbers, using the Principal Component Analysis method implemented in sklearn’s T-SNE function, and created a visualization of the words’ relationships using the spatial metaphors provided by the vectors (we include the visualization in high resolution in the Annex 3 of this paper). We manually reviewed these automatic clusters and reduced them to categories related to the visions of nature we were working on: animalista, narco-cultural, and conservacionista. However, an examination of the words contexts and the vectors showed that the words related to the narco-cultural discourse could be divided further: there were different narco-cultural subreadings derived from our initial category: particularly local and international versions of narco-culture. Thus, to represent those nuances, we reclassified the 20 vectors into 7 final vectors, and colored the words in our visualization accordingly: animalismo, consrvacionismo, narco culture (in general), narco culture using words in English, narco culture using words in Portuguese, Narco culture from the local context, and Narco cultural reading of Colombian politics (we include the coding categories used in the Annex 2).

An Interpretation of the Controversy

We can use the information, or paratext, we obtained from the word embeddings to update and refine our characterization of the visions of nature we presented before. For instance, the cluster of words related to conservacionistas shows an abundance of technical words related to the study of populations; endemic and alien species; the concepts of endangerement, restoration and extinction; or mentions to the ecosystem, biodiversity, and risks associated to hippos like biochemical changes in soil composition, competition for food resources, and zoonosis. This is consistent with the scientific preoccupation of conservation biologists with understanding the ecological problem of the hippos and proposing scientific solutions to it. It is worth noticing that a big part of conservacionista discourse on Twitter is related to the impact of hippos in the environment of another species: manatees. This is meaningful because it points at how the hippos are involved in a process of semiocide by changing the soil composition and, in effect, making the environment of manatees unlivable. On the other hand, animalista discourse is mostly related to the understanding of hippos as sentient individuals. In the tweets under this group there are salient mentions to saving and rescuing hippos because they are conceptualized as innocent, defenseless, or beautiful; a call to find alternatives to culling, like sterilization, building animal sanctuaries or sending the animals to zoos in other countries (although these strategies have proved to be impractical and even dangerous); and content related to the animalista ideology as a whole, like mentions to vegetarianism and veganism, or references to the legal impact of declaring hippos as legal persons, in accordance with the pragmatic agenda of animalistas. On the exoticizing discourse of narco-cultural there is an abundance of laughs in Spanish (jajajaja) and portuguese (kkkkkk), curse words, comparisons of Pablo Escobar and the Hippos with current local politicians, but also words connected to the journalistic description of the events: a background of the hippos in the context of Pablo Escobar and his zoo, a general overview of the problem, a narrative account of the intents of sterilizing or controlling the population. One interesting reading from the computational analysis is that local narco-cultural discourse is ambivalent between a shameful recognition of the pernicious impact drug trafficking has had in the country and an ironic approach to narco-aesthetics, while, on the international side, there is a more detached, derisive attitude.

Additionally, this computational analysis offered additional information that introduced new nuances relating to the dynamics of public discussion between these discourses. First, the word embeddings show that there is an aggressive exchange between animalistas and conservacionistas, and journalistic media amplify it in a way that increases polarization. Some in the former group frame the conservation measurements of culling as murder and killing of innocent living beings, and characterize biologists as cold and indifferent to pain, and some in the latter group call the animalistas ‘’mascotistas”, or, roughly translated, pet-ists, in a pejorative way that ridicules their cause, and frames them as ignorant and stupid.

To explore further this controversy, we created a mentions network using the software Gephi to display which users mention others in the controversy around the hippos. We classified users according to their discourse with a simple voting system derived from the embeddings. Namely, each user got labeled with the category most recurrent in the words the user used in their tweets. In general, the topology of the network shows that the narco-cultural discourse is dispersed and occurs in many subgroups that have sporadic interest around the topic. On the other hand, the discussion between animalistas and conservacionistas shows a much denser subnetwork that is representative of the controversy. Figure 5 shows a subnetwork obtained with the Giant Component filter in Gephi (for better viewing, in the Annex 4 of this paper we include a high resolution image). This subnetwork evidences the mentions and interactions between animalistas, conservacionistas and one fraction of the narco-cultural group, particularly, a group based on discussions coming from local journalistic accounts. In the subnetwork, some of the actors are important animal rights activism politicians, with power to change laws in the country, and important scholars in the field of biology, with authority to publish studies about the case. This subnetwork shows a close interrelation and communication between actors, but also a closer relationship between animalistas and the general public by links connected to newspapers and newscasts. Conservacionistas have a more closed circle of nodes, but such circle is strongly connected to State institutions working on conservation of national ecosystems and universities. These particular network dynamics show that there are communication paths between people from different discourses and visions of nature, mostly occupied by controversy, but, as we will propose in the following section, this is an opportunity for a change in conceptualization that, in the end, can benefit conservation measures.

Fig. 5
figure 5

Giant component mentions subnetwork of Twitter users in the dataset classified by their predominant clusters. Blue: animalistas, orange: conservacionistas, green: narco-cultural (general), purple: connected fraction of narco-cultural (portuguese), brown: narco-cultural (Spanish)

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Final Remarks. An Ecosemiotic Proposal for Dialogue

Relationships with nature are based on systems of values that human beings create based on their beliefs and the search for a satisfaction of their needs. We are oriented by spiritual, aesthetic, and moral attitudes toward nature, but we also establish dependent relationships in which we see nature as a provider of goods and services, and sometimes as a subject for domination. These points of view are, implicitly or explicitly, always present in our discussions and considerations about conservation; human communities have a plethora of values that are key elements in conservation and management strategies (Brechin et al., 2002; Claus et al., 2010). Understanding that discursive diversity in the context of biological diversity can be useful to create an approach on conservation that relates visions of nature with technical expertise.

Our analysis shows that the three discourses and visions of nature around the case of hippos in Colombia have, at the same time, notorious differences and common affinities. Each one of the discourses overlaps the others and represents contradictions derived from the complexities of the social and ecological context they are involved in. Most saliently, there has been a controversy fueled by ideological differences between animalistas, who center their work and ethics on preventing the suffering of animal subjects, and conservacionistas, who center theirs on an understanding of ecology from the perspective of populations and ecosystems. Such differences have degenerated in a polarized public conflict, as the Twitter dynamics show, and, subsequently, this has resulted in aggressive clashes that undermine adequate legal policies and conservation measures. The narco-cultural discourse adds an exoticizing reading of the case that makes it even more complicated, as it amplifies the problem in public opinion, but also fogs the real ecological issue with sensationalist, derisive readings of the situation. This kind of public opinion dynamics through social media, following Büscher (2021), can be seen as the contradiction of two different tensions: “mediation as a truthful reflection of nature and mediation as entertainment or spectacle” (43). Hippos in Colombia are seen though different and conflicting lenses, in a digital natureglut (Büscher, 2021), or excess of representation, that, instead of enhancing understanding, obscures.

A recommendation derived from this study is that an honest revision of all discourses, common agendas, and new framings of understanding should be promoted. One possible approach that could be considered by stakeholders in the hippos caseFootnote 9 is to change the frame of reference from the notion of invasive species, which connotes some negative and misleading concepts —ideas of illegal migration, a xenophobic tone, a sense of evil assigned to unaware animals— to a language that focuses more on an understanding of the environment as a holistic system, or to think of new, more productive metaphors (Keulartz & van der Weele, 2009). As Magnus and Remm (2018) warn “[a]lthough potentially resulting in a positive outcome for the ecological alien species paradigm, attaching an ecological paradigm to a political one may turn the ecological meaning into an easy target for political manipulation” (335). Ultimately, both animalistas and conservacionistas have the same purpose: the protection of animals and nature, but on different temporal, spatial scales, and different units of evaluation (individuals vs. populations) (Bobier & Allen, 2022). Unfortunately, the antagonistic way the discussion has developed has prevented them from recognizing commonalities instead of escalating conflict. As Taylor points out: “[t]hese tensions can be resolved by recognizing the ways in which moral and technocratic visions of politics are allied, and remain popular, especially in global environmental discourse” (1997, p. 241). Such a language change could be an adequate step towards that direction. The biosemiotic notion of semiocide can be a useful framework to this new language use. If we understand the case as semiocide, we can change the focus from hippos as main characters in the story, to the holistic view of the semiosphere as a space occupied by multiple organisms, each one in need of its particular space, resources, and pathways of communication for survival and wellbeing.

Additionally, in order to promote a beneficial negotiation of adequate conservation practices, that benefits local fauna and human communities, a false sense of superiority should be avoided by any stakeholder, be it ethical or cognitive superiority. In ecosemiotic and cybernetic fashion (e.g. Bateson, 2000), we should be conscious of ourselves as participants in the semio-eco-system and not only as external controllers, stewards, or observers. The research line presented in this paper aligns with a Political Ecology of Responsibility, in the sense of (Komi & Nygren, 2023). That is, recognizing agency in other organisms, but also recognizing the role and power of humans over the lives of non-humans. Scientific discourses can fall into technocratic postures that fail to acknowledge the cultural and moral issues at play by assuming a supra-rationality that can deteriorate into self-indulgence. Likewise, animal rights activism should also be informed by research on the complex dynamics of ecosystems and the big picture of populations and interspecies relations. This exercise in dialogue can be seen in itself as an ecological approach of translation, in the sense of making our points of view accessible to the umwelts and visions of nature of others by creating accessible sign systems (Kull & Torop, 2011), and also being open to see the environment from alternative visions of nature. Creating accessible sign systems necessarily requires seeing the other as an interlocutor, and, in difference, trying to find common agendas, viable resolutions and overlapping pathways of communication.