How do you make people feel empathy for fish? To be more accurate, with the rare fish which existed for millions of years, outlived dinosaurs, could live to be a hundred years old, and might go extinct because of humanity? Well, I don't know what you thought, but we thought "why don't we make sturgeons like people?". We imagined the world where the sturgeon is an influencer and tells their story through social media, such as Facebook posts, Instagram stories, and Esquire-like interviews. Nothing demonstrates the possible extinction of sturgeons better than a screenshot from sturgeon's Tinder, where there is no match for the fish within many miles.
Such personifications work well when you are to overcome the indifference of readers. By telling a story of a protagonist, we help to think of his species not as of something vague and far from understanding, but as of something clear and relatable.
Apart from the fun part, we also asked an expert about how and where the sturgeons live in Ukraine, what they eat, why they go extinct and what we can do to help save this ancient species. By doing all that, we managed to show the important information, which is usually ignored, in a fun and attractive way.
To heighten the interest to that topic, we even made a movie trailer for this article in
a horror style (↗). That sounds strange only before you realize that it is not the trailer but the extinction of the species that really scares.