I was scrolling through Instagram when I saw it: a white fuzz ball of a baby seal, snuggling in a snowdrift. I stared dopily into its clear black eyes, squealed at the screen and tapped the cartoon heart beneath the photo. You better believe I liked it.
Then I read the caption.
![Wildlife photographer Paul Nicklen is using Instagram clickbait to promote awareness of climate change. This newborn ...](/web/20160921214833im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/h/k/w/4/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grh97z.png/1473982956242.jpg)
"A newborn harp seal hides behind a piece of sea ice and seeks shelter during a blizzard," it said. Aww. It went on: "With human-induced climate and the loss of sea ice, harp seals are losing their birthing grounds."Oh.
"In 2007," it added, "more than 70 per cent of the pups died due to poor ice conditions. In 2010, almost none survived. As I type this, baby harp seals are struggling to survive yet another terrible ice year near the Magdalen Islands." Oh, God.
![The 18-month-old seal was given antibiotics and fluids and fed a diet of fresh fish.](/web/20160921214833im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/p/u/k/c/5/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grh97z.png/1473982956242.jpg)
I came to Instagram to get a quick baby animal fix and left with a horrifying message about how climate change could wipe this pup from the face of the planet, and all of its little friends, too.
Paul Nicklen, the wildlife photographer who took the image, knows what he's doing. "I hang a cute animal picture out there like bait and reel them in," he told me.
I'm hooked. Intellectually, I understand that climate change is one of the most important issues facing our planet. But practically, I ignore it. The problem feels too big, and the science too boring. I've never found a convenient time to watch An Inconvenient Truth. I haven't paged through a copy of National Geographic in my adult life. I'm part of the problem.
But now a crew of wildlife photographers and conservationists has found a way to reach me through one of social media's shallowest pleasures: ogling marine mammals on Instagram.
![Adelie penguin numbers have increased across east Antarctica, research shows.](/web/20160921214833im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/m/s/r/w/m/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grh97z.png/1473982956242.jpg)
"Climate change is so huge, so uncomfortable, and so overwhelming, it's hard to talk about it," Nicklen said. "And often the best scientists are the worst communicators."
Nicklen, a marine biologist as well as a photographer, is not personally drawn to the cutesy stuff. But after posting a picture two years ago of a snow-dusted baby emperor penguin that inspired an avalanche of "likes", he's come around to the advantages of the aesthetic. He regularly draws in his 2.6 million followers with heart-warming images, then pairs them with captions that recast them as cautionary tales.
![A dolphin tossing an octopus off the Mandurah coast.](/web/20160921214833im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/n/4/a/h/g/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grh97z.png/1473982956242.jpg)
Every so often, he'll post a direct glimpse of impending doom: a sea otter wheezing its last breaths on an Alaskan beach, or the body of a young polar bear that starved to death in an area of the Arctic that has lost its ice.
Following wildlife Instagram means experiencing emotional whiplash. The savviest photographers work to achieve a careful balance between the superficial and the political.
![A little penguin has been microchipped at the Melbourne Zoo and returned to the bay at St Kilda after being found ...](/web/20160921214833im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/n/r/d/4/0/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grh97z.png/1473982956242.jpg)
Jasper Doest, a Dutch wildlife photographer and conservationist, recently took a series of haunting photographs of white storks that had made their homes on European landfills. "I could fill up my whole Instagram with very harsh images of storks lying there dead in the garbage and feeding on plastic, but people would eventually have enough of that," Doest said.
He takes care to insert idyllic images amid the uncomfortable ones. "The first thing you want is for the audience to fall in love with the subject," he said. Only then do you show that subject living on human garbage.
Keeping the Instagram audience clicking into a wildlife photographer's feed means serving up different kinds of images from those that appear in National Geographic.
One of Brian Skerry's most celebrated photographs shows a dead thresher shark caught in a fishing net off the Mexican coast; National Geographic has named it one of the magazine's 50 greatest photographs of all time. But when Skerry, a long-time National Geographic photojournalist, shared it with his 465,000 Instagram followers, it was met with a muted response.
More popular than the shark are the images Skerry took of a spinner dolphin leaping beneath a rainbow, a baby beluga whale seemingly smiling coyly for the camera, and a seal posing coolly underwater with one flipper folded over the other. The seal looks as if it were "about to drop his mixtape", as one commenter put it.
These casual internet surfers might be tempted to scroll past conservation public service announcements (preachy) or scientific tracts (boring). But Instagram's freewheeling platform has opened a trap door into environmental awareness.
When Skerry posted a close-up portrait of a baby seal, he tagged it with the terms #climatechange and #nature, but also #seals, #babyanimals and #love. The Instagram users lured in by a magnetic animal photo may find themselves unexpectedly open to the climate-change message. "It can make them feel like they're making these discoveries on their own," Nicklen said.
And while Instagram lacks the fact-checking safeguards of more traditional scientific sources, it engenders a sincere, authentic experience. "Because of the intimate nature of these posts, viewers come to trust the photographers," said Joel Sartore, a National Geographic photographer who has dedicated his career (and his Instagram) to photographing rare animals. "They feel that they know them."