JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Crocodile, meet shirt. Chris Banks, Melbourne Zoo’s director for international conservation partnerships, introduces a baby crocodile to David Celdran, Philippine endorser of the Lacoste Save Your Logo project.

Unless you are cut off from civilization you have probably heard about biodiversity loss and its impact on the environment. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List reports that 1 in 8 birds, 1 in 4 mammals, and 1 in 3 amphibians are endangered species. An estimated 15 to 37 percent of all species will be extinct in 40 years unless we do something more than rattle off alarming statistics or claim to be environmentalists in order to look cool.

Some species have advantages over others. We’ll donate to campaigns to protect whales and dolphins because they’re cute and in the event of an ocean disaster we imagine they would be our aquatic Leonardo DiCaprios. We’ll buy T-shirts with pictures of lions and stuffed toy tigers because big cats are beautiful, majestic creatures. We’ll visit tarsier reservations because they’re cute, although we really need to weigh the nocturnal beasties’ interests against the entertainment of loud tourists with their blinding flash cameras.

But crocodiles? Not an easy species to love. They’re hideous, they’re scary, and in countless movies we’ve seen them eat people (hence their bad reputation, which is unfair). But if crocodiles cease to exist, the complex balance in wetland ecosystems would be upset. We would lose one of the last survivors of the prehistoric age, a creature that has not changed in the last 100 million years. Crocodiles lived through the rise and extinction of the dinosaurs and the evolution of our own ancestors; it would be terrible if they don’t survive human encroachment into their natural habitats.

Read our column Emotional Weather Report today in the Philippine Star.