The Charisma Premium

If, in the early 1990s, you visited Rocky Mountain National Park, you may have crossed paths with an elk named Samson. So nicknamed for his colossal size and strength, Samson was a 1,000-pound behemoth with a rack like a cottonwood’s crown. He seemed to delight in humans — he loitered in backyards, playfully bluff-charged passersby, posed for countless photos. Although hundreds of elk migrate from Rocky Mountain each fall through the gateway town of Estes Park, Samson was no faceless member of his herd — he was a bona fide star. Tourists sought him out; shops slapped his visage on T-shirts. You might say he had charisma.

At first blush, the notion that Samson was charismatic seems somehow unscientific. Many wildlife biologists think in species and populations, not individual animals; what determines whether an elk herd persists in the long run isn’t the fate of any single creature, but the health of the collective. Yet laypeople inevitably harbor biases: We pick favorites, succumb to anthropomorphism, love whom we love. Scientists aren’t immune to the formation of attachments, either. “I felt I had lost a good friend, although it was a one-way relationship,” wrote one researcher after Spot, a female humpback whale who frequented the waters of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, died in 2022. 

When animals are particularly beloved, their killing can raise hackles — and damage economies. Take the infamous slaying of Cecil the Lion, the main attraction in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, who was killed by an American dentist in 2015. While Cecil’s ecotourism value may have run over $1 million, the dentist paid about $54,000 for the privilege to shoot him. That imbalance piqued the attention of a group of researchers, including Christopher Costello, a resource economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “We put it together and thought, OK — individual animals have different levels of charisma, and that’s got to return economic value,” Costello said. “How do we estimate that?” 

The result is the “charisma premium,” a concept that Costello and his colleagues described in a 2023 paper in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. Their study essentially creates a framework for placing a value on revered animals. The idea of valuing individual animals isn’t new: For instance, one 2010 report, which surveyed dive tourists on their expenditures, found that each individual reef shark in Palau generates nearly $2 million over its lifetime. But the sagas of Cecil and Samson prove that not all animals are created equal to wildlife aficionados. To account for the discrepancies between critters of varied prominence, the researchers developed a complex mathematical model that expresses a simple concept: People long to see the famous animals they love, are willing to spend time and money to seek them out, and experience a sense of joy and fulfillment when they do encounter them. As Costello put it, “If you’re a wildlife viewer and you see one of these iconic individuals, you get a really big spike in value.”   

The idea of a charisma premium might be most potent in national parks, whose gaggles of visitors often crave an encounter with local VIAs — Very Important Animals. In Grand Teton National Park, the leading celebrity is Grizzly 399, a matriarch with more than 20 cubs and grandcubs whose every move seems to be attended by a passel of photographers. In Yellowstone National Park, a succession of named and numbered wolves and packs — Limpy, 302, the Druids and many others — have long enthralled watchers. Most legendary of all, perhaps, was O-Six, a skilled huntress with a knack for lingering near park roads — until she wandered beyond Yellowstone’s borders in 2012 and was legally shot. “She was like a hero in the wolf world,” one grieving wolf-watcher told Outside magazine after O-Six’s death. “They called her the ‘Rock Star.’” 

These examples suggest a few attributes that make for charismatic animals. Being large or otherwise distinctive helps, as do close family ties, a willingness to live near humans and a proclivity for media appearances. The most charismatic critters possess all of those traits. These days, the charisma king might be Otis, one of Katmai National Park and Preserve’s Fat Bears, who grow to gargantuan proportions by gorging on salmon in full view of gawking humans and webcams. Otis is one of the population’s oldest members and a four-time winner of Fat Bear Week, an annual competition to crown the … well, you can probably guess. According to the organizers of the contest, which draws more than a million voters each year, he can be identified by his floppy right ear and a patch of blondish fur on his left shoulder — not to mention the “knowledge, skill and patience” with which he hunts his piscine prey.

The fame of Otis and his fellow corpulent ursids, and the ease of visibly differentiating them from one another, made them excellent test subjects for the charisma model. Happily, a dataset already existed, in the form of surveys that asked webcam viewers to rank their favorite bears. When Costello and his colleagues applied the survey data to their model — which takes into account the amount of time people choose to spend watching animals and the amount of satisfaction they derive from seeing especially famous ones — they found that Otis was indeed one valuable bruin. The average webcam watcher, they calculated, was willing to pay $2.99 for the chance to see Otis during a viewing session — six times more than they’d pay to see the 10th-most valuable bear, Princess. “Online bear viewers derive higher value from seeing their favorite bear once than from seeing lots of bears they do not recognize,” the scientists wrote. 

Crucially, though, some of Otis’s celebrity did rub off on other bears: According to the study, when some animals stand out, the whole population becomes more valuable. People adore Katmai’s Fat Bears in part because their ranks include Otis — just as O-Six’s fame brought more attention to Yellowstone’s wolves as a whole. A rising tide of notoriety lifts all animal boats.   

Granted, the notion of assigning different economic values to animals’ lives can feel arbitrary or even unfair. As the researchers point out, an animal’s charisma is “independent of the biological or reproductive role” that it plays within an ecosystem. For example, Otis’ comrade Popeye is only Katmai’s 20th-most charismatic Fat Bear, but given that both ursids are large adult males, their contribution to the park’s population is likely similar. (Popeye might be subordinate in human popularity contests, but in real life he has a knack for stealing Otis’ fish.)   

And what of the bats, the songbirds, the pollinating insects: the animals that generally can’t be differentiated as individuals, but are nonetheless integral to park ecosystems? Conservation is already biased toward charismatic megafauna: the big, the beautiful, the mammalian. Might the valuation of charisma perpetuate our innate preference for bears over beetles and moose over mice? Perhaps the runaway success of Katmai’s Fat Bears will inspire a park to promote its Chunky Caterpillars.

Still, there’s no denying that telling the stories of individual animals can produce profound conservation benefits. Such is the case in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, where a small population of mountain lions has long been isolated by the massive freeways that spiderweb Southern California. Most famous among these embattled cats was P-22, who successfully crossed the highways and lived in Griffith Park, a small patch of urban chaparral in Los Angeles. Angelenos fell in love with the feline bachelor, and conservationists organized a campaign to build a wildlife overpass in his honor. The crossing, which is under construction now, will span the 101 freeway and allow the Santa Monicas’ cougars to mate with unrelated cats, thus refreshing their stagnant gene pool. 

“He reminded us that we haven’t lost that connection to wildlife and wildness,” said Beth Pratt, the National Wildlife Federation’s California regional executive director, who served as P-22’s unofficial publicist until the cat was euthanized after likely being injured by a car in 2022. The overpass will ultimately run almost $100 million, most of it raised through private donations — a testament to the immense value that we humans place on wildlife, and the ability of intrepid individuals to spark our affection and pry open our wallets. 

So how might agencies such as the National Park Service apply the concept of animal charisma? For one thing, the idea suggests that the Park Service might do well to cultivate other animal celebs in order to foster appreciation for animals usually viewed from afar. In some cases, the infrastructure already exists: Pinnacles National Park has its CondorCam, a motion-activated camera near a feeding station where the majestic vultures regularly dine; all that’s missing are some cutesy names and a social media account. (To be sure, the condor’s naked head and necrophagous diet might make it a slightly more challenging sell than a bear, but North America’s largest terrestrial bird deserves an affectionate public.) Webcams could also help to dramatize the lives of animals, like fish, that aren’t easily viewed in person. “Seeing less-charismatic species up close on a screen could have a bigger impact than trying to see them in the wild,” said Leslie Richardson, a Park Service economist and one of the study’s authors. 

What’s more, according to Richardson, quantifying the charisma premium could allow authorities to demand proper compensation when beloved animals are killed illegally. This, alas, is the fate that befell Samson, Rocky Mountain’s emblematic elk. After a poacher shot Samson with a crossbow in 1995, the town erupted in grief and fury; one local recalled that townsfolk “wanted to take the poacher and string him up a flagpole.” In the end, the scofflaw was sentenced to 90 days in jail and a $6,000 fine — a figure that didn’t account for Samson’s outsized economic and emotional importance. 

But Samson’s story didn’t end there. In 1998, Colorado’s legislature passed “Samson’s Law,” which tacked an additional $10,000 penalty on poachers who kill big bull elk and other trophy animals. Estes Park also unveiled a huge bronze statue of their iconic ungulate, funded by donations from Samson’s fans, on the corner of two main thoroughfares — a tribute that has itself become a minor tourist attraction. Not even death, it seems, can quench some creatures’ charisma.