ORIGINAL PAPER Beauty ranking of mammalian species kept in the Prague Zoo: does beauty of animals increase the respondents’ willingness to protect them? Eva Landová 1,2 & Petra Poláková 1 & Silvie Rádlová 2 & Markéta Janovcová 1,2 & Miroslav Bobek 3 & Daniel Frynta 1,2 Received: 27 June 2018 /Revised: 19 November 2018 /Accepted: 19 November 2018 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Aesthetic preferences for animals correspond with the species’ presence in the worldwide zoos and influence the conservation priorities. Here, we investigated the relationship between the willingness of respondents to protect mammals and some attributed characteristics such as their aesthetic beauty. Further, several methodological aspects of measuring mammalian beauty were assessed. Animal beauty was associated not only with the respondents’ willingness to protect the species but also with its attributed dangerousness and usefulness. We found that the most preferred animals were carnivores and ungulates, whilst smaller species of rodents and afrosoricids were unpopular. The main characteristics determining that an animal will be ranked as beautiful were complex fur pattern and body shape. We demonstrated that the position of mammalian species along the ‘beauty’ axis is surprisingly stable, no matter the form (illustrations vs photographs), context of stimulus presentation (several number of stimuli per family vs one randomly selected species per family), or the method of beauty evaluation (relative order vs Likert’ s scale). Keywords Mammals . Beauty . Animal conservation . Preferences . Human perception . Zoo Introduction Noah’s Ark hypothesis and selection of beautiful species for boarding Recently, evidence shows an increasing extinction rate of many animal species (World Wildlife Fund 2017) caused by habitat loss and accelerated by climate change (Fahrig 1997). As Pritchard et al. (2012) pointed out, the in situ conservation strat- egy is central to the contemporary global biodiversity protection. However, a combination of ex situ and in situ approaches (Redford et al. 2012) as well as the development of various ex situ projects is essential to improve the chance of species survival (Pritchard et al. 2012). The World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA) is supposed to play a major role in this effort (Conde et al. 2011, 2013; Gusset and Dick 2011). For example, the Przewalski ’ s horse (Equus ferus przewalskii) be- longs to one of the species that have been reintroduced thanks to ex situ conservation in zoos following their extinction in the wild (Volf 2009). The list of mammalian species where captive breeding helped to reduce their threat status is longer, e.g. the European bison (Bison bonasus; Pucek et al. 2002; Tokarska et al. 2009), American bison ( Bison bison; Freese et al. 2007), Asiatic wild ass (Equus hemionus; Saltz and Rubenstein 1995), golden lion tamarin (Leontopithecus rosalia; Stoinski and Beck 2004), black-footed ferret (Mustela nigripes; Dobson and Lyles 2000), or the greater stick-nest rat ( Leporillus conditor; Breed and Ford 2007; see the list of species reviewed in Conde et al. 2011 or successfully reintroduced mammals reviewed in Frynta et al. 2013). The importance of zoos as contemporary Noah’ s Arks (Soulé et al. 1986; Lacy 1987; Frankham et. al. 2002; Lees Communicated by: Matthias Waltert Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-018-1596-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Daniel Frynta frynta@centrum.cz 1 Department of Zoology, Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague, Viničná 7, 128 44 Prague 2, Czech Republic 2 National Institute of Mental Health, Topolová 748, 250 67 Klecany, Czech Republic 3 The Prague zoological garden, U Trojského zámku 3/120, 171 00 Prague 7, Czech Republic The Science of Nature (2018) 105:69 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-018-1596-3