–Jane Goodall
An hour past the Austin sprawl, strip malls give way to rolling wilderness, and the roads transform from asphalt to gravel.
When I arrive at the entrance to Alveus Sanctuary, I drive slowly, gazing out the window at familiar surroundings. It's a smooth ride now, but back in July, the Central Texas Floods wiped out this road. For a brief moment, the sanctuary's forty-plus animal residents were in danger of missing out on critical resources, like meals and medications— never mind the humans who work here every day.
If you're a regular Twitch viewer, there's a decent chance you've seen this road before, too. Top streamers from around the country began descending on Alveus in July—offering up not only their physical assistance in digging and draining water, but also their collective audiences. At several points across the assembled streams, “over one hundred thousand people were watching live,” Alveus director Maya Higa tells me, as we stand here on the road.
There is a level of reverence that folks reserve for talking about Maya. Her peers (other streamers) may enjoy gassing themselves up — for one to go live every day, it’s a feature of the occupation, not a bug — but they all seem to ascribe Maya’s unique strain of chatter to a higher purpose. “She is saving the world,” her friend and former podcast co-host QTCinderella said in July. Scientists and researchers who know her tend to marvel at Maya’s ability to distill convoluted information on conservation and the environment into a substance that even scroll-happy, vertical video viewers can get behind. And upon visiting Alveus, which Maya founded when she was just twenty-one, CBS News came away from Texas with a bold proclamation: They’d found “Gen Z’s Jane Goodall.”
I ask Maya for her thoughts on being compared to one of the world’s most renowned conservationists.“I would never, ever give myself that title,” she responds. “They’re massive shoes to fill.”
“But people use it a lot to describe me now, which is cool,” she follows up.
That newfound visibility comes with hig her expectations, which is why we’re here, in Texas. Because Maya (alongside the animals and humans who call Alveus home) has been hiding in plain sight these past six years, refashioning Twitch—best known for gaming “Let’s Plays” and loud, young men barking—as a tool to, say, share fun facts about insects—and raise some money along the way.
In a moment when research funding has been gutted across the board and attacks on science become ever more normalized, Alveus has built its foundation on an alternative path. Not only as a vehicle for virtual education, but also a platform, to shine a spotlight on the work of researchers around the world—and, in the near future, maybe offer its partners even more.
“When we're reaching tens of millions [of viewers] a year…that does really matter,” Maya tells me. “We can mobilize so many people, and there's a lot of hope in that. It's our job to stay really positive, and to let people know that our planet has a chance—because it does.”
For the purposes of this piece, over the last two months, I spoke with a dozen scientists, researchers, creators, and viewers. There were two questions I set out to answer.
First, are Maya, the Streamer and Maya, the Conservationist poised to meet the current moment?
And second, what’s gained and lost when science is predominantly communicated— and consumed—over social media?
I.
The first animal Maya introduces me to at Alveus is a friendly horse named Ace, who saddles up to me and leans over, silently implying that yes, I should probably pet him.
Unlike the other animals at Alveus, Ace is not here to be rehabilitated. No, he’s been right by Maya’s side since she was twelve, following her all the way from her childhood home in the Bay Area to her current residence near Austin.
Ace had another pit stop in between, too. “I think it’s pretty unique for a kid to take their horse to college,” Vicki Amon-Higa, Maya’s mom, tells me over a video call. “But if you’re truly in love with your horse, and you’re a horse person, of course you’re going to take your horse to college.”
According to Vicki, Maya learned to ride horses at age four. Their farm played home to a pig named Bella, a goat named Fro-Yo, and a cat named Nachi. For some families, the extra tenants may have created an unruly environment, but Vicki normalized this slice of life early on for her kids. “I grew up in the sticks, a hundred miles north of the Bay,” Vicki says. “There were no stoplights in my small town. It was definitely the country.”
The youngest of four, Maya took the most interest in agriculture, following in her mom’s footsteps and joining 4-H at an early age. “It’s kind of like Girl Scouts, but for animals,” Maya says. Vicki credits the program with helping her daughter gain confidence with public speaking, noting that Maya was “the president of the largest Silicon Valley 4-H club” in high school.
When she went off to college three hours south in San Luis Obispo, Maya missed living with animals, so she took a volunteer opportunity at a local zoo. “I started developing a love for conservation that I didn’t know I had,” she tells me. “I’ve always been really passionate about the planet—that’s why I wanted to [work in] agriculture—but the zoo made me realize that conservation, sustainability…there’s a lot of overlap there.”
“Once I started the zoo internship, there was no going back.”
Her coworkers became alligators and black bears, exotic parrots and Patagonian maras. Many of the species were vulnerable, if not critically endangered. “I just wanted to protect all of them,” she says.
Maya didn’t know it yet, but the seeds of Alveus were planted during that internship. All it took was a red-tailed hawk named Bean— and a clip going viral on Reddit.
The first animal Maya introduces me to at Alveus is a friendly horse named Ace, who saddles up to me and leans over, silently implying that yes, I should probably pet him.
Unlike the other animals at Alveus, Ace is not here to be rehabilitated. No, he’s been right by Maya’s side since she was twelve, following her all the way from her childhood home in the Bay Area to her current residence near Austin.
Ace had another pit stop in between, too. “I think it’s pretty unique for a kid to take their horse to college,” Vicki Amon-Higa, Maya’s mom, tells me over a video call. “But if you’re truly in love with your horse, and you’re a horse person, of course you’re going to take your horse to college.”
According to Vicki, Maya learned to ride horses at age four. Their farm played home to a pig named Bella, a goat named Fro-Yo, and a cat named Nachi. For some families, the extra tenants may have created an unruly environment, but Vicki normalized this slice of life early on for her kids. “I grew up in the sticks, a hundred miles north of the Bay,” Vicki says. “There were no stoplights in my small town. It was definitely the country.”
The youngest of four, Maya took the most interest in agriculture, following in her mom’s footsteps and joining 4-H at an early age. “It’s kind of like Girl Scouts, but for animals,” Maya says. Vicki credits the program with helping her daughter gain confidence with public speaking, noting that Maya was “the president of the largest Silicon Valley 4-H club” in high school.
When she went off to college three hours south in San Luis Obispo, Maya missed living with animals, so she took a volunteer opportunity at a local zoo. “I started developing a love for conservation that I didn’t know I had,” she tells me. “I’ve always been really passionate about the planet—that’s why I wanted to [work in] agriculture—but the zoo made me realize that conservation, sustainability…there’s a lot of overlap there.”
“Once I started the zoo internship, there was no going back.”
Her coworkers became alligators and black bears, exotic parrots and Patagonian maras. Many of the species were vulnerable, if not critically endangered. “I just wanted to protect all of them,” she says.
Maya didn’t know it yet, but the seeds of Alveus were planted during that internship. All it took was a red-tailed hawk named Bean— and a clip going viral on Reddit.
II.
As we walk around the sanctuary, Maya notes the cameras rigged throughout each animal enclosure.
The video feed isn’t solely for staff to observe Alveus’ “ambassadors,” as the team likes to call them. It’s for fans back home to watch along, too.
She credits Connor O’Brien, the nonprofit’s Director of Operations, for the complex setup. “I think it’s one of the most ethical ways to view wildlife,” Connor tells me. “The cameras are expensive, it’s hard to get into, but it’s been so well worth it. People get so attached to [the animals] because it’s so accessible.”
It may be a surprise for someone whose day job includes the title “streamer,” but Maya barely spent any time online growing up—or even playing video games. “I think I first started watching some beauty creators in college, when I was learning how to do makeup,” she says.
Around that time, friends introduced her to Twitch. She’d posted several videos on Instagram for fun, singing covers of her favorite songs. Why not stream them? her friends asked. “They thought I could make money that way,” Maya laughs.
On April 15, 2019, one stream took off in ways Maya never could’ve imagined. In between songs, Maya began describing a red-tailed hawk she was currently rehabilitating. Chat didn’t believe her. “‘You don’t have a hawk in your backyard,’” she remembers the hundred or so viewers saying. “‘There’s no way.’”
Maya disappeared, before bringing the bird back inside. She then launched into the presentation-style program she’d learned in school. “I said, ‘This is Bean. He’s a juvenile red-tailed hawk, the most common widespread bird in North America.’”
Some of her viewers clipped the speech in amazement and posted it on r/LiveStreamFails, a subreddit dedicated to celebrating streaming culture (and its heroes’ many misadventures).
The clip garnered two hundred seventy-five thousand views.
Maya’s supervisor at the zoo was stunned. “The events that we were doing, teaching kids—we would go to classrooms with, like, twenty kids at a time,” Maya says. “So the potential for impact [online] was very obvious, and very fast, and very exciting.”
Another thing she’d begun to realize was that hosting mobile events (as in, those away from the zoo) was a laborious process. Transportation often became a logistical nightmare. Sometimes the humans scared the animals; sometimes the animals scared the humans. With her newfound popularity on Twitch—and graduation quickly approaching—why not invest more time into presenting the same programs, only via streaming?
Following the viral clip of Bean, Maya reveled in her role as the Internet’s favorite wildlife educator, introducing her viewers to falcons, crows, and even raccoons. It was fun, it was stressful, and it quickly became a “real” thing. “I guess there were a lot of moments [in college] where I was wondering what my career was going to look like, because I had no intention of doing content creation as a job,” Maya tells me.
Her parents were a bit dubious of streaming, yet curious. “The first time Maya was home from college, she said she’d streamed last night and made some money,” Vicki tells me. “I was flabbergasted. Why would people pay her to sing? It did not make sense to me.”
Yet her parents had both begun working in tech in the eighties, riding the explosive startup zeitgeist that was spreading across Silicon Valley like wildfire. Vicki cut her teeth under none other than Steve Jobs, serving as his director of hardware quality at NeXT Computer before following him back to Apple (and Pixar, too, where she helped support the teams behind A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2).
“We know that there are trends, and they have staying power—or not,” she says.
At NeXT, their mission was to build computers that “our friends could afford to buy.” Vicki saw that mission turn from a dream into a reality. “I am holding onto one while I’m having this conversations with you,” she says, motioning to her iPhone.
So when Maya told her parents she was moving to Texas, linking up with the streaming community in Austin, they evaluated the risk against the rising popularity of Twitch.
Eventually, they obliged.
And by February 2021, Maya had opened her very own animal sanctuary.
As we walk around the sanctuary, Maya notes the cameras rigged throughout each animal enclosure.
The video feed isn’t solely for staff to observe Alveus’ “ambassadors,” as the team likes to call them. It’s for fans back home to watch along, too.
She credits Connor O’Brien, the nonprofit’s Director of Operations, for the complex setup. “I think it’s one of the most ethical ways to view wildlife,” Connor tells me. “The cameras are expensive, it’s hard to get into, but it’s been so well worth it. People get so attached to [the animals] because it’s so accessible.”
It may be a surprise for someone whose day job includes the title “streamer,” but Maya barely spent any time online growing up—or even playing video games. “I think I first started watching some beauty creators in college, when I was learning how to do makeup,” she says.
Around that time, friends introduced her to Twitch. She’d posted several videos on Instagram for fun, singing covers of her favorite songs. Why not stream them? her friends asked. “They thought I could make money that way,” Maya laughs.
On April 15, 2019, one stream took off in ways Maya never could’ve imagined. In between songs, Maya began describing a red-tailed hawk she was currently rehabilitating. Chat didn’t believe her. “‘You don’t have a hawk in your backyard,’” she remembers the hundred or so viewers saying. “‘There’s no way.’”
Maya disappeared, before bringing the bird back inside. She then launched into the presentation-style program she’d learned in school. “I said, ‘This is Bean. He’s a juvenile red-tailed hawk, the most common widespread bird in North America.’”
Some of her viewers clipped the speech in amazement and posted it on r/LiveStreamFails, a subreddit dedicated to celebrating streaming culture (and its heroes’ many misadventures).
The clip garnered two hundred seventy-five thousand views.
Maya’s supervisor at the zoo was stunned. “The events that we were doing, teaching kids—we would go to classrooms with, like, twenty kids at a time,” Maya says. “So the potential for impact [online] was very obvious, and very fast, and very exciting.”
Another thing she’d begun to realize was that hosting mobile events (as in, those away from the zoo) was a laborious process. Transportation often became a logistical nightmare. Sometimes the humans scared the animals; sometimes the animals scared the humans. With her newfound popularity on Twitch—and graduation quickly approaching—why not invest more time into presenting the same programs, only via streaming?
Following the viral clip of Bean, Maya reveled in her role as the Internet’s favorite wildlife educator, introducing her viewers to falcons, crows, and even raccoons. It was fun, it was stressful, and it quickly became a “real” thing. “I guess there were a lot of moments [in college] where I was wondering what my career was going to look like, because I had no intention of doing content creation as a job,” Maya tells me.
Her parents were a bit dubious of streaming, yet curious. “The first time Maya was home from college, she said she’d streamed last night and made some money,” Vicki tells me. “I was flabbergasted. Why would people pay her to sing? It did not make sense to me.”
Yet her parents had both begun working in tech in the eighties, riding the explosive startup zeitgeist that was spreading across Silicon Valley like wildfire. Vicki cut her teeth under none other than Steve Jobs, serving as his director of hardware quality at NeXT Computer before following him back to Apple (and Pixar, too, where she helped support the teams behind A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2).
“We know that there are trends, and they have staying power—or not,” she says.
At NeXT, their mission was to build computers that “our friends could afford to buy.” Vicki saw that mission turn from a dream into a reality. “I am holding onto one while I’m having this conversations with you,” she says, motioning to her iPhone.
So when Maya told her parents she was moving to Texas, linking up with the streaming community in Austin, they evaluated the risk against the rising popularity of Twitch.
Eventually, they obliged.
And by February 2021, Maya had opened her very own animal sanctuary.
III.
We've arrived at the most recognizable stop in Alveus, where we find an emu sprinting back-and-forth across his forest-like enclosure.
Maya informs me that emus have a top speed of thirty-one miles per hour, though she finds the current energy level of hers, Stompy, peculiar. “Stomp, wow…he really has places to be today,” she jokes.
The emu was the sanctuary’s first animal resident. Maya rescued Stompy from a zoo in California when he was just two weeks old; she thought he’d be a perfect ambassador to teach viewers about the exotic meat trade. “Emu meat had a really crazy spike in popularity in the nineties, then people lost interest,” she says. “But emu meat, oil, and leather are all things that people farm emus for, so those are the things we talk about with him.”
She mentions similar talking points in each animal enclosure. In the chicken coop, Maya describes a game she usually plays with visitors (mostly streamers), where they consider photos of four unique egg-laying operations and guess whether they’re factory farms or cage-free. In the marmoset enclosure, we meet Appa and Momo; Maya explains how her staff rehabbed the monkeys after rescuing them from an overmatched owner, teaching viewers about the exotic pet trade in turn (“Momo's had more than half of his teeth removed because he was fed the wrong thing, [and] his teeth just started rotting out,” she tells me).
As we walk from enclosure to enclosure, I feel as if I’m watching one of Maya’s streams. It’s been six years now since she began honing her unique form of science communication for the Twitch generation. While she didn’t coin the phrase “hiding the broccoli” herself, she likes to think it’s become her secret sauce, sprinkling conservation facts in between pickup basketball streams, makeup GRWMs, and Let’s Plays.
“We have a relatively young demographic for conservation educators—we're looking at nineteen to maybe late twenties, early thirties,” she tells me. “These are people that are already online, and they're not used to consuming really dense educational material, right? They're online to be entertained, or to watch, like, gaming content.”
“And so we have to adjust to those attention spans and give them stuff that's really engaging, without them knowing they’re being taught,” Maya continues. “Because at the end of the day, they're all budding consumers, and they're budding voters. They're people that are developing their own personal philosophies about consumption, and those are all really important things for the future of our planet.”
Along with featuring animals in her streams, Maya began reaching out to scientists and researchers in 2019, inviting them onto her podcast, Conservation Cast. One of those experts: Dr. Solomon David, a leading aquatic ecologist whose work centers on freshwater fish.
“I said, ‘Well, what’s this interview like?’” Solomon tells me over a video call. “And she’s like, ‘We do it on Discord.’ I’m like, ‘What’s Discord?’”
The show was not only a podium for experts to share their work live, but also a fundraiser. Solomon remembers Maya matched his enthusiasm for gar, displaying a “genuine interest” in the ancient freshwater fish species he researches. On top of that, every time a member of the Discord chat left a tip, Maya verbally thanked them, calling each subscriber out by name.
Solomon found this level of community engagement fascinating. “We raised over one thousand dollars for [the nature magazine] Ranger Rick, just from me talking about gar for forty-five minutes,” he recalls.
Though she stopped publishing Conservation Cast in 2021, across the show’s sixty-plus episodes, Maya says viewers donated over ninety three thousand dollars to various conservation organizations. This success set the stage for her biggest venture yet: Alveus, named after the Latin phrase that means “the channel or bed of a river.”
“It’s gonna take a lot to make this happen,” Maya shared in her announcement video on February 10, 2021. She set a goal of raising over five hundred thousand dollars, money that would go directly into “building out the facility.” The next day, she streamed for twenty-one hours, incentivizing viewers with prizes like a golden shovel and Gucci loafers worn by the rapper T-Pain.
It worked. To celebrate, Maya fulfilled a promise she’d made to fans, shaving her head on stream.
Now, at just twenty-two and armed with cash, she had to figure out how to make the thing a reality.
“I had little-to-no managerial experience, and definitely no experience in founding a nonprofit,” Maya tells me. She leaned on the experts she’d interviewed on Conservation Cast, including the aforementioned Solomon David and Joe Siegrist (himself an avian researcher and the president of The Purple Martin Conservation Association, a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring the survival of purple martin songbirds).
“She started bouncing documents back-and-forth to me with, you know, early bylaws and business cases,” Joe tells me. “I was totally a cheerleader from day one because I loved this idea of doing a sanctuary entirely in the virtual space. I wanted to be on the board, and I wanted to do anything I could to make this thing possible.”
Past just breaking ground on the campus, Maya knew she needed to build a team. One science communicator that’d caught Maya’s eye was the aforementioned Connor O’Brien, then a digital marketing specialist at the American Eagle Foundation (AEF) in Tennessee. In his role, Connor learned less about marketing good jeans and more about capturing footage of bald eagles, installing “eagle cams” in remote areas.
He’d also started a TikTok account and Twitch channel for the foundation, quietly growing the AEF a cult following. “I was trying to take an organization that was more traditional and get them more new-age,” Connor tells me. “Once Maya got my number, she abused it. She was always calling me for advice.”
“I was trying to push my organization to do more, and at the same time I was getting a lot of resistance, Maya was pushing full-steam ahead,” he continues. “I watched every minute of her initial campaign and thought, wow, there’s so much power for good here, and she is so committed that she even shaved her head. I think she’d be a good boss.”
Connor joined Joe on the board. That lasted for a month or two, before Maya successfully pitched Connor and his wife, Kayla, on moving to Austin in October 2021. Both hold degrees in biology; they agreed to work at the sanctuary full-time, bringing their experience with them.
“At the time, there were only the donkeys, Stompy, the crows, the chickens, and chinchillas,” Kayla recalls. These days, she oversees the sanctuary’s forty-plus ambassadors as Director of Animal Care & Training; Connor does a little bit of everything as Director of Operations.
“When I talked with Connor about it, I said, ‘Two years! I’ll do it for two years!’” Kayla jokes. “It was really just a leap of faith. When you have an opportunity like this, with something that’s being built from the ground up, it’s really cool to be a part of it.”
The Alveus staff has grown to fifteen members, ranging from animal care coordinators and facility specialists to creative producers and video editors. At first, Maya found it overwhelming to hire folks older than her, many of whom held more expertise and weren’t from Austin. But four years in, they’re proud of the forty-hour work weeks and livable wages they say they can afford to offer employees, particularly in a traditionally low-paying profession. Additionally, Maya feels like they’ve developed a true team culture, centered around a shared love: the animals.
"We're all really aligned philosophically… we care about conservation, and we want to see this organization help our natural world,” she says. “And so it's really easy when you're all headed to the same place.”
IV.
Upon visiting the last of the animal enclosures, we follow Maya back to Alveus’ offices.
Inside, we greet members of the production staff, who sit scattered across desks filled with several monitors each. A sofa lounges across the middle of the room; mounted in front is a TV, broadcasting several of the animal enclosures live on Alveus’ Twitch channel.
It’s a peaceful setting, and a much slower lifestyle than what I’m accustomed to in Chicago. Part of me feels a pang of jealousy.
Maya says it took a lot of time and effort for the sanctuary to reach this point. “I’ve kind of always thought of my [personal] brand as a funnel into the sanctuary,” she tells me. “And so the more brand recognition I have—going to other streamers, who know that I'm the animal person with the animal sanctuary—the bigger this nonprofit is.”
A couple years ago, her dream was pretty cut-and-dry: get Alveus to the point where it could live on as a standalone entity. “Where if I had a mental breakdown and had to leave for a month, everybody is still getting paid, viewers are learning, and the animals are still getting taken care of,” Maya says.
It required a lot of “scrambling” since Alveus’ founding, but she believes the sanctuary has reached that point. This year, Alveus passed a million combined followers across platforms.
With that strong base intact, a natural question follows: What comes next?
One fan—himself a veteran YouTube creator and science communicator—empathizes with the exciting, nerve-wracking position Maya now finds herself in. “I think one of the hardest things as a creator is going, Okay, I have this attention— what do I do with it?” Hank Green tells me over a video call. “Because the dumb answer to that question is to use it to get more attention.”
Upon visiting the last of the animal enclosures, we follow Maya back to Alveus’ offices.
Inside, we greet members of the production staff, who sit scattered across desks filled with several monitors each. A sofa lounges across the middle of the room; mounted in front is a TV, broadcasting several of the animal enclosures live on Alveus’ Twitch channel.
It’s a peaceful setting, and a much slower lifestyle than what I’m accustomed to in Chicago. Part of me feels a pang of jealousy.
Maya says it took a lot of time and effort for the sanctuary to reach this point. “I’ve kind of always thought of my [personal] brand as a funnel into the sanctuary,” she tells me. “And so the more brand recognition I have—going to other streamers, who know that I'm the animal person with the animal sanctuary—the bigger this nonprofit is.”
A couple years ago, her dream was pretty cut-and-dry: get Alveus to the point where it could live on as a standalone entity. “Where if I had a mental breakdown and had to leave for a month, everybody is still getting paid, viewers are learning, and the animals are still getting taken care of,” Maya says.
It required a lot of “scrambling” since Alveus’ founding, but she believes the sanctuary has reached that point. This year, Alveus passed a million combined followers across platforms.
With that strong base intact, a natural question follows: What comes next?
One fan—himself a veteran YouTube creator and science communicator—empathizes with the exciting, nerve-wracking position Maya now finds herself in. “I think one of the hardest things as a creator is going, Okay, I have this attention— what do I do with it?” Hank Green tells me over a video call. “Because the dumb answer to that question is to use it to get more attention.”
“And then you use the new attention to get more attention, and you use the newer attention to get more attention, and then eventually you become an attention black hole,” he continues. “And the singularity happens and you're like, Actually, I hate this. I don't know what I'm doing, but everybody's looking at me.”
It’s one thing to experience a viral moment, like Maya did in 2019; it’s another to sustain the flow of attention and maintain your humanity, says Hank. So to better understand where all those views are coming from—and the real people behind them—I reached out to several more of Maya’s fans.
Throughout these conversations, I realized that Alveus has become a regular fixture in their viewers’ lives. Save for becoming a veterinarian, college sophomore Arsen Carangelo believed there were no career paths that would allow her to pursue the dream of working with animals—until she started watching Maya, Kayla, and Connor at the sanctuary every day. “I’m pursuing my animal sciences degree because of Maya,” Arsen tells me.
Oliver Cheseldene-Culley, a recent law school graduate and aspiring environmental attorney, regularly tunes into other streamers like QTCinderella and FaZe Adapt from his home in England. But anytime exam season came around during university, Oliver would put Alveus’ twenty-four-seven Alveus livestream on in the background as he studied. “It calms me, and makes me feel like I’m part of something bigger than myself,” he says.
Past just serving as an inspiration, though, I was curious whether viewers were actually learning (and retaining) anything from Maya’s streams. The answer I received was an emphatic yes.
Oliver began listing off fun facts regarding the strength of parrots' beaks, and dove into detail on the permeable skin of frogs. Arsen mentioned that Maya’s segments on spiders and insects helped her get over her arachnophobia. Rebecca Nieves, a twenty-year-old pre-med student in South Florida, agreed. “With insects, now knowing how important they are to [local ecosystems]...it sounds simple, but it really does give you a worldview change," she tells me. All of a sudden, “you’re actually noticing these things, and you actually want to go outside and find these animals” (“I am the public relations team for insects,” Maya jokes to me).
That education often leads to action. As a college student with a limited budget, Arsen says she can only donate to a finite number of environmental causes she cares about. Nevertheless, whenever Maya shares a petition via Instagram—and explains why viewers should join in signing—Arsen is first in line.
The sophomore also participates in Maya’s ongoing Show and Tell series. Viewers fill out a form on the Alveus website, describing nature-related “things” they’re doing; Maya then shares submission on her stream. “People might be studying for a biology degree, or that they went and did a trash cleanup, or they volunteered at an animal shelter,” Maya tells me. “And so we’re actually tracking, like, community service hours from our community.”
Show and Tell was born out of a collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund, but it’s not Alveus’ first direct partnership with a nonprofit. In recent years, Columbia University researchers began studying the effectiveness of virtual animal education models like Alveus; Maya hopes they publish the data soon so more people “understand the potential” of operating remotely. A new series, Alveus Adventures, has taken viewers everywhere from Dr. Solomon David’s “Gar Lab” at the University of Minnesota to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation in Massachusetts (A regular comment from the channel’s YouTube subscribers: “I wish these videos were even longer”).
For now, Alveus has been more than willing to provide its platform, a vessel to share the attention it receives with organizations it believes in. Nevertheless, Connor, the director of operations, believes they can do even more.
“I almost feel guilty that we’re in this position where we can go live, and (within reason) get a project funded pretty fast, just because we have such an amazing community—and they know where the money is going,” he tells me. “It’s a privilege to be in this position.”
“A lot of our friends are the ones getting cut…this very crucial funding for big conservation stuff,” he continues. “Alveus isn’t in a position to step in yet, but where we’re going, we want to kind of take over…”
Connor pauses, and thinks for a second. “That’s not the right word.”
He believes they can be a major player in conservation. The first step: They’ve found success in helping several universities and research centers set up custom camera rigs, following Alveus’ model by speaking directly to local communities via Twitch. But soon, they'll be able to assist further, plugging gaps and driving innovation in places where federal funding is falling through.
“In three years, I think we'll be able to really do a lot,” he says.
In my conversation with Hank, he opined that the best creators ask themselves a specific question: “What do I want to do that would tap into my skills, my abilities, my interests, my values, and also be good for the world?” In his telling, the ones who lead fruitful, sustainable careers are the ones who figure out how to leverage the attention they receive towards long-term fulfillment.
“That’s what sets Maya apart,” Hank concludes.
Epilogue.
The Austin sun is setting soon,and the one-hundred degree heat is starting to break.
As we pack up our car, several of the Alveus staff members are returning to the sanctuary. Most days, feeding begins in the mornings—as early as six-thirty—and finishes up later in the evenings.
We say our goodbyes and drive away. Forty-eight hours later, I’ll be back at the studio, on my computer, catching up on emails and tackling the stressors of day-to-day life.
In the following days, I reflected on what I’d learned about Maya, the Streamer and Maya, the Conservationist. The obvious takeaway is that the grand ambitions of the latter are made possible by the work of the former.
At Alveus, I asked Maya why she left Wine About It—the lifestyle podcast she started with her friend, QTCinderella, in 2022—earlier this year. “Were you worried about not being taken seriously by the more traditional scientific world?” I posed.
Short answer: No. She just got busy. But even without a wine-sipping podcast to her name, Maya’s communication style hasn’t skipped a beat. “I think it’s really important that people see me as a person more than, like, a formal wildlife presenter,” Maya said. “[It’s the] difference between reading something in a textbook versus sitting on a couch, listening to your friend talk about something that they care about.
“One is much more anecdotal and trustworthy—something that you can get invested in. And one is very traditional, and more just learning. And so I obviously subscribed to the second model.”
I thought about this upon reading several obituaries for Dr. Jane Goodall. Coincidentally, the woman whom Maya has looked up to for a majority of her life—the legendary figure whom she is now sometimes compared to—passed away in October, at the age of ninety-one.
Most people accept that Dr. Goodall was a clear-cut expert in her field, venturing past her groundbreaking research on East African chimpanzees to also leave a legacy of conservationist advocacy and environmental activism. In her twenties, Dr. Goodall inspired an entirely new style for the science of animal observation; her deeply-researched and vivid storytelling led to many National Geographic articles based on her work, as well as her most famous book, In the Shadow of Man.
Curiously enough, however, critics emerged, questioning her scientific integrity simply based on how popular her writing had become. “Wasn’t good science supposed to be boring?” read one obituary this month, poking fun at Dr. Goodall’s detractors.
Still, Goodall emerged in a vastly different period of science communication. So I asked several experts and researchers I spoke with for this piece: As social media eats the word, what’s gained and lost in their line of work?
Hank Green, who’s launched several careers off of YouTube stardom, has mixed feelings. “There’s a lot of people who are communicating about science or the state of the human body or the universe or whatever,” he tells me. “They can just sort of say the most interesting, possible thing, because they have no need to be connected to the truth.”
“Because of the way that the Internet is structured, that stuff is getting a lot of attention,” Hank follows up. “And I really don’t know how to interface with that, except to just keep doing my part of the job.”
But he does point out that there’s no longer “one guy,” a la past educators like Bill Nye or Carl Sagan. “Up and down the scale, from TikTok creators to magazine writers to authors, there’s a lot more of it,” he says. “And it’s very good, and I’m glad for it.”
Shel Winkley is one of those communicators. A veteran meteorologist based in College Station, Texas, Shel realized early on that translating his local weather reports to online spaces like Twitter threads and TikTok videos could help his community—a community with viewpoints across the political spectrum—better comprehend the effects of climate change.
“In Texas, we love our bluebonnets—it’s the state flower,” he tells me over a video call. He mentions that the flower patches have become a popular Instagram attraction for parents and their kids. But over the years, as springtime started creeping earlier and earlier on the calendar, locals couldn’t understand why the bonnets would pop up in February—then disappear due to freezes.
“That was my first chance to really tie something that everybody loves and everybody associates with to the impacts of climate change, right?” Shel says. “And so I used that moment to really localize climate change. You can talk about polar bears all you want, but what does it matter to Mom as she walks out the door, and is trying to get her kids to soccer practice?”
In other words, She is hiding the broccoli.
“It’s our job to stay really positive, and to let people know that our planet has a chance—because it does.”
– Maya Higa
– Maya Higa
Maya believes that there will always be some experts who—out of sheer ignorance, intentional or otherwise—don’t understand her brand of science communication. Yet there are plenty of others who recognize its potential, to bridge information gaps across generations.
“We need people to be able to adapt quickly,” Dr. Solomon David, the gar researcher, tells me. “And I recognize the irony as somebody who studies very slowly evolving fish.”
For Joe Siegrist, Alveus board member and Purple Martin Conservation Association director, his work relies on educating younger audiences—else the birds he’s spent years of his life researching will cease to exist. “Purple martins need humans to provide birdhouses for them, or else they can’t reproduce,” Joe says. “They don’t nest at all in the wild anymore due to habitat loss. So we need to have people interested from generation to generation, because the genie isn’t going back in the bottle.”
At the beginning of this piece, I wondered aloud if Maya, the Streamer and Maya, the Conservationist were poised to meet the current moment. Truth is, I wasn’t expecting to discover a factual answer. Saving the world is a lot of pressure to put on one person’s shoulders. There are too many stakeholders at play: partisan politicians; oil and gas companies stuck in the twentieth century; universities seeing their federal funding slashed; tech companies bolstering AI training models and energy-sucking data centers; and us, as consumers.
But what’s clear is that Maya Higa continues to blaze her own trail, and set a vision worth following. She’s straddling two lines—one foot in the conservation world, the other in the creator world. Many of Alveus’ hires come from traditional zoo backgrounds; at the same time, a pair of OnlyFans creators helped fund the wolf dog enclosure by selling photos online. “We’re not a traditional nonprofit in a lot of ways,” Maya jokes.
Her Twitch peers have taken note, and their descent on Alveus following the floods was a physical manifestation of all the goodwill Maya has gained in the streamer community. In two days, their combined audiences raised over one hundred eighty thousand dollars. Alveus was able to rebuild its entrance road within a week.
That sense of connection, that ability to click a button and broadcast a message to the world…none of it would be possible without the Internet. Maya, the Streamer isn’t ignorant of that. She constantly expresses her gratitude for the millions of people who tune in every day.
But for Maya, the Conservationist—the same woman who grew up leading 4-H meetings, and once drove her horse three hours south to college—the life she’s carved out for herself revolves around a burning desire to protect the things she cares most about.
“With content creation, it's really easy to get sucked into the numbers and the game of it all,” Maya tells me. “This team here, at the sanctuary, is very grounding. Animals in themselves are so grounding.”
“That's one of the reasons that I love them so much,” she continues. “When you show up and you walk into an animal's enclosure, they have no concept or care for your size as a creator online, right? Or the mistakes that you made three years ago, or a year ago, or yesterday.”
“The only thing that they care about is how you show up that day,” Maya concludes. “They help keep you really present, which is the most important thing I think I've learned as a creator. To find ways, all the time, in between the pockets—of the views, and the numbers, and the posting and everything.
“To just keep feeling human.”
MAYA HIGA is a streamer, conservationist, and animal educator. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Alveus Sanctuary in Austin, Texas. Follow along with Maya's journey—
(TWITCH) twitch.tv/maya
(YT) @mayahiga
(IG) @maya_higa
Keep up with Alveus Sanctuary—
(TWITCH) twitch.tv/alveussanctuary
(IG, YT, TT) @alveussanctuary
(TWITCH) twitch.tv/maya
(YT) @mayahiga
(IG) @maya_higa
Keep up with Alveus Sanctuary—
(TWITCH) twitch.tv/alveussanctuary
(IG, YT, TT) @alveussanctuary
Nathan Graber-Lipperman
(IG) @bynategl
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