Hey Thoughty2 here.
Have you ever seen a flying bear?
No?
That’s because they don’t exist!
But fast forward 100 years and flying bears could be freakin’ everywhere, okay maybe
not flying bears.
But something equally as amazing and terrifying is happening across the entire animal kingdom.
Creatures far and wide are evolving faster than ever before.
And the ways in which they’re evolving is unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
Through our vast studies into evolution we’ve realised that it takes roughly one million
years to notice a significant change in an animal’s characteristics.
A major leap in its evolutionary life.
As we all know Zoologists, Bioscientists and other experts have been constantly monitoring
animals all over the world for hundreds of years.
However, in the past 50 years a huge change in how animals evolve has been observed.
Instead of a million years some animals have made huge evolutionary jumps in just a few
decades and in some cases as little as 20 years!
In 1989 the international community passed a ban on the sale of ivory worldwide, in an
attempt to stop the poaching of elephants for their extremely valuable ivory tusks.
Elephant poaching dropped significantly in the years that followed and elephant numbers
in the wild started to rise again.
But despite its illegality, the demand for ivory never went away, especially in China,
where’s it’s highly coveted.
The two tusks from a single elephant can sell for up to $400,000 on the black market and
so in this highly lucrative market criminal gangs have met the ever-present demand for
the illegal collector’s item.
Poaching levels have risen once again and sadly, today around 35,000 elephants are slaughtered
every year for their ivory.
That’s over 5% of the global elephant population.
In fact, the number of elephants poached every year is now far greater than before the ban
in 1989.
But the elephants are fighting back, yet they don’t even know how.
Every year more and more elephants are born without any tusks.
Because today an elephant is more likely to survive and reproduce if it has no valuable
tusks for poachers to kill it over, even if this means it can’t defend itself against
rival elephants.
In Zambia the amount of tusk-less female elephants rose from 10 percent to 40 percent in just
20 years.
That’s evolution happening before our eyes in an astonishingly short 20 years, and it’s
all because of the actions of a few unsavoury humans.
In some areas of South Africa 98 percent of female elephants have no ivory.
Most humans like living in cities, goodness knows why, all the research shows that we’re
considerably less happy and less safe in cities.
But nonetheless we have a natural desire to swarm around giant metal hubs of weird modern
art and 24-hour fast food restaurants.
And our cities are growing, at a rate faster than ever before.
Currently 54% of the global population live in urban centers.
By 2050 It’s estimated to rise to 70%.
This will of course mean a far greater percentage of the Earth’s natural habitats will be
destroyed so we can build more Mc-Kentucy-Fried-Subways with vast splattering’s of Vegan Cafes,
to support the growing urban population.
This is of course bad news for avocados; avocado abuse is already rising at a phenomenal rate.
But it’s even worse news for the animal kingdom, or maybe it isn’t.
Destruction of natural habitats is of course devastating to the species that once called
that place home.
But like the great African elephants, animals far and wide are supercharging their evolution
to adapt to life inside the city.
Human’s are forcing them to, because it’s either adapt to the urban environment or become
extinct.
Coyotes are traditionally found inhabiting the great grasslands of middle America but
in the past few decades they have spread across the whole country and now inhabit every major
city across America, where they have found themselves a unique home.
They are highly threated in their natural habitat, the US government kills 400,000 coyotes
every year, under the guise of “Wildlife Services” they call it “population management”.
So heavily persecuted, coyotes have been forced to masterfully adapt to the urban lifestyle.
They will eat quite literally anything, from litter to bits of clothing found lying around.
Amazingly, after being monitored extensively on CCTV it was observed that coyotes monitor
traffic patterns and vehicle speeds in order to cross roads safely.
In Chicago alone there are an estimated 2,000 coyotes successfully living within the urban
sprawl.
Urban birds are also adapting their street smarts.
Scientists set up problem-solving tests for different species of birds living in cities
and then carried out the same test on rural birds.
The city-slickers were found to be significantly smarter than their rural counterparts and
were able to solve the problems far quicker.
Urban birds have learnt to steal sugar packets from tables outside restaurants and cafes
and even steal food from people’s plates when they’re not looking.
These may not be examples of true evolution, where a physical mutation becomes the norm,
but they do represent huge changes in the way animals behave due to human intervention.
And this is exactly how evolution starts, it won’t be long before urban-dwelling animals
do evolve physically to meet the new demands and challenges that a city lifestyle presents
them with.
And some already have.
Just look at what humans have done with their best friend, the dog.
Humans created dogs.
15,000 years ago there were no dogs.
We formed an unlikely relationship with grey wolves and over the next few thousand years
as our relationship with wolves evolved, so did they.
These fierce predators at the top of their respective food chain became more docile,
their bodies shrunk, and so did their teeth and paws, their ears went all floppy, so us
humans would have to scratch behind them more often.
There are now hundreds of breeds of dogs around the world, with vastly different characteristics
and personalities.
Yet they are all able to reproduce with one-another because they all came from the same species.
Now if human intervention is able to create an entirely new species of animal within such
a tiny period of time, 15,000 years.
Then the possibilities are endless for how other animals can and will change over the
next 1,000 years and beyond.
The common theme here is that we aren’t trying to change animals, we didn’t intend
to alter the wolf so radically, but through rapid evolution, they have adapted themselves
to fit around us humans.
The exact same process is now happening on an unimaginably large scale worldwide, due
to urbanisation.
The effects of human driven evolution in animals is not just a theory.
Like with the African elephants and their ivory, the effects have been observed over
countless species of animals in recent decades.
Songbirds have changed their tune so their acoustics are not lost within the constant
noise of the city below.
Spiders in cities are getting far bigger than their rural cousins, calm down, I’m not
going to show an image.
Insects, rats and mice are becoming immune to insecticides and rat poisons.
And bad news for those who are squeamish about bugs, because bed bugs are fast becoming highly
resistant to all the harsh chemicals we’ve been throwing at them to try and exterminate
them.
In the past few decades bed bugs have become 250 times more resistant to pesticides and
have developed significantly harder shells.
Even weeds are getting in on the action, they’ve developed a resistance to weed-killers, meaning
we’re now going to have to rename all weed-killers to weed-not-killers.
Flowers that are often picked by romantic park dwelling couples are becoming shorter
and shorter every year, so they can hide amongst the other plants and are therefore less likely
to get spotted and plucked from the ground.
On a far larger scale pretty much all species of animal across the planet have changed their
fertility cycles due to global warming.
Many species now breed earlier on in the year than they used to, to account for the messed
up seasons brought on by global warming.
Another of the biggest problems that our urban lifestyles are causing animals is chemical
pollution.
We use a lot of packaging and buy a lot of shiny new technology, all of this requires
the use of chemicals to produce, a lot of these harmful chemicals will inevitably find
their way into rivers.
Some fish are unable to adapt to this pollution and are wiped out.
Other species however have rapidly evolved to become entirely resistant to toxins within
the water.
Atlantic killifish found in Passaic River and Newark Bay in New Jersey are now able
to tolerate toxicity levels 8,000 times higher than other fish.
A trait they’ve been forced to develop due to a nearby chemical factory leaking its toxic
leftovers into the river.
They can literally swim around in horrifically toxic water all day long without any ill effects
whatsoever.
The amazing thing is secluded populations of the killifish developed this anti-toxic
adaptation at the exact same time, without coming into contact with each other.
Humans may not be the most considerate of species.
For a long time, we have disregarded the needs of our animal cousins in exchange for rapid
industrialisation and urbanisation.
So it’s rather endearing to know that nature will mould itself to fit around our foibles.
And thankfully nature is powerful and smart enough to be able to change so rapidly to
a new, unhospitable environment, for if it wasn’t many of the incredible creatures
that we’ve come to care about would probably be extinct today.
Thanks for watching.
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