11 Animals That Are EVOLVING To The Modern Times
11.
Pink Salmon Have Pushed Up Their Migrating Schedules
In an instance of one of the most rapid adaptations to climate change, pink salmon are migrating
earlier in the year than they did thirty years ago.
This is a result of shifting water temperatures.
According to researchers, the tendency among these fish to travel from the ocean into rivers
to reproduce roughly two weeks earlier than they used to has become genetically ingrained.
The change appears to be the result of natural selection, which has conditioned the fish
to avoid inhospitably warm waters.
10.
The Rise of the Super Bedbug As the number of bedbug infestations has risen
over the past few decades, human beings have relied on basic pesticides to keep them at
bay.
But studies by leading entomologists continue to show that these home-invaders have grown
increasingly resistant to both traditional and newly developed poisons.
In the instances where bedbugs are vulnerable to the chemicals that used to kill them within
minutes, they now take up to seven days to die.
Scientists and exterminators now recommend against an overreliance on insecticides, citing
a higher need for other remedies such as mattress encasements and traps.
9.
African Elephants Are Ditching Their Tusks African elephants were once famous for both
their imposing size and the long tusks that differentiated them from most Asian elephants.
But over the course of the last century, as poaching related to the ivory trade has diminished
their populations across the continent, African elephants have adapted by losing their tusks
or passing along the “tuskless” gene to their offspring.
While this may arguably make them less of a target for poachers, living without tusks
can be a tremendous disadvantage for elephants in the wild.
Functioning as extended curved teeth, tusks allow elephants to dig up the ground, strip
bark from trees, defend themselves against other animals, and instigate mating rituals.
This adaptation is making elephants best-suited to live in human-controlled wildlife preserves
rather than the wild they’ve always known.
The effect of poaching and big game hunting on this once-iconic mammal serves as a living
example of human beings’ collective impact on the planet.
8.
Some House Mice Have Beaten the Pesticides Household pesticides used to be the best way
to rid a residence of mice or other vermin.
But with the significant increase in travel between Europe and North Africa over the past
thirty years, Spanish and German house mice have crossed with Algerian mice, a species
with whom they had last interacted almost 3,000,000 years ago.
The common ingredient in most pesticides is warfarin, a chemical agent originally used
by doctors to break down blood clots in their patients.
But too high a dosage of warfarin can be fatal, which is why it became a reliable weapon against
rodents.
Because Algerian mice are a different species from Spanish and German mice, they do not
suffer the same vulnerabilities to warfarin.
Geneticists expressed surprise at the newfound resistance to domestic poisons, as such a
horizontal gene transfer enabling survival against these outside factors is more common
in bacteria or plant life.
7.
Peppered Moths Turned White to Black to White Again
The peppered moth, popularly known as “Darwin’s Moth,” adapted to its starkly changed habitat
by turning from white to black in the wake of Britain’s industrial revolution.
This color change allowed peppered moths to blend in with soot-covered surfaces blackened
by factory pollution.
But as the air quality in the United Kingdom has improved over the past few decades, these
moths have begun to change back to their original color.
While the numbers between black and white moths are roughly even today, scientists have
determined that white moths will eventually return as the dominant representation of the
species.
Many point to this chain of transformations over two centuries as a living example of
Darwin’s theory of evolution, from which the moths take their nickname.
6.
Red Squirrels Deliver Earlier In the early 2000s, scientists discovered
that red squirrels had become the first mammals to adjust to the shifting environmental circumstances
tied to climate change.
Experts at the University of Alberta analyzed the behavior of these squirrels over ten years,
witnessing the actions of four generations in the process.
They discovered that the squirrels started giving birth almost three weeks earlier than
they previously did each year.
This change in birth rate is a direct result of seasonal changes in the region.
The squirrels that pushed back their birth cycles due to the temperature produced longer-living
offspring.
5.
Fence Lizards Are Natural Dancers In the early 20th Century, when fire ants
first arrived in the continental United States, southwest fence lizards were ill-equipped
to deal with them.
As few as 10-to-12 fire ants were once capable of immobilizing and killing one of these desert-dwelling
reptiles.
Over time, however, the fence lizard developed an ability to shake and shimmy the ants off
of itself.
It then passed on the instinct to do so to its offspring, along with longer legs and
greater agility that enabled it to escape faster.
The lizard’s signature “dance” stands today as one of the most original methods
of survival into which an animal has ever adapted.
4.
Capuchin Monkeys Are Looters Due to the sprawling urban development of
the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, capuchin monkeys in the neighboring hills have found
their habitats either negatively affected or destroyed.
In order to survive, these monkeys have become city-dwellers (and not the law-abiding kind).
Because some local residents and many tourists consider the small primates endearing enough
to feed, capuchin monkeys have learned to associate humans with food.
As a result, entire bands of them commit breaking-and-entering on a near-daily basis.
Despite their adorable appearance and expressive faces, capuchin monkeys are capable of serious
destruction in pursuit of their own survival.
Many homeowners have reported stepping into houses ransacked by what they thought were
human burglars, but later turned out to be the region’s cutest criminals.
The well-orchestrated process by which the monkeys invade these residences speaks to
their intelligence and ability to adapt to a drastically different environment.
Many will climb power lines onto rooftops where they can hide in gutters or chimneys.
One monkey becomes the designated “lookout” and alerts the others that a home is ready
to be looted by imitating a bird call.
This is the type of scene most people would expect to find in a DreamWorks animated feature,
but it has become a very real problem for the people of Rio.
3.
Crazy Ants Have Crazy Homes Found everywhere from humid coastal areas
to dry deserts, crazy ants have learned to beat the heat by burrowing into some of the
items humans depend on most...and then destroying them from inside.
These appropriately-named insects build their homes within household electronics.
In everything from wall sockets to desktop computers to air conditioning units, crazy
ants reproduce in quantities surpassing those of all other ant species by 100-to-1.
Because they set up their homes indoors, they are less likely to be picked off by predators,
a benefit that allows their numbers to multiply quickly and without interruption.
Their unusually small size allows them to enter almost any protected cavity.
They can even invade items as small as cell phones or calculators.
Further separating them from other ants is their lack of an instinct to dig tunnels,
advancing instead into already existing tunnels within man-made gadgets such as electrical
wires.
They are also known to use everything around them as supplies, even each other.
When fellow ants are electrocuted by a still-working electronic item in which they swarm, their
comrades add their corpses to the network of nests.
As if all this couldn’t create enough headaches for the average homeowner, crazy ants have
also developed an immunity to many go-to pesticides used by exterminators.
In one instance, out of 150 air conditioning units in an apartment building in Waco, Texas,
90 were infested with crazy ants.
It took months to rid the structure of those infestations, leaving its units empty except
for the tiniest, most determined tenants.
2.
The Emergence of the “Grolar Bear” From ocean pollution to melting ice caps,
no other bear on earth has had to deal with more environmental hazards than the polar
bear.
In search of habitats with cold enough climates, polar bears sometimes cross with grizzlies,
leading to the creation of polar-grizzly hybrids, also known as “grolar bears” or “prizzlies.”
First encountered in Canada in 2006, the grolar bear has the ability of the polar bear to
survive in freezing weather and the hunting instincts of the grizzly.
Its appearance speaks to its hybrid genetics.
It has the polar bear’s long snout and light-furred torso mixed with a grizzly bear’s muscular
build and dark-furred limbs.
And unlike other animal hybrids, grolar bears are capable of reproducing, ensuring the unique
survival of both species.
1.
Russian Dogs Who Catch the Train Moscow, Russia, is one of the busiest cities
in the world.
As such, it has a large and complex underground metro system.
In order to find both consistent food supplies and adequate shelter, stray dogs all over
the city have developed an understanding of the trains and where they go.
Unaffected by the presence of strangers and loud noises during rush hour, which would
unsettle domesticated canines, Moscow’s strays are able to calmly travel from one
area of the city to another just like any commuter.
And because their instinct is to travel safely, they rarely approach surrounding humans or
threaten them, though there are instances of what observers call the “bark-and-grab.”
The dogs will approach humans holding food from behind, bark or jump up at them, then
quickly snatch the dropped food items.
Visitors to Moscow’s underground will likely find most citizens barely notice the animals.
They are just fellow residents trying to make it in the big city.