• What animals have learned to use the subway and obey traffic signals?
What animals showed a rapid, mass evolution over the course of just 15 years?
Usually evolution takes millions of years, but here are 10 ways creatures are evolving
right now, before our very eyes.
10 –Subway Dogs • The subway system of a major city is difficult
enough to navigate for humans.
Like, even if you’re looking at the map, and a dozen people have already told you how
to do it, it’s still confusing.
• But the stray dogs of Moscow have it figured out.
They get on and off and specific stops, catch a nap on the ride, and even hop up on the
seats if there’s room.
• They’re also known to obey traffic laws when above ground, crossing at crosswalks,
and only when the light turns.
9 –Blind Cave Creatures • For a creature to evolve into not having
eyes, seems like more of a de-evolution than anything.
Isn’t losing your eyes moving in the wrong direction?
• Well, most of those creatures can’t really see much anyway, living in the total
complete darkness of a deep cave.
And food is scarce as well, so energy is at a premium.
• So, since they weren’t using their eyes anyway, they just stopped developing them.
By doing this, they conserve 15% more energy by not needing to use brainpower on vision.
• In fact, several cave dwellers are evolving to the point where they are developing brains
without any vision centers at all.
8 –Tuskless Elephants • Elephants originally developed tusks to
help them fight off predators.
• That was then.
Now, elephants’ most deadly predator is humans.
And tusks don’t help them fight off human predators – they DRAW them.
• Poaching has become such a serious problem, that it has actually changed the gene pool
for elephants.
• Previously, around two to six percent of African elephants were born tuskless.
Now it’s closer to 98 percent, as elephants born with tusks are frequently poached for
the ivory.
• In the past decade, about one-third of Africa’s elephants have been killed for
their tusks.
The ones that are left get to live long enough to breed.
And that always includes the tuskless ones.
7 –Toxin-resistant cave fish • The indigenous Zoque people of Mexico
have had a ritual in which they travel into a dark sulfuric cave to ask their gods for
a good rainy season and good harvests.
• Part of the ceremony involves pouring an into the water that is toxic to the cave
fish – which, incidentally, are one of those previously-mentioned creatures thatevolved
to lose their eyes.
• The practice was eventually banned by the Mexican government over ecological concerns.
• But ecologists decided to study the long-term effect of the ritual on the fish, and found
that over time, the fish had evolved to become resistant to the paste.
6 –Poison-immune mice • Some European house mice – particularly
those from Germany and Spain – have evolved into being poison-resistant.
• But it wasn’t something that happened through natural selection over time.
Instead, they interbred with an Algerian species of mouse that they had been separate from
for over a thousand years.
• This led to a rare gene transfer, usually seen only in plants or bacteria.
The cross-bred mice are resistant to poison, and not sterile, like many cross-bred animals.
5 –Flowers with a bird perch • The Rat’s Tail is a type of flowering
plant native to South Africa that relies primarily on birds for pollination.
• And because they rely on birds for pollination, they evolved in a very specific way.
Unlike most flowers, the Rat’s Tail grows a flower at the base, and has a long, branchless
stem growing above it.
• Birds perch on the stem, hang upside-down, and reach down into the flower at the base
of the plant to drink its nectar.
• Scientists now believe that was an intentional evolution, and that the stem was grown specifically
to be a bird perch.
4 –Tawny owl color change • Tawny owls come in two different colors
– a light grey, and a reddish brown.
The northern European birds generally have adopted those two colors for camouflage.
• The brown ones blend in better with trees, the grey ones blend in with ice and snow.
• As a result, grey owls are far more common in Northern Europe, especially Finland, where
it tends to snow more.
• But over the past 50 years, there has been a steady increase in the brown-colored
Tawny owls.
• As the climate warms and winters become milder, the brown coloration is more advantageous,
and more owls of that color are surviving and breeding.
3 –Climbing Lizards • One of the most stunning recent examples
of a species’ rapid evolution has happened in the green anoles, a small lizard native
to Florida.
• The brown anole, a closely-related relative, is an invasive species native to Cuba, but
they are bigger and stronger than the green anole, and quickly dominated the ground.
• As a result, the green anole had no choice but to climb up and live in bushes and branches,
where their larger cousins couldn’t get to them.
• This has led to an incredible rate of evolution.
In just 15 years, the green anole has developed much larger toe pads, with sticker grips,
to better adapt to living higher up in trees.
• The rate of changewould be equal to the average human height increasing from 5 feet
9 inches to 6 feet 4 inches, in a matter of 20 generations.
2 –Chemical immunity in fish • The Hudson River is not the friendliest
ecosystem.
• For decades, General Electric dumped over a million pounds of toxic chemicals into the
river before environmental regulations came into play in the 1970s and finally told them
to stop poisoning the river.
• But the chemicals – known as PCBs – are still there, resting on the river bottom.
And they’re very harmful to the Atlantic Tomcod, one of the river’s most plentiful
native fish.
• The chemical exposure should have wiped out the tomcod, but instead, it actually mutated
their DNA to blunt the toxic effects of the chemicals.
• That’s good for the tomcod… but bad for the larger fish that feed on them, not
knowing they’re about to chow down on a toxic fish.
1 –Bed Bugs that Won’t Die • If you see a bed bug, the first thing
you need to do is kill the bed bug, and then make sure you kill its entire family.
• That usually involves sprays and bug bombs, made to poison the little pests to death.
• But in New York City, those tricks aren’t working anymore.
They’re building up a resistance to two common chemicals – one used by exterminators,
the other found in sprays and insecticides commonly found in stores.
• The poison still kills them – for now – it just takes an awful lot more of it
than it used to.
Over time, maybe it will even make them stronger.