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The Snake Next Door
Image: Common Vine Snake (Ahaetulla nasuta) — Raju Kasambe / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
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Accidental Ecosystems: How Dutch Homes Became Bat Caves
Hidden Tenants in Our Homes Hidden inside the walls of many Dutch homes lives one of the Netherlands’ most successful urban mammals: the ‘gewone dwergvleermuis’, or Common Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pipistrellus). Dutch houses weren’t purposefully designed to become bat caves, yet…
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From fields to sewers: how rats thrive in the city
Cities are not as empty at night as they seem. When humans go to sleep, another species becomes active. They move through walls, drains, and hidden corners of the city: rats. These city rats deal with a very different kind…
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Human disgust is quietly driving urban evolution
When people think about urban evolution, their first thought tends to be how animals adapt to urban environments by dealing with pollution, traffic, noise, or artificial light. Urban evolution is generally considered to be biological evolution in response to changing…
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The Fearless Pigeon: Master of Urban Adaptation
Everyone has experienced the lurking of pigeons close to them, waiting for the right opportunity for a crumb of your sandwich to fall to the ground. They fearlessly walk among crowds or fly above our heads while dropping presents. We…
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From ancient city builders to city adapters
Around 100 million years ago, long before humans evolved, the first cities were built on earth [1]. Although these cities were not visible from space, they did already influence the world around them. These infrastructures were built by a small…
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When roads split species: Are urban newts evolving apart?
In cities, nature rarely disappears completely, it simply gets rearranged. For the great crested newt (Triturus cristatus), urban landscapes form networks of breeding ponds separated by roads, buildings, and other barriers. At first glance, these ponds may seem like isolated…
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Urban corals are following in the footsteps of pigeons
When you think of animals that thrive in the city, the first thing that comes to mind might be pigeons and raccoons, but certainly not corals. These are the organisms that are widely known to be sensitive to the effects…
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