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How to Talk to Passersby About Urban Evolution… Without Sounding Crazy
Posted by Ruth Rivkin (PhD candidate at University of Toronto Mississauga) We’ve all been there: You’re hard at work sampling on someone’s lawn, in a ditch next to the road, or in a public park, when suddenly you hear a…
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Proc. B Special Issue: Can Random Processes Drive Parallel Evolutionary Responses to Cities?
Continuing our coverage of the recent Proc. B Special Issue on urban evolution, James Santangelo (PhD candidate at University of Toronto Mississauga) tells us about his recent manuscript: One of the outstanding questions in evolutionary biology concerns the extent to which different…
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Tools of the Trade: the Net Gun
Collecting samples in urban environments can present some challenges (as Matt Combs describes in “The Good, The Bad, and The Smelly” and Jane Remfert describes in “Urban Residential Field Tip”). As someone working on pigeons in Northeastern cities, I’ve encountered…
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Why Did the Squirrel Cross the Road?
In cities the number and types of predators drastically differ from nearby rural and “natural” areas. This often means that the biggest threat prey species have to face in cities are domestic predators (dogs and cats) or generalist “mesopredators” like…
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Proc B. Special Issue: Urban Hubs of Connectivity: Contrasting Patterns of Gene Flow Within and Among Cities in the Western Black Widow Spider
In my recent contribution to the special issue on urban evolution in Proceedings B, my co-authors and I share our findings on contrasting patterns of gene flow (paper here). This is one of several posts on the recent special issue…
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Is Artificial Light Changing Pigeon Behavior?
I live in New York City, “city that never sleeps,” where you can get a manicure at 11pm, a haircut at 1am, and a slice of pizza at 3am. While it may be normal for people to be out and…
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The Good, The Bad, and The Smelly: Fieldwork in the Big Apple
I’ve spent years trapping rats across Manhattan in New York City as I study the urban evolution and ecology of brown rats (Rattus norvegicus). This fieldwork has led to many experiences, some good, some bad, and some smelly. Below are my…
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iNaturalist: Track Life in the City Near You!
Many people don’t think about cities as great places to observe wildlife, and most people have no idea what plants and animals live in the city with us! Say you’re walking around in the city and you see an interesting plant…
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