Evolution in an Urbanizing World
One thing I always wonder when I see birds flying around cities is "where are they nesting???" Fortunately, the Audubon Society has an answer for that question - many birds nest in and on buildings and other anthropogenic structures. For example: Chimney swifts nest inside of chimneys Cliff swallows build mud nests on the sides... Continue Reading →
This post is part of our series covering the large number of urban evolution manuscripts that were published in August in the special issue "The Evolution of City Life" in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Urban environments are often composed of novel communities of native and introduced species. In several cities in Germany,... Continue Reading →
The Smithsonian Channel and Day's Edge Productions have put together a fantastic mini-series and a full-length documentary on anole evolutionary research. Episode 7 of the miniseries and part of the full-length movie feature urban lizards and urban evolution research by myself and my collaborators, Shane Campbell-Staton (UCLA) and Jason Kolbe / the Kolbe lab (U. Rhode Island). Check out... Continue Reading →
The annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) is almost here! From January 3-7 biologists will convene in Tampa, Florida to share the latest and greatest from a broad range of research areas. Urban evolution talks have a strong showing at the meeting this year, and we would like to hear... Continue Reading →
Urbanization impacts species in many different ways, including behavior, morphology, and physiology. Although many of the documented phenotypic shifts show evidence of a genetic basis, the actual genetic differences and the genes they occur in are unknown for most urban adaptations. In fact, it seems we know very little at the genetic level regarding which... Continue Reading →
As the field of urban ecology and evolution advances, one major issue consistently jumps out at me: the lack of information on basic ecology and natural history of many species in urban environments. Such information provides a background for hypothesis driven research, a context for interpreting results, and a comparative baseline. Evolutionary studies, particularly those framed... Continue Reading →
Above: Fig. 2 from Rivkin et al: many species have been shown to adapt to cities. Thompson et al. ask whether or not this could lead to speciation. Organisms that persist in urban environments are subject to novel selective pressures as they exploit this novel niche space. We now know that this ecological shift can lead to... Continue Reading →
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 raccoons, coyotes, or foxes. That is, unless you consider the threat from humans, and in... Continue Reading →
In their recent contribution to the special issue on urban evolution in Proceedings B, Sarah Diamond and team share their exciting results on detecting parallel and non-parallel physiological responses to the urban heat island in acorn ants (paper here). This is the first of several posts to come on the recent special issue on urban evolution... Continue Reading →
Thanks for joining me! From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved - Charles Darwin
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