Mammals Moonlight Around Human Settlements

[Judi Lynn]

(Click "Full Transcript" after first paragraph)

By Jason G. Goldman on July 18, 2018

A study of human-mammal interaction across the globe found that animals are more prone to take to the night around humans. Jason G. Goldman reports.

Homo sapiens has an outsized influence on the behavior of other animals. We have long hunted them. More recently, we destroy habitats to build housing and coffee shops, and we build roads to drive from our houses to those coffee shops. But some of our influences are far more subtle.

"My collaborators and I had noticed a striking pattern in some of our own data from far-flung places like Tanzania, Canada, Nepal…where animals we were studying seemed to be more active at night when they were around people.

University of California, Berkeley wildlife ecologist Kaitlyn Gaynor.

To see if animals really were changing their activity schedules, Gaynor and her team rounded up 141 studies of 62 kinds of mammals from across six continents. And they found that mammals near people across the globe have settled on a new strategy for survival: they take to the night, when most of us are comfortably tucked into our beds counting sheep. The finding is in the journal Science. [Kaitlyn M. Gaynor, et al. The influence of human disturbance on wildlife nocturnality.]

More:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/mammals-moonlight-around-human-settlements/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+energy-and-sustainability+%28Topic%3A+Energy+%26+Sustainability%29