Urban Evolution

Is it possible that, given enough time, animals could fully adapt to an urban/human-dominated environment?

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Define "fully adapt"
Define "animals" (which animals)

Sure, why not.

>Define "fully adapt"
Mainly exploiting any possible niches that may become available, or taking over niches that been emptied.

>Define "animals" (which animals)
Any animals adaptable enough to survive. (snakes, rats, crows, pigs, etc.)
Should've included plants, too.

Well it's already happening with some animals but the majority of animals are not adapting well to urbanization.

What usually happens is the few animals that do well in urban environments out-compete all the other animals that lived there before the urbanization. Seagulls, coyotes, raccoons, squirrels, cockroaches.

In ringworld (a sci-fi book) no pests exist on ringworld (a ring-shaped world) so humans had an evolutionary radiation and filled all the ecological niches that pest usually fill.

So there would be less biodiversity (bad for a lot of reasons) and the things that do persist wouldn't be great (think gross things).

Well, "adapt" basically just means to not go extinct, right? So, I suppose these animals didn't adapt,

West African Black Rhinoceros
Pyrenean Ibex
Passenger Pigeon
Quagga
Caribbean Monk Seal
Sea Mink
Tasmanian Tiger
Tecopa Pupfish
Javan Tiger
Great Auk
Bubal Hartebeest

Arguably, I suppose some pigeons, raccoons, squirrels, rats, etc. have "adapted".

Possums, rats, roaches,pigeons, mice and bedbugs seem to be doing pretty well.

Less biodiversity initially, sure. That would happen before any radiation of new species into a depleted environment.

In the case of the Ringworld, biodiversity was not a problem, for reasons that I won't give away as spoilers but which do not apply on Earth.

So nothing like this? Bear in mind, these are supposed to be from around/past 10 million years in the future.

If humanity managed to maintain a sustainable way of living for a long time I guess animals would evolve to fill niches and we'd new species like your picture. And biodiversity would improve.

You mean will beasts ever care where they crap?

Well, at least that's somewhat comforting.

That assumes cities stay a static ecosystem but they don't. Human cities change every few years.

What about the land outside of the cities, like landfills, deserts, and the remnants of forests?

Urban rats kinda already are. They ran some comparative tests and found that they are magnitudes smarter than their immediate wild relatives.

They also, of course, build much larger families - more like nations than tribes - which occasionally war on each other.

Increased social interaction creates an evolutionary feedback loop, in cases where social pressures increase natural selection pressures, and more and more brain power is required to thrive in the increasingly complex social environment. Add to that all the artificial threats and clever scavenging techniques these critters have to adapt to, and pretty soon, well, pic related.

(or "Ben"...)

>*pic related

Surprisingly, my mind went to this.

No, cities can still be dynamic just not too dynamic. We just need to get rates of extinction down to background levels (right now it's far too high).

They're no evolution without evolutionary pressure so some change is good, it just can't be too quick or too great.

There's a new type of house cat that looks like a chupacabra and hunts in packs like wolves... Supposedly because it's ferrell house cats that adapted to urbanization

Seems you have a few options...

- Be cute and cuddly, docile and domesticable.

- Be edible and domesticable.

- Be extremely omnivorous, resistant to toxins, and be too small and mobile to be easily exterminated - and breed like mad. Preferably combined one or both of the above.

- Be a useful, easily corralled insect.

Basically, in the long run, nothing on land going to survive, unless we adopt it, or can't exterminate it.

I suspect even the domesticated feed animals will go near extinct, as soon as we find a artificially produce the meat and materials they provide more cheaply than we can by farming them, even if they collectively outweigh at the moment. We're gonna want that land back, once they start to outlive their usefulness.

That's pretty cool.

Sauce?

Feral cats usually form colonies of females that boot out lone breeding males that then roam from colony to colony, alternating between getting laid and getting BTFO.

I'd like to see the adorable article though.

herofan135.deviantart.com/gallery/45327524/The-urban-future

Going off of this, do you think it's possible for an animal or plant or fungi or any organism to gain some adaptation or mutation that allows them to digest plastic? Plastics are made from oils in the earths crust which came from old dinosaur-time fauna. I'm sure there are organisms alive today that are able to use the crude oil as a carbon source, but when it's been refined and turned into plastic, the half-life goes to something like 1 million years.

But if there are organisms that can digest the crude oil, why isn't there an even more specialized organism? In my opinion something like this popping up is a matter of when not if. And if my hunch is correct, do you think having huge dumps full of garbage and plastic would make it more likely for an organism like this to exist, or would spreading out our plastic worldwide give life more of a chance at adapting to this niche? I always see campaigns about getting the plastic out of our ocean and all that, but wouldn't it be ironic if having garbage all over the place actually helped bring about a solution?

Yeah that would be a good solution to the plastic problem.
Unfortunately right now there's no known organism that digests plastic but I wouldn't put it past an undiscovered/future type of bacteria or archea. Some of those microbes are crazy fuckers.

That's what I'm saying. Do you think it's more likely if we concentrate a shit ton of plastic into a giant pile like we do in garbage dumps? I figure that's a breeding ground for all new types of nasty organisms, and if there's a lot of plastic around maybe a new organism will start to make use of it (because theres so much of it). On the other hand, if we spread out our plastic across the world, the full force of Earth's biodiversity can attack it from all different angles. I think a plastic eating organism is actually more likely to turn up in our oceans because it's more diverse, but is it worth polluting our oceans with plastic in an attempt to get mother nature to solve our problem for us?

Here's an exerpt from a book that covers this subject.

>He sat down on his haunches, motionless, and watched as more and more curious small mammals began to emerge. Clearly, many of the species he could now see were unfamiliar to him. Although their bodies looked like those of the rodents of his time, their heads were distinctly different. It was clear that many distinct species were present, some with long tapered heads, others with thin ribbonlike tongues, others with blunt heads and large knoblike teeth, still others with huge batlike eyes. Some had fur in a variety of camouflage patterns, while others were hairless. Some were heavily armored with armadillo-like scales. Some had front legs exquisitely adapted for digging; others had long needlelike claws extending from their toes. The small forms wormed among the garbage, some using their impossibly long tongues to probe into the piled refuse, while others broke open some of the many scattered bones to root out the marrow.

Seems more likely they'll just eat what little food there is rather than eating plastic.

Actually, there are fungi that eat plastic and polymers. There's bacteria that eat petroleum.

There's even fungi that'll eat aluminum.

(Bloody nevocellular freaks, I'm convinced these damned things are of alien origin.)

One of fun apocalyptic scenario involves a rapidly breeding airborne petrol and plastic eating bacteria, perhaps weaponized, that brings a quick end to civilization.

>but is it worth polluting our oceans with plastic in an attempt to get mother nature to solve our problem for us?
There's an "island of plastic the size of Texas" in the pacific ocean (more of a concentration, really), but I don't think anyone put it there deliberately.

>but I don't think anyone put it there deliberately.
Exactly, and people are actually working to clean up the plastic. Which is why I want to know if having plastic in the ocean could actually be a good thing in the long run.

>There's even fungi that'll eat aluminum.
Since they are fungi, I'm assuming they also use the sun as an energy source. If these guys are using photosynthesis, where is the aluminum coming into play? They obviously aren't breaking it down on the molecular level so they must be using metallic aluminum or aluminum oxide as a key component in their body. Very interesting and exactly the kind of specimen I'm interested in. Do you know where this species was found?

To answer your question OP, the answer is no

Evolution is multivariable, evolutionary constraints are random and ecological restraints are random

If there were no possible ecological variable changes (no change in an areas temperatures, climate, soil properties, etc) and there was no change in predation from other species, and completely absent potentials for mutations among us- our genes always stay the same, then yes. This assumes the stereotypical high school "hardy weinberg principle." But since these issues will occur, variation will always continue to favor the rabbit that can run away from the fox faster than his fat slow friends and rabbits become faster as a population overtime.


So no, it will never occur and would even likely still occur given the above scenario

fungi arent using photosynthesis

Really? I have two questions then. How do fungi normally get energy? And how does this specific fungi use aluminum to get energy? I was under the impression that unless you're an animal, you need to use sunlight to survive (or in rare cases heated sulfuric vents at the bottom of the ocean).

>exploiting any possible niches that may become available
Like birds using cars at trafficlights to crack nuts?

>unless you're an animal, you need to use sunlight to survive
Most fungi get nutrients by releasing enzymes that break other products down or extract building materials from them, including polymers, releasing carbohydrates and nitrogen from these sources (making them one of the few creatures that can grow, not only completely independent of sunlight, but sometimes without air, or even water - though the lack of the latter will stop most and slow others, and tends to be required at some point of the cycle). The sunlight thing, however, isn't technically universally true, even for some plants, even if it's certainly the norm for them (and generally a defining factor). Many fungi, on the other hand, actually tend to fully abhor sunlight, as it will kill them or at least inhibit their growth. Generally, warm, moist, and dark is the preferred habitat.

If you look into fungi too deeply, you'll find they truly terrifying creations, staggering in variation, all but completely alien in their biological functions to any other lifeforms on the planet, and in many ways, the core mechanism of the cycle of death.

>Which is why I want to know if having plastic in the ocean could actually be a good thing in the long run.
Well, I suppose, as Goldbloom says, "Life will find a way.", but it kills a lot of the existing life forms, risking a collapse of the ecosystem, and anything that lives on stuff that eats plastic, is probably going to be pretty toxic to us.

>To answer your question OP, the answer is no
>Evolution is...

I am not sure that OP's question really pertained to evolution. Multiple species have adapted to urban environments without noticeably evolving. To the list already posting, I'd add a prominent one -- Homo sapiens seems to do quite well.

Or using skyscrapers as perching.nesting sites.

The American opossum is just one species that has adapted behaviorally to take advantage of the rich food source represented by back-alley dumpsters and trash cans. The geographical range of ol' Mr. 'Possum has increased in the wake of urbanization.

Aren't some forms of deer doing well, too?

Not so much in urban environments, and insomuch as they are anywhere, only with our blessing.

Still think - or just being so damned invasive you can't be gotten rid of in the foreseeable future, are the only evolutionary paths remaining for land dwelling critters. Though, I suppose if we become mad technological gods one day, angry sterilizing nanites will take care of that last group too.

Could isolated parks be a possible refuge for them?

Until we decide we don't want them there, or need those parks for something else.

Land reserves, like Yellowstone, work fine for deer, for now, but parks in cities do not, and urbanization and habitat destruction is going to continue to spread indefinitely - unless we develop biological immortality and enforce a population cap on ourselves or some other strange such thing.

Given we wiped out about 50% of the land dwelling megafauna over the past half century alone, I suspect, by the time our grandchildren come along, there won't be any such thing as large "wild animals" - only the domesticated, the few feral ones derived from them, and perhaps a handful of reserves in zoos and such.

Won't the global population plateau around the 11 billion mark?

On a related note: could (increased) time travel be a viable solution to overcrowding?

Meh, that plateau is one of many dreams for which the evidence is dubious. But even if the population was made static now, the resource usage and exploitation would not be, particularly as the developing nations advance, thus habitat destruction will continue for the foreseeable future, as resources are consumed and acquired. So while such a plateau may slow it down, as may certain advancements in recycling, it won't stop it, and ultimately, they are all doomed.

Unless, I suppose, we take their genetic record to the stars and start setting up habitat worlds elsewhere.

>Ctrl+F Planet Earth 2
>0 of 0
Step it up anons, the episode on cities is exactly what you're looking for

Bump

>If you look into fungi too deeply, you'll find they are truly terrifying creations
i.4cdn.org/wsg/1486703180139.webm

Bump

who do you think the elites are, fungi controled humans bro