• Complain

Schilthuizen - Darwin comes to town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

Here you can read online Schilthuizen - Darwin comes to town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2018, publisher: Picador, genre: Art. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

No cover
  • Book:
    Darwin comes to town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Picador
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2018
  • Rating:
    3 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 60
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Darwin comes to town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Darwin comes to town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

*Carrion crows in the Japanese city of Sendai have learned to use passing traffic to crack nuts.*Lizards in Puerto Rico are evolving feet that better grip surfaces like concrete.*Europes urban blackbirds sing at a higher pitch than their rural cousins, to be heardover the din of traffic. How is this happening?Menno Schilthuizen is one of a growing number of urban ecologists studying how our manmade environments are accelerating and changing the evolution of the animals and plants around us. In Darwin Comes to Town, he takes us around the world for an up-close look at just how stunningly flexible and swift-moving natural selection can be. With human populations growing, were having an increasing impact on global ecosystems, and nowhere do these impacts overlap as much as they do in cities. The urban environment is about as extreme as it gets, and the wild animals and plants that live side-by-side with us need to adapt to a whole suite of challenging conditions: they must manage in the citys hotter climate (the urban heat island); they need to be able to live either in the semidesert of the tall, rocky, and cavernous structures we call buildings or in the pocket-like oases of city parks (which pose their own dangers, including smog and free-rangingdogs and cats); traffic causes continuous noise, a mist of fine dust particles, and barriers to movement for any animal that cannot fly or burrow; food sources are mainly human-derived. And yet, as Schilthuizen shows, the wildlife sharing these spaces with us is not just surviving, but evolving ways of thriving. Darwin Comes toTown draws on eye-popping examples of adaptation to share a stunning vision of urban evolution in which humans and wildlife co-exist in a unique harmony. It reveals that evolution can happen far more rapidly than Darwin dreamed, while providing a glimmer of hope that our race toward over population might not take the rest of nature down with us.

Schilthuizen: author's other books


Who wrote Darwin comes to town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Darwin comes to town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Darwin comes to town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Contents
Guide
Pagebreaks of the print version
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use - photo 1

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use - photo 2

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

for Iva

Its perfectly formed. A miracle of micro-engineering ready for its short visit to the world. Gossamer wings, still unfrayed, folded carefully over its imperceptibly breathing abdomen. Six nimble legs, delicately placed on the dusty wall, in mint conditioneach with a complete set of nine segments, not yet diminished in number by sharp connections with ventilation fans or jumping spiders forelegs. Its golden-bristled thorax, a power nugget encasing the balled-up energy of flight muscles, so massive that it almost hides from view the serene face behind which a miniaturized brain coordinates input and output channels of antennae, palps, all-seeing eyes, and the eight interlocking sheaths of its parasitic proboscis.

I am standing in a hot and crowded pedestrian tunnel of London Undergrounds Liverpool Street station, spectacles in one hand, nose pressed against the tiled wall, admiring this fine specimen of the house mosquito, Culex molestus , freshly emerged from its pupa. But I am slowly waking up from my entomological reverie. Not only because of the rushed passersby that avoid knocking into me with a last-second swerve and a muttered excuse me that is more accusatory than apologetic, but also because I am becoming uncomfortably aware of the CCTV camera suspended from the ceiling and Transport for Londons repeatedly broadcast advice to its passengers to report any suspicious behavior to a member of staff.

For a biologist, the inner city is an unlikely place for any professional activities. The unwritten rule among biologists is that, when prompted, one should answer gruffly that cities are only necessary evils where a true biologist spends as little time as possible. The real world lies outside the urban realm, in forests, dales, and fields. Where the wild things are.

But if I am honest I must admit I secretly like cities. Not so much the organized, slick, well-oiled parts of them, but rather the grimy, organic fabric of the city, revealed in forgotten corners where the threadbare carpet of culture gives waythe citys underbelly where the artificial and the natural meet and engage in ecological relations. To my biologists eye, the inner city, for all its hustle and bustle and thoroughly unnatural appearance, becomes a constellation of miniature ecosystems. Even in these seemingly sterile, thoroughly brick-and-concrete-clad streets of Bishopsgate, I spot life-forms that cling on in stubborn defiance. Here, a snapdragon growing in wild profusion from some invisible crack in the plastered wall of a flyover. There, the unspeakable chemistry between cement and leaked sewage from which glassy off-white icicles are born, which in turn serve as anchor points for the soot-dusted webs of common orb-weaver spiders. The emerald veins of moss sprouting from the slits between cracked reinforced glass and its frame, fighting for supremacy with the rust bubbles working their way through the red lead paint. Feral rock pigeons with diseased feet balance among the plastic spines on a ledge. (Somebody has put up a sticker next to it showing an enraged pigeon with balled wing-fists, saying: Plastic needles represent a cynical, oppressive restriction of our right to free assembly. This fight is not over!) And a mosquito on the wall of a train station underpass.

It is not just any mosquito. Culex molestus is also known as the London Underground mosquito. It gained this name first because of the havoc it wreaked on Londoners sheltering on the platforms and tracks of the Central line at Liverpool Street station during the German bombing raids of the city in 1940. And then, in the 1990s, because of the interest taken in them by University of London geneticist Katharine Byrne. Byrne joined maintenance crews on their daily expeditions into the bowels of the citys tube network. They went into the deepest parts of the tunnels where the brick walls supporting tangles of wrist-thick electric cables are blackened by dust from the trains brake shoes, and where the only place indicators are mysterious codes in chalk, spray paint, and ancient enameled plates. Here, the London Underground mosquitoes live and breed. They steal the blood of commuters, and lay their eggs in flooded sumps and shafts, which is where Byrne collected their larvae.

She took samples of water-with-larvae from seven places on the Central, Victoria, and Bakerloo lines, brought them to her lab, waited for the larvae to develop into adult mosquitoes (like the one I saw on that tunnel wall) and then extracted their proteins for genetic analysis. Twenty years ago, I saw her present her results at a conference in Edinburgh. Even though her audience consisted of seasoned evolutionary biologists, she managed to thrill us all. First, the underground mosquitoes in the three tube lines were genetically different from one another. This was, Byrne told us, because the tube lines form nearly separate worlds, with the clouds of mosquitoes in each line stirred and mixed by the constant piston-like action of trains moving around in snugly-fitting tunnels. The only way for the mosquitoes in the Central, Bakerloo and Victoria lines to become genetically mixed, she pointed out, would be for all of them to change trains at Oxford Circus station. But not only were the mosquitoes in separate underground tubes different from each other. They were also different from their above-ground relatives. Not just in their proteins, but also in their way of life. Up on Londons streets, the mosquitoes feed on bird, not human, blood. They need a blood meal before they can lay their eggs, they mate in large swarms, and they hibernate. Down in the tube, the mosquitoes suck commuters blood and lay eggs before feeding; they dont form mating swarms but seek their sexual pleasures in confined spaces, and are active the whole year round.

Since Byrnes work, it has become clear that the Underground mosquito is not unique to London. It lives in cellars, basements and subways all over the world, and it has adapted its ways to its human-sculpted environment. Thanks to mosquitoes that get trapped in cars and planes, its genes spread from city to city, but at the same time it also cross-breeds with local above-ground mosquitoes, absorbing genes from that source as well. And it has also become clear that all this has happened very, very recentlyprobably only since humans began constructing underground buildings, did Culex molestus evolve.

As I take a last good look at my very own London Underground mosquito, in that crowded passageway in Liverpool Street station, I imagine the invisible modifications that evolution has accomplished inside that tiny, fragile body. Proteins in its antennae have changed shape so that our human odors, rather than bird smells, elicit a response. Genes that regulate its biological clock have been reset or turned off, to prevent it from going into hibernation, since there is always human blood underground and it never gets very cold. And think of the complex diversifications that have been needed for the change in sexual behavior! From a species where the males swarm in large clouds that females dart in and out of to seek fertilization, to one that mates by simple one-on-one pairing in the small spaces where the sparsely distributed underground mosquitoes happen to run into each other.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Darwin comes to town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution»

Look at similar books to Darwin comes to town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Darwin comes to town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution»

Discussion, reviews of the book Darwin comes to town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.