How animals, bugs and plants are evolving in cities | Menno Schilthuizen

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 24 August 2020

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

In cities, evolution occurs constantly, as countless plants, animals and insects adapt to human-made habitats in spectacular ways. Evolutionary biologist Menno Schilthuizen calls on peculiar beings such as fast food-loving mice and self-cooling snails to illustrate the ever-transforming wonders of urban wildlife -- and explains how you can observe this phenomenon in real-time, thanks to a global network of enthusiastic citizen scientists.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. Our environments are changing rapidly, largely because of us, humans. What do today's cities, full of noise and pollution and light, do to wild animals and plants? Evolutionary biologist Meno Schilthausen is the voice behind today's talk from
0:22.8	TEDx Roma in 2019. He covers the amazing adaptability of animal and plant species. They were forced into
0:30.3	what he calls a pressure cooker of evolution, but they've found fascinating ways to survive and even
0:36.0	thrive. I loved the geeky anecdotes in this one.
0:39.9	Hope you do too.
0:42.8	A small village near the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. This is where I grew up.
0:49.5	In the 1970s and 1980s, when I was a teenager, this area was still a quiet place. It was full of farms and
0:57.2	fields and swampland. And I spent my free time there collecting wildflowers, bird watching,
1:05.8	and also collecting insects. And this was one of my prize finds. This is a very special beetle, an amazing beetle
1:13.3	called an ant beetle. And this is a kind of beetle that lives its entire life inside an ant's nest.
1:20.4	It has evolved to speak ant. It's using the same chemical signals, the same smells as the ants do for communicating.
1:29.4	And right now, this beetle is telling this worker ant, hey, I'm also a worker ant.
1:34.7	I'm hungry. Please feed me. And the ant complies because the beetle is using the same chemicals.
1:40.9	Over these millions of years, this beetle has evolved a way to live inside an ant
1:46.7	society. Over the years, when I was living in that village, I collected 20,000 different beetles,
1:54.5	and I built a collection of pinned beetles. And this got me interested at a very early age
2:00.7	in evolution. How do all those different
2:04.2	forms, how does all this diversity come about? So I became an evolutionary biologist, like Charles Darwin.
2:13.6	And like Charles Darwin, I also soon became frustrated by the fact that evolution is something that happened mostly in the past.
2:22.2	We study the patterns that we see today, trying to understand the evolution that took place in the past.
2:29.0	But we can never actually see it taking place in real time.
2:32.9	We cannot observe it. As Darwin himself already said,
	...

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