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This is scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Jason Goldman.

Wild animals are equipped with a variety of techniques to avoid becoming lunch for a bigger tootheer animal.

The most well-known methods include the classic fight and flight, as well as freeze. A team of researchers wondered how proximity

to people might impact those survival strategies.

We often see that animals are more tolerant around us in urban areas but we don't really know why.

UCLA Evolutionary Biologist Dan Blumstein. Is it a filtering process where only the

tolerant animals are there is it just individual

plasticity meaning individuals habituate or change their fear of us and that

leaves tolerance you know or can there be an evolutionary dynamic occurring?

To find out Blumstein and his colleagues combined information from 173 studies of more than

100 species including mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and even mollusks.

Turns out that regardless of evolutionary lineage, the animals react in a similar way to life among humans. They lose their

anti-predator traits. That pattern is especially pronounced for herbivores and

for social species.

This behavioral change is perhaps unsurprising when it's intentional,

the result of domestication and a controlled breeding paradigm.

But it turns out that urbanization alone results in a similar change, though much more slowly, around three times more slowly. The results are in the journal Ploss biology. The main point is that we're essentially domesticating animals by urbanization.

We're selecting for the same sorts of traits that we would if we were actually trying to

domesticate them. If the urbanization process helps animals better coexist

...