This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Jason Goldman.

Homosapians 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 that we were studying seemed to be more active at night

when they were around the people.

University of California Berkeley Wildlife Ecologist Caitlin 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.

For example, an animal that would ordinarily prefer to spend half its active time during the daytime and half at night shifts to two-thirds of its active time under darkness and our particular human behaviors do not seem to matter.

Something that surprised me in the study was just how consistent the shift towards

noctranality was across types of human disturbance.

We had expected to see animals being a little bit more

discerning and perhaps responding more strongly to activities like hunting

that actually do pose a risk to the animal. But what we found was that

you know whether it is infrastructure development or hunting or even just hiking through wilderness areas, all of these human activities elicit a response in wildlife suggesting that they're playing it safe around us.

...