Man-made noise disrupts the growth of plants and trees
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/17457323
When I read the title I thought that somehow the plant and trees were being individually affected by the noise, but it seems it is ‘just’ the behavior of pollinators and seed dispersers. I recall recently learning about one of the side effects of reintroducing wolves to Yellow Stone: brook trout got larger. On the surface it is incredibly hard to make the leap to more wolves = larger fish, but this is what they discovered… The lack of predators for large grazing animals (elk, deer, etc.) meant that the shrubs and whatnot growing along the sides of creeks was kept very minimal which allowed for fish predators (such as eagles) to easily locate and capture the trout, thus forcing the population to reach sexual maturity faster (hence be smaller). The returning wolves favorite location to hunt is right along the sides of streams and creeks which lead to a dramatic reduction in the grazing there which lead to a huge resurgence of growth along the banks which made life a lot more difficult for the fish predators which allowed the trout to reach much larger sizes.
Life is full of these sorts of non-linear feedback loops (negative as well as positive (though which is which is often in the eye of the beholder)). That is what gives Darwin the field to determine fitness, thus survival, thus evolution. We are no doubt in the midst of a massive extinction event on par with some of the worst recorded in geological history and without a doubt the extinction event is all man-made. Also without a doubt many people will say that this is a bad thing, but it really is just a thing and life will adapt as it has no choice in doing and while we may see dramatic reductions in diversity, there are already clearly species that are winners in this human caused extinction event.
Interesting. What is selected for, and how, isn’t always clear. Nor is what is causal, versus what is corollary.
Here’re a couple more interesting ones for you:
Fifty years of data show that walleye in Lake Oneida are easier to catch when the density is down, rather than when it is up. (The density variation can be as much as 100:1.) The data didn’t make sense. Additional studies have indicated that the effect is due to prey density. When prey are low, walleye population drops. Apparently, though, being hungrier, they’ll bite anything, including more lures.
Some bass are genetically easier to catch than others. I won’t go into the lengthy process (decades) used to determine this, here, but it’s quite separate from other factors related to catch. If anglers catch easy-to-catch bass while they are guarding the young, the young die. By fishing these easy “nursery” areas, fisherman are breeding harder-to-catch fish. (It’s important to note that the fisherman aren’t “teaching” the bass or environmentally adjusting their behavior; they are just killing off those with the easy-to-catch genetic makeup.)
That’s cool! I have never been much of a bass fisherman (to be honest, I am not much of a fisherman at all: if I ain’t catchin within a few minutes of puttin my line in, I am done) but I have done some trout fishing in catch-and-release areas and it is very interesting fishing there. Because of the heavy fishing if the fish only fed when humans weren’t around, they would starve, so they had to learn how to avoid fishermen’s flies yet recognise the real thing. The particular time I did my fishing I was able to target a nice sized trout that was just a few feet from me. If I _exactly_ matched the drift of actual live flies the trout would show interest and I was finally able to hook him (her, it). However, the fish was also well experienced with being hooked with barb-less hooks and spit out my fly. Amazingly to me, it went right back to the same location and resumed feeding. I wasn’t able to tempt it again and after a short period the wind picked up and the real flies no longer drifted ‘correctly’ and all the fish stopped feeding all together.
Kinda amazing to me, all that thinking going on in a fish brain.