Darwin Comes to Town Quotes

“and, the highlight, Cristiano Ronaldo weeping on the grass after a knee injury in the 24th minute, while a lone Autographa gamma sips his teardrops away.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“The fourth and final explanation for the rich biodiversity of cities is the sheer diversity of habitat patches.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“A third source of urban biological richness is, in fact, the loss of good-quality habitat immediately outside the city perimeter.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“These constantly arriving foreign inhabitants form the first of at least four explanations for the high biodiversity urban naturalists are encountering in their cities. A second explanation is the fact that the places where people like to build their settlements, which then grow into cities, are often biologically rich areas to begin with.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“But let it be clear that I consider human cities as a fully natural phenomenon, on a par with the mega-structures that other ecosystem engineers build for their societies—the only difference being that whereas ants, termites, corals, and beavers have been maintaining their roles at a stably modest level for millions of years, the scale of human ecosystem engineering has grown by several orders of magnitude over just a few thousand years.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“The closest relatives of bed bugs (Cimex lectularius) are parasites of cave bats—which indicates that that was also bed bugs’ original niche.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“Roughly, with every tenfold increase in island size, the number of species you find there doubles.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“that inconsistent of me? No—of course we must regret what we lose, but that does not mean that what we gain is worthless.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“What she means is that cities exchange not only species, but also the human inventions that make those cities tick and that urban organisms must adapt to.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“What all this means is that the ecosystems of cities around the world are growing more and more alike; their communities of plants and animals, fungi, single-celled organisms, and viruses are slowly inching toward a single globalized, multi-purpose urban biodiversity. And even if the exact species across cities may not be identical, you will find similar species playing similar roles.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“Cities are the world’s new vacant niches, and the blackbird is one species that has embarked on the road toward speciating to maximize its profits from this horn of plenty,”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“It is not likely that the insects were attracted by any beer in the bottle because, as the authors remind us, no Australian would ever throw away a bottle that still has beer in it.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“This whole theater of great tit socio-sexual opportunities, threats, decisions, and interactions is played out during the dawn chorus, when territorial males are flitting about nervously, loudly broadcasting their “dee-du” calls, and meanwhile keeping an eye on their own females and on rival males, as well as ogling female neighbors.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“The evolutionary landscape of the city is now nearly completely revealed to us. There are close encounters of the first kind—the tough but static physical and chemical structure of the city (heat, light, pollution, impenetrable surfaces and all the other urban features we saw in Section II of this book). Evolution as a result of such encounters may come to a standstill when the perfect adaptation is reached. Then there are the even more exciting close encounters of the second kind. These happen where urban animals and plants interact with aspects of the city that are not static, namely where they involve other animals and plants, including humans—all of which could, in principle, respond by changing themselves. This kind of encounter is all the more exciting because it may lead to “Red Queen” evolution: evolutionary arms races where both partners keep finding new ways to gain the upper hand. In theory, such evolution never stops. Yet there is one final part of this urban evolutionary landscape that we have so far skirted around. In the previous chapters, we have seen close encounters of the second kind involving interactions between species. But what about that particularly close encounter within a species? Males and females of the same species also evolve to adapt to each other—we call this sexual selection. It would be naïve to think that there is no urban impact on the amorous animal.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“As we have seen before, cities are like mad scientists, creating their own crazy ecological concoctions by throwing all kinds of native and foreign elements into the urban melting pot.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“That is why urban evolution can proceed so rapidly: the animals and plants that need to adapt to whatever new feature humans release in their urban environment do not need to wait for the right mutations to come along. Mostly, the necessary gene variants are already there, waiting in the wings of the standing genetic variation. It only takes natural selection to bring them out into the limelight, and give them a chance to shine.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“Phylogeography began in the 1980s as a way to tell the evolutionary history of natural populations of animals and plants. It usually involves looking at a large number of “markers,” variable bits in the DNA of a species, for a lot of specimens from different parts of a species’ area of distribution. Phylogeographers can then use such rich information on the genetic make-up of a species to trace back its history.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“Parakeets in Paris … It could be the name of a hypnotic Matisse painting, but since the 1970s it has been a very realistic image for the French capital. In fact, the ring-necked parakeet (Psittacula krameri) is one of the birds that has been most successful in invading cities in Europe (on a smaller scale, also in Japan, North America, the Middle East, and Australia).”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“Though this gives a fleeting impression of them all being connected by wireless to the great mother ship of French aristocracy in the sky, the “antennae” are in fact meant to keep the park birds from landing and covering their regal heads in unsightly droppings.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“In the preceding pages of his great book, Darwin had laid out the foundations of his theory in four easy, steadfast steps. One—there is variation: in many (sometimes near-imperceptible) ways, each individual is different from the next one. Two—this variation is heritable: offspring resemble their parents. Three—there is surplus: most offspring do not survive. Four—there is selection: survival is not random but favors those who are best suited to the world they live in.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“In other words, Passer domesticus has become an urban species because it was already adapted to a lifestyle that, purely by accident, prepared it for the niches that we have created in cities. The urban environment offers conditions that happen to resemble one or more aspects of a species’ way of living in pre-urban times. And it is those species that are pre-adapted to the novel niches in the city. They are the first to move in.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

“First described by geographer Tony Chandler in his 1965 book The Climate of London, the “urban heat island” is the result of several things. To begin with, the activities of millions of people, packed together in a small area with all their cars, trains, and other machines, creates a lot of excess heat, which remains trapped among the tall buildings. Secondly, the stone, asphalt, and metal of streets, pavements, and buildings absorb heat during the day, either directly from the sun or via reflections off windows, and at night only slowly cool off, radiating out heat all the time. The bigger the city, the larger the heat island; every tenfold increase in number of inhabitants raises the temperature by about three degrees centigrade. In the world’s largest cities, it can be more than twelve degrees hotter than in the surrounding countryside.”
― Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution