New York's Uptown Rats Are Genetically Distinct from Downtown Rats
citylab.com
citylab.com
They pulled out the big guns. Bacon!
We're talking on the order of a hammer on steel here.
I was under the impression. trapping was happening indoors. Go somewhere you know there will be rats, pop a few, toss them in a bucket, wash rinse repeat. Depending on who the research is being done under it would only take a call to whatever department (probably something having to do with trash) you want the undergrads to tag along with for a shift to collect rats.
>That seems harder than setting traps and checking in a day later.
Going to where you know rats will be once to shoot them is easier than going twice to set and retrieve traps.
Where you can see them scurrying about there's often lots of people and other distractions, equipment or other obstacles that would make shooting them impractical.
I don't think the NYC subway crew would take too kindly to people shooting up their equipment to get rats.
Many people are opposed to killing lifeforms capable of emotions - especially when there are no valid reason, like food.
Or the Avocado Rat - Pizza Rat's hip cousin living in Williamsburg?
"New York City is a place where rats climb out of toilets, bite babies in their cribs, crawl on sleeping commuters, take over a Taco Bell restaurant, and drag an entire slice of pizza down the subway stairs."
> The mice have become so genetically distinct from one another that if you show Munshi-South a DNA sequence randomly selected from a white-footed mouse in NYC, he can tell you where it lives. At the same time, city mice as a whole also seem to be evolving new traits that mice from rural areas outside the city lack…
[1] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/uptown-mice-are...
This is an older article, from when their first studies were coming out.
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/science/26evolve.html
Both articles also discuss other species, but it seems like the focus is usually on genetic differences between urban and rural populations, or polluted versus not polluted, and not on intra-urban genetic variations.
> At the same time, city mice as a whole also seem to be evolving new traits that mice from rural areas outside the city lack: genetic mutations that may help them neutralize toxic metals in polluted soil, for example, or speed up their sperm in response to the intense sexual competition in their overcrowded metropolitan homes.
I wonder why they seem to be a little hedgy around the toxic-metal-mutation bit. I'm guessing they suspect that that's what the mutation does, but don't particularly want to feed the poor mice toxic-metal laden soil just to confirm.
It's like the roaches in some Washington D.C. buildings that are immune to virtually every chemical used for pest control. It's so bad that chemical companies test new compounds on those populations first. That's what decades of selective breeding has brought about.
question : where does such food come from, and why?
Respectfully, I think it's more likely that definite results are hard to get. Researchers generally don't shy away from harming mice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raccoon#Distribution_in_Germ...
my googlefu fails me currently
I doubt The Atlantic would have given citylab permission to republish it like this.
Not that many centuries. Australia was colonized very recently. Go to placed like the middle east or china and families may have been in the same area for thousands of years.
It's an anecdote, but I was pretty impressed when my uncle recently signed up for one of those ancestry tests, and it correctly pinpointed exactly the region that his grandfather (my great-grandfather) had come from in the late 19th century. I'm certainly no expert in the genetics but it boggles my mind a bit that it's detectable that his recent lineage didn't stray much from that small area of Europe until it went to the States. I share 50% of my ancestry with him, the other 50% is from other parts of Europe, my wife is from another part with its complicated story, and we have kids... After 3 generations I don't think any one particular country should be particularly recognizable (though I'll admit, I may be over-simplifying or misunderstanding how it works). Yet my uncle's DNA test pinpointed a small place in Europe with only a few hundred thousand people, and did so correctly.
I am really pleased by the human borough/rat burrow parallel here.
You don't need a lot of territory for this to happen. The lice that specialize in humans have split into two distinct species: one for head hair and one for pubic hair. (and allegedly the latter is under threat).
Can we, uhh, not mention this to any alien species we may encounter in the future?
Human head and body lice have indeed diverged, but are not completely speciated and can, in the lab, still interbreed. The term in the Wikipedia was "subspecies"; as I'm not a zoologist I'm not sure if it's a formal term or not.
But my claim head/pubis claim was wrong. That's my TIL for today!
Can we get an endangered-species designation asap? I've shorted Gillet's stock.
They were just carried there. They are rather smart, but either way will do what they can to find food and mates, just like every other species.
A rat living in the city has it pretty good compared to those that have to forage in the wild. Slices of pizza regularly fall onto the subway tracks, for example, but this really doesn't happen in the middle of the forest. Nobody leaves huge dumpsters full of food scattered across the countryside, but they're literally on every single street corner in a city like New York.