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Concept
Urban wildlife
Summary
Urban wildlife is wildlife that can live or thrive in urban/suburban environments or around densely populated human settlements such as townships.
Some urban wildlife, such as house mice, are synanthropic, ecologically associated with and even evolved to become entirely dependent on human habitats. For instance, the range of many synanthropic species is expanded to latitudes at which they could not survive the winter outside of the shelterings provided by human settlements. Other species simply tolerate cohabiting around humans and use the remaining urban forests, parklands, green spaces and garden/street vegetations as niche habitats, in some cases gradually becoming sufficiently accustomed around humans to also become synanthropic over time. These species represent a minority of the natural creatures that would normally inhabit an area, and contain a large proportions of feral and introduced species as opposed to truly native species. For example, a 2014 compilation of studies found that only 8% of native bird and 25% of native plant species were present in urban areas compared with estimates of non-urban density of species.
Urban wildlife can be found at any latitude that supports human dwellings - the list of animals that will venture into urbanized human settlements to forage on horticultures or to scavenge from trash runs from monkeys in the tropics to polar bears in the Arctic.
Different types of urban areas support different kinds of wildlife. One general feature of bird species that adapt well to urban environments is they tend to be the species with bigger brains, perhaps allowing them to be more behaviorally adaptable to the more volatile urban environment. Arthropods (insects, spiders and millipedes), gastropods (land snails and slugs), various worms and some reptiles (e.g. house geckos) can also thrive well in the niches of human settlements.
Urban environments can exert novel selective pressures on organisms, sometimes leading to new adaptations. For example, the weed Crepis sancta, found in France, has two types of seed, heavy and fluffy.
Official source
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