Human beings modify the environment in which they live and cities, most profoundly transformed places on Earth, they are also altering the way life evolves, Sicence publishes today.
An international team led by the University of Mississauga (Canada) has studied if a parallel evolution is taking place in all the cities of the world and for this they turned their gaze to white clover, both in urban centers and in nearby rural areas.
The Global Urban Evolution Project (GLUE) analyzed data collected by 287 scientists in 160 cities in 26 countries, who sampled this plant.
The result of his research is, according to the University of Toronto (Canada), “the clearest proof yet that human beings in general, and cities in particular, are a dominant force driving the evolution of life globally”.
From Toronto to Tokyo, Melbourne to Munich, white clover frequently evolves in direct response to environmental changes that take place in urban environments.
White clover produces hydrogen cyanide as a defense mechanism against herbivores and to increase its tolerance to water stress, but those that grow in cities tend to produce less quantity than those in rural areas neighbors, due to repeated adaptation to urban environments.
They are the changes in the presence of herbivores and the water stress in cities those that push white clover to adapt differently from its rural counterparts.
This finding is valid for cities of different climates, and their implications they go far beyond the clover plant, the researchers warn.
The environmental conditions of cities tend to be more similar to each other than to nearby rural habitats, so that the center of Toronto is more comparable to Tokyo in many respects than the surrounding farmland and forests.
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This study is, according to Rob Ness of the University of Mississauga, a model to understand how humans change the evolution of life around them.
The project examined white clover because it is one of the few organisms present in almost every city on Earth, providing a tool to understand how urban environments influence evolution.
“Now that we know that humans are driving evolution in cities around the planet, that information can be used to start develop strategies to better conserve rare species and allow them to adapt to urban environments”, considered Marc Johnson, from the same Canadian university.
This knowledge can also help, he added, to better understand how to prevent unwanted pests and diseases from adapting to human environments. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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