< h1 class="ql-align-center" > wild animals marching into cities</h1>
The urban ecological environment shared by humans and animals is taking shape, and protecting the wild animals in the city is also protecting our urban environment.
Late at night, Stanley Gerhardt drove to a cemetery in Chicago's South Side. The cemetery gate was locked, and he jumped through the fence wall, and in a trap set beforehand, Gerhardt found a trapped male coyote, which he anesthetized and took away.
Since 2000, Gerhart, an ecologist at Ohio State University, has labeled or identified more than 850 coyotes wandering around the city of Chicago, and has tracked more than 400 of them with radio tracking technology and GPS positioning collars.
Coyotes are a small wolf in the wilderness of western North America, also known as the timber wolf, steppe wolf, or coyote wolf. Their habitat usually requires a vast natural area. At first, Gerhart said, I don't think there will be many wild animals in the city that can be studied, and there will certainly not be too many coyotes. But I was wrong. According to conservative estimates, the number of Chicago coyotes today is about 2,000, and the actual number may be even higher.
Gerhardt isn't the first major factor to attract wildlife is natural elements such as temperature and water, and whether cities attract wildlife depends largely on humans. People build streets, buildings and tunnels where they need to. This has led to a variety of animal habitats, with stone steps in parks, green roofs of high-rise buildings, subways, and sidewalks, all of which are new habitats found by wild animals in the city.
Coyote: Lives on human territory
In the 14 years since they began tracking coyotes, Gerhardt has followed in their march from suburbs to downtown Chicago. Skyscrapers and congested traffic are everywhere in the city, and everywhere there are people and cars rushing by. Nevertheless, coyotes thrive in the cities, and their numbers are growing.
Gerhardt has seen coyotes in many parts of the city, waiting for signal lights to change along abandoned rail lines, waiting for vehicles to pass by at crowded intersections, and hiding on the roof of garages to raise their offspring. Coyotes living in cities don't go out to forage until night falls. In the limited darkness, they hunt four times as much food as in the suburbs — and in densely populated cities, there are too few places to feed them.
Gerhardt has also been studying the diet of coyotes while tracking their tracks. Initially, an analysis of coyote feces revealed that they rarely ate human food. Now, through the detection of isotopic analysis techniques, he found that coyotes in different individuals have different foods. Chicago coyotes still feed primarily on natural prey such as rodents, other small mammals, wild fruits, and other foods. However, in their other food components, humans discard significantly more food than before.
The most critical question for surviving in cities is how dependent are they on human food? Where there are foods that coyotes like to eat, it is possible to attract them to a specific habitat.
In order to detect the food composition of coyotes, Gerhardt had to catch live coyotes. It is difficult to catch them alive in the city, and he cannot set traps in densely populated cities, which may lead to humans or pets trapping them by mistake. If it's on a farm or in some wildlife sanctuary, researchers can set traps without worrying about people touching traps by mistake or about being let go of coyotes they've caught.
Applying for funding for urban coyote research is also difficult, with government agencies investing in key areas protecting some wild species in forest areas. Gerhart said: "It's still hard to believe that cities are places where wildlife is thriving, and it takes time for people to understand these things. In the eyes of some, wild animals generally avoid urban areas rather than choose cities as their new home.
<h1 class="ql-align-center" > bat: building a new home on a high-rise building</h1>
Like coyotes, bats thrive in cities, especially in some cities in central Texas. Ecologists at Waco Baylor University in the state have found that 8 of the 9 species of bats that live in central Texas have made their way to cities.
In cities, bats find similarities between human houses and their natural habitats. Some burrowing bats, such as the Mexican tailless bat, are attracted to some of the city's old high-rise buildings, where they can use their heights to settle and take off.
Some species of bats usually inhabit trees, such as the genus Twilight Bat, whose goal is to green communities. But oddly enough, these wood-loving bats are often drawn to upscale neighborhoods, regardless of the greenery there. The researchers speculate that they may be attracted by the high-rise landscape there, and that there are fewer stray cats and dogs there is also one of the possible factors.
Wildlife surveys in cities are often met with some man-made obstruction. You can't always say, "I want to go into this building and catch bats." "This kind of investigation must have the cooperation and cooperation of the owner and the police department, and the researcher's explanation often arouses great curiosity from the surrounding onlookers."
Onlookers will ask a lot of questions. The researchers would explain: "If you look closely, bats are beautiful and cute creatures. Some residents have even called for local media to help investigate the habitat of the bats, which has helped researchers a lot by allowing them to determine the specific location of the building where the bats are located and get permission to enter the building to collect samples.
Amy Savage, an ecologist at North Carolina State University, also sees the benefits of city dwellers assisting in wildlife surveys. She said: "Urban ecology research now has two dominant ideas, one is to let this kind of investigation and research be carried out in secret, secretly, and secretly; the other is to make the investigation as clear as possible - to tell people the signs of the existence of urban wildlife, so that people know that this is a scientific study." An open-ended approach can easily lead to research being affected or even undermined, but Savage still insists that science needs to be mass-disseminated.
<h1 class="ql-align-center" > raccoon: a "fighting wit" story with humans</h1>
One winter night, Simon Tredwell of Toronto, Canada, pushed a wheeled dumpster into an ice-covered clearing near his home filled with a mixture of food scraps: some cat food, sardines and dried fried chicken. Tredwell returned to the house after checking that the three motion-triggered night vision cameras installed nearby were working properly.
Tredwell is testing a new cover lock that he designed to cope with the growing number of raccoons in the city of Toronto. For the sake of the cleanliness of the city, a way is needed to get the raccoon out of the human dumpster.
For more than 10 years, local residents have been asked to throw some biodegradable organic materials, such as leftover bread and vegetables, meat scraps and bones, and even paper towels, into green garbage bins. But raccoons, who have adapted to city life, have learned how to tear down the bins, let the lid touch the ground, and then the garbage inside will scatter. If the lid latch has not been opened, the raccoon will often fiddle with it until it is opened. The city's environmental protection department intends to upgrade the garbage cans in response to the vandalism of the raccoons.
The raccoons that marched into the city terrified many Toronto citizens, and even the mayor of Toronto admitted to the media that his family was frightened by the sudden appearance of raccoons when they went out to take out the garbage. Many people have had the experience of driving raccoons out of their homes.
Unlike many other animals, in the face of the prosperity of cities and the expansion of humans, raccoons are not deterred, but live more tastefully and prosperously in human cities. Michael Petitt, associate professor of psychology for animal behavior at York University in Toronto, said: "We devised a variety of ways to "protect" our garbage, and all failed.
Part of the reason for raccoons' successful incursions into cities may be that the urban environment has led to their increased intelligence. The effect of urban life on intelligence in humans is well known, and educational psychologist Vauclia Fontes compared the cognitive ability of rural and urban children by two indicators: one is crystal intelligence, also called fixed intelligence, which is experience-related intelligence, that is, an ability formed by mastering cultural knowledge and experience, which continues to grow in adulthood but slows down; there is also a kind of liquid intelligence, also called fluid intelligence, which refers to the ability to logically think and solve problems in new situations. She found that children from wealthy families in the city had an advantage in both intelligences, but even poor urban students scored higher on liquid intelligence than those in rural areas.
Susan Macdonald, a comparative psychologist at the University of York who has studied raccoon behavior for years, compared the problem-solving abilities of rural and urban raccoons and found that urban raccoons are far superior in intelligence and ability to their counterparts living in the countryside.
Over the past few summers, Macdonald has used surveillance footage to record the foraging behavior of rural and urban raccoons and found that both rural and urban raccoons can easily find their familiar containers for cat food, but they handle unfamiliar containers differently. It takes a long time for rural raccoons to discover the secrets of food hidden in new containers they have never seen before, while urban raccoons pounce on them at the first sight.
Some raccoons, who have become "senior residents" of the city, have even learned how to open the door to The Macdonald's garage, where her trash can is kept. The experienced raccoon would stand on a turned-over flowerpot and use its five-fingered claws to push and pull the doorknob with a circular knob until it was turned away. Usually, this is a bit difficult for them because their paws have a hard time holding things. But urban raccoons are extraordinary, not only because of their problem-solving abilities, but also because they are familiar with urban life, they are not afraid of the sudden appearance of humans, and they will persevere in their efforts: they spend hours trying to obtain potential food. The rate at which new residents of these cities learn is also staggering. For something new that appears near the trash can, they will repeatedly try to crack it until they find the trick to it.
One possible reason cities are particularly favorable to raccoons is that they are naturally bold. A bold and curious animal like a raccoon is perfectly capable of being a great learner. Researchers have also found a link between boldness and the ability to learn in other animals. For example, Lynn Snydern of the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom found that bold rainbow trout are more capable of learning than their shy counterparts.
Improvements in the protection of municipal bins, for raccoons, are actually a kind of ability training — the constant process of learning how to open these bins also improves their overall intelligence.
Fortunately for Tredwell, he designed locks that were beyond the raccoon's ability to learn, as his latch system required a thumb that could be opposed to the index finger, which was lacking in the raccoon's physiology, and they finally had to accept this reality and chose to give up.
Video from Tredwell shows Raccoon struggling for 5 nights trying to open his trash can and eventually losing interest. By the 5th night, they had left, shifting their attention to the other baits around them. It seemed to understand that it was a waste of time to try again, so it chose to give up. But to come to this conclusion, we must first make an effort and an attempt.
The city of Toronto is currently hosting a test and evaluation contest for the design of city dumpsters, and a new test of raccoon intelligence is coming, when at least 500,000 novel "anti-raccoon garbage cans" will appear in the city.
< h1 class="ql-align-center" > ant: the clean army in the city</h1>
While most New Yorkers sit on street-side benches and enjoy steaming hot dogs, they never think about what their inadvertent crumbs scattered on the ground mean to some urban wildlife. Most of the food scraps thrown away by city dwellers are cleaned up and eaten by ants and rodents. As miniature garbage disposal teams in the city, they have the value of existing in the city.
An ecologist has discovered an interesting way to measure the impact of ant "clean armies" on urban ecology. She had placed small iron cages in Manhattan, covered with a layer of mesh that rodents could not enter, but ants and other arthropods could climb in. Ecologists sprinkle hot dog, biscuit and potato chip crumbs on the cage and on the open ground, respectively. Food in parks and on city roads is fair to all species, including rats, squirrels, raccoons and pigeons.
In the open, the food quickly disappeared. But there are almost as many food scraps eaten by arthropods in some cages on the road as rats and other animals eat outside their cages. Arthropods remove 2 to 3 times as much food debris from the road every day as they do in parks.
These findings suggest that ants, especially those on the sidewalk, as well as other arthropods, are "edible" and are important "cleaners" on city streets. And it's rodents who eat more trash in the park, and ants may even compete with rats and other rodents for food. Arthropods eat as much as 1,000 kilograms of food waste each year on Broadway and West Street Roads alone, equivalent to about 20,000 hot dogs.
Municipal food waste is one of the biggest problems in cities, and in fact, the help that animals living in cities give us has always been underestimated. Large amounts of human food waste buried in landfills, if left untreated, will eventually break down to produce the greenhouse gas methane. Any animal that lives in a city can contribute to reducing this type of garbage, and they are providing real help to humanity. Although ants are small, they have the potential to have a great impact on the urban ecological environment, which is a very exciting thing.
Ecologists use isotopic techniques to analyze how dependent ants are on human food. It turned out that most of the carbon in urban ants came from human food, which was completely different from their forest-dwelling counterparts.
<h1 class="ql-align-center" > fungus: contributing to the reduction of urban pollution</h1>
New York also has a class of "residents" that are easier to overlook than ants, and they may provide another different type of service. The plants and soil on the green roofs of New York City isolate the place from the buildings below and form a world of their own, in which a large number of tiny fungi grow, and the diversity of their varieties is astonishing, and those that fall on the roof and become rainwater before the runoff flows away, providing nutrients for the fungus to grow.
The living environment of manhattan high-rise roof plants is full of pressure, such as shallow soil and insufficient nutrition, and most of these microorganisms are beneficial to the growth of roof plants. Beneficial fungi attach to the plant root system, allowing the plant to grow more outwardly stretched roots, absorbing soil nutrients to meet the needs of plant growth, and plants provide sugar to the hermit fungus through photosynthesis in return.
Researcher McGuire believes that some of the fungi she found in the soil protect plants from pathogens and droughts, and some of the others she found, including penicillium and Aspergillus, may also have the ability to reduce certain pollution, such as hydrocarbons emitted by cars and factories. However, the actual role of these microorganisms has yet to be further investigated.
<h1 class="ql-align-center" > urban ecology as seen by ecologists</h1>
Since the 1970s, ecologists have been paying attention to new trends in urban ecology where humans and wildlife coexist, but research has been slow. Ecologists have found that after dealing with a variety of wild animals in the city, some of them are "little thieves" who want to get some delicious food from humans, and some have a great curiosity about human society, and silently observe in the dark.
Ecologists' research reveals an astonishing fact: in cities that belong to humans, all kinds of wild animals are also thriving, thriving, and living on the same land as humans. Some of them are even doing the work of cleaning the city for the city's residents, silently contributing their small strength, which can be called the "model citizens" of the city.
As our world becomes more developed, urban ecology will become increasingly important. Ecologists are filling the gap in the field of urban ecology, investigating how animals, plants, and microbes in urban ecology share urban space with urban human residents and provide services to humans in return.
People are beginning to realize that in the cities and suburban areas where we live, the urban ecological environment shared by humans and animals is taking shape, and the protection of wild animals in the city is also protecting our urban environment.