Lay eggs earlier in the spring to make the birth of the chicks coincide with the increasingly precocious activity of the caterpillars on which they will feed.
Go on migration at the right time.
Rebuilding a viable population after a large epidemic…
If they knew, since Darwin, that the species adapt to the pressure of their environment, the scientists did not suspect that this evolution generally occurred so quickly.
In a study published Wednesday in the journal
Science
, a team of researchers from the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra show that the rate of adaptive evolution, which they estimated for 19 populations of wild birds and mammals, has been on average two to four times faster in recent decades than suspected.
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In Australia, the mortality of tropical trees has doubled in forty years
“We were surprised by this result because most theories suggested that the processes of natural selection took place over very long times
, underlines Timothée Bonnet, researcher at the ANU…
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