Many people think that evolution is some magical phenomenon that takes hundreds, even thousands of years to occur. People think of dinosaurs turning into chickens, chimpanzees into people, wolves into chihuahuas and so on. However, what many people don’t realize is that evolution happens every day all around us, just on a much smaller scale.
Omar Tonsi Eldakar is an associate professor at NSU in the department of biology. He offered the example of the recent COVID-19 pandemic as an example of rapid evolution.
“It can occur quite rapidly. You have a great example with COVID-19 where you see these new strains popping up, because we have such a high variation in populations,” Eldakar said.
[W]hat people often do not consider is how drastically environments have changed since the rise of urbanization and human industrialization. Native wildlife is now forced to adapt to buildings popping up, to human waste and even harmful direct interactions such as hunting and poaching.
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California condors are a critically endangered species, partially due to habitat loss but also due to poison ingestion via their prey.
However, just this year scientists noted the first case of asexual reproduction through a process called parthenogenesis in California condors.
