(Inside Science) — In 2012 and 2013, Bill Bateman, a zoologist based in Perth, Australia, began to notice something interesting about how animals were navigating the bush: When mining companies created small paths through the previously tangled environment to install seismic lines, animals started preferentially using those trails to move from one place to another.
And animal ingenuity wasn’t confined to walking on beaten paths.
“The more we looked, the more evidence there was that anthropogenic structures were often used to the advantage of these animals,” said Bateman, who works at Curtin University.
People usually think of any activity done by humans out in the wild as innately negative, but the more Bateman looked, the more he found animals adapting to take advantage of the human-built environment. From power lines to buildings and roads, wild animals do adapt to the world of humans — and some of them even thrive ...
