Day for Night

Humans are hugely and directly impactful on 75% of the earth’s land mass. No other animal species has had remotely the impact on the planet than have we. Almost every day, we learn of yet another fact illustrating that even the most rigorous scientists have underestimated the rate of change generated by man’s ignorant explosion of harm on the environment, a matter that really didn’t garner any international priority until the end of the twentieth century, literally a century after the industrial revolution began to belch greenhouse gasses from the smokestacks of “progress.” The latest data? Stuff you cannot even see from satellite pictures.

“Hidden underwater melt-off in the Antarctic is doubling every 20 years and could soon overtake Greenland to become the biggest source of sea-level rise, according to the first complete underwater map of the world’s largest body of ice.

“Warming waters have caused the base of ice near the ocean floor around the south pole to shrink by 1,463 square kilometres – an area the size of Greater London – between 2010 and 2016, according to the new study published in Nature Geoscience.” The Guardian (UK), April 2^nd.

Nature may be agnostic about our destructive efforts; she began with a barren rock and took it from there. Been there, done that. But nature’s creatures, those in direct and unavoidable contact with man, either succumb to extinction or adapt. My May 5^th blog, Big is Dangerous!, explains why the biggest mammals on earth are those most destined for extinction. Their ability to hide among a Malthusian explosion of humans is virtually impossible.

And where animal adaptation is most pronounced, most successful, is where animals continue to reside within the vast urbanized parts of the planet. More than a few have moved from diurnal to nocturnal to find safety in the night shadows, when there are fewer people milling about and where hiding from view is easier.

“As animals have found themselves trapped in shrinking parcels of pristine land, they’ve had to adapt to living in the presence of cities or near human activity… For instance, some birds have had to change the frequency of their songs to communicate in loud urban environments, scientists have found. Others have discovered that blackbirds become more sedentary.

“Kaitlyn Gaynor, a wildlife ecologist and PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, wondered if mammals were not just being displaced in space, but also in time — that is, if they were changing their routines to avoid humans, who primarily operate during daylight hours.

“Historically, that question has been hard to answer, especially for for secretive wildlife species, ecologist Ana Benítez-López of Radboud University in the Netherlands explained in a commentary that accompanies the study. But now that has changed… ‘In recent decades, the advent of technologies, such as satellite and GPS telemetry or camera traps, has made it possible to monitor wildlife activity more accurately,’ wrote Benítez-López, who wasn’t involved in the study…

“The researchers focused on medium- and large-size mammals. These animals need a lot of space, have more potential to interact with humans, and are behaviorally very flexible. Also, there was more data on their 24-hour activity patterns… The team compared the ‘nocturnality’ — the share of an animal’s activity that was conducted at night — of animals living in places with low and high levels of human disturbance.

“They found that animals living in areas with high human activity were indeed shifting to more nocturnal activity, by a factor of 1.36. (For example, this meant that an animal that used to spend 50% of its active time at night would see that share rise to 68%.) The trend held across continents, habitats, types of animals and even types of human activity.

“‘We expected to find a trend towards increased wildlife nocturnality [across] species, but we were surprised by just how consistent the results were,’ Gaynor said… Whether that human activity was lethal (such as hunting) or largely harmless didn’t seem to matter… ‘The response is of equal magnitude to activities that don’t actually pose a risk to animals, like hiking through the woods — activities that we think of leaving no trace,’ she said.

“The phenomenon was widespread — 83% of the 141 case studies in the analysis saw an increase in nocturnality… Larger mammals appeared to shift more strongly, the scientists wrote, ‘either because they are more likely to be hunted or as a result of an increased chance of human encounter.’

“This shift could have a broad range of impacts that could ripple through an ecosystem, both the study authors and Benítez-López said. Among them: … If apex predators can’t hunt as well at night as they can during the day, they may less able to regulate the populations of prey species… A nighttime shift by one species could force it into competition with other animals who use the same resources but at different times.” Los Angeles Times, June 16^th.

Hunger, decimation of agricultural land, rising tides, mega-storms, fires and floods and the ravages of war have pushed humanity to virtually every habitable square inch on the earth’s surface. Extreme desertification will increase surface temperatures in what are already the warmest places on the planet past the point where even the hardiest people can survive that growing heat. Rising seas will claim islands and massive coastal land, pushing humanity further into some of the last vestiges of wild countryside. More animals will have to adapt or die.

Without concerted and coordinated global efforts to walk back the environment harm we continue to inflict, the inevitable conflict between nature and man will come to a serious of rather dramatic consequences. Words and slogans, denying the obvious, only make the horrible that much worse.

I’m Peter Dekom, and in the conflict between man and nature, despite our arrogant assumptions to the contrary, nature will never lose… sooner or later.