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Bears Are Exploiting A Hunting Rule To Better Care For Their Cubs

Aside from trying to keep your stockpile of pic-a-nic baskets safe, there really isn't a good reason left to hunt bears. Nonetheless, shooting the big salmon suckers remains a popular pastime in Sweden, which apparently hasn't gotten Netflix yet. But there are a set of limits to the practice which change the ways bears are hunted, and which hunters should probably memorize. Because the bears certainly have.

One of the most important rules in bear hunting is never killing a mama bear still raising her cubs. Anytime a hunter sees a group of tiny bear brats following their target, they have to back off. And the bears, using their instinctual ability to sense legal loopholes, have adapted to this by caring for their cubs longer. Like, a whole year longer, which in bear years is the equivalent of guilting your 18-year-old into going to the nearby community college so they don't have to move out.

Van de Walle, Et. Al./Nature"Son, you wanting to move out is killing your mother. Literally."

4

Lizards Are Developing Bigger Feet To Navigate Cities

Anole lizards are very good at adapting to new environments, and that includes man-made concrete jungles, where they are literally evolving stickier feet. A study of the Puerto Rican anole showed that compared to their hillbilly cousins, city-dwelling lizards had a predisposition for bigger feet (to cover more surface area) and longer lamellae, which are those sticky hairs lizards and Spider-Man use to hang from ceilings.

Postdlf/Wiki CommonsThey even have the same nemesis as Peter Parker: science budget cuts.

3

Swallows Are Evolving Shorter Wings To Avoid Traffic

Each year, about 80 million American birds are turned into roadkill -- ironically while trying to eat roadkill themselves. You'd think that some of them would've figured out a way to keep from bouncing off license plates already. And you would think right.

J.smith/Wiki CommonsSure, it's loud, but the commute to that rotting possum corpse is a breeze.

2

Urban Spiders Have Evolved To Love Fluorescent Light

While living in Vienna in the '90s, arachnologist Astrid Heiling noticed that the spiders on her local pedestrian bridge preferred to hang out on the well-lit parts of the handrails, rather than in the dark nooks and crannies. Intrigued, Heiling started taking a spider-census, and found that they not only preferred the fluorescent lights, but craved them. Webs numbered well into the thousands, with many overlapping -- proving that even spiders can't escape urban crowding.

1

Moths Are Evolving To Stay The Hell Away From Lamps

Moths and lamps have been inseparable since the days of Tesla and Edison, but their unnatural obsession for unnatural light hasn't exactly been good for their health. Luckily, it seems that some moth clans are finally figuring how to quit hitting the bulb and are getting high on life instead.

A study of urban moths in cities and towns across Switzerland and France has shown that moths are actually evolving to stay away from light in order to avoid being charred to death or getting gobbled up by savvy predators. But it takes a lot of wattage before that particular light bulb goes off in a moth's mind.

Scientists ran the experiment on moths they collected from both cities and villages, and found that specifically those exposed to constant overwhelming light pollution (i.e. city slickers) had an instinctual habit to avoid the light in favor of darkness. Meanwhile, their hillbilly brethren continued flocking to the fluorescent to get their fix. And thus starts the great moth culture gap.