Trapped by Evolution is an excellent article looking at the many ways that human altered environments prove fatal to many animals.
“When humans alter the environment, they often cause problems more subtle than simply destroying habitat, the researchers argue. The changes can create a situation in which an animal’s evolved behavior hurts its chances of surviving or reproducing, which in turn can send the species downhill, and fast.”
Obviously pollution and habitat destruction has been hugely destructive to many species. But this article looks instead at ways that an animal’s instincts, instincts that normally protect the animal in the natural environment, work against the animal in certain human altered environments.
This article gives a number of examples of this phenomenon (which the scientists describe as evolutionary traps). The example that struck me was the story of the buprestid beetle. Apparently the male buprestid beetle prefers larger female buprestid beetles, the larger the better. All well and good, until an Australian beer company decided to sell their beer in a beer bottle with a new design that just happened to mimic the ideal female buprestid beetle. Soon the real female beetles were being ignored by the male beetles who were much more interested in copulating with these newly discarded beer bottles.
