I know that natural selection often takes a long time to operate on large populations.
Highways have only been with us for 100 years or so, perhaps not enough time for
whole populations to adapt.
Perhaps it is more of a cognitive constraint, something not so easily amenable to
being selected for (or against), a fundamental limitation in animals’ brains which fails
to make them recognize that the oncoming lights represent extreme danger. Maybe
they are aware of the danger but are unable to grok the high closing speed. Or
maybe something else is at work.
Animals are not yet able to communicate with one another well enough to say “Hey my uncle got killed on that road over there so don’t go near it”.
So Natural Selection and/or Evolution has got one helluva job in front of them.
Either get animals to communicate (which is a little bit much to solve the problem at hand) - or get them to instinctively recognize cars (quickly approaching bright lights) as a danger and then get them to know what to do next…because they already *run * from the noise…problem is they run across the road.
It’ll never happen. At least, it won’t happen in the way you think. As far as I understand the theory, you’d eventually get a different reaction…which may or may not be beneficial, but by that time the problem will have changed. Maybe we’ll be in flying cars or something.
Crows in Wyoming sit on the fenceposts waiting for morning cars to deliver their breakfast.
Hawks do the same, while the damned Kansas swallows seem to revel in playing ‘chicken’ with the windshields of passing motorists.
Maybe some to have the opportunity to learn from the highway experience because it just killed them. I would think an electric fence for instance would have a far better chance of being responsable for ingrained skills passed from one generation to the next.
I saw a video clip of a coyote crossing a freeway by looking left, waiting for traffic, crossing to the median then looking right before crossing the rest of the way…frakin dog did the trick better than half the people I know would have.
that said I would guess that since highways have only really been with us for 50 years or so. and what do you expect to happen in 50 years?
Just a guess, but the reason probably depends on the species. For example we all know about the stereotypical fixated by the headlights response of some animals. Some animals are more adaptable and some have more geneetically programmed behavior. But look at your question another way: humans are supposedly the most intelligent animal, and most humans have grown up familiar with cars - yet there are still plenty of pedestrian deaths (aka human roadkill). The peppered moth’s response to pollution probably took less than 50 years. A similar response to traffic could be possible depending on selection pressure and availability of gene alternatives.
I’m not so sure. When I was a kid, we had two dogs. One was in the habit of recklessly bounding across the road in front of our house (unless we stopped him). The other, though, had figured things out and would carefully look left and right before crossing. (It was actually kind of comically anthropomorphic.)
Put these two dogs out there without human supervision, and natural selection would quickly eliminate the bounder, leaving only the cautious dog to reproduce. I wouldn’t think it would take to long to produce a generation of animals cautious of roads.
And just speaking anecdotally, it seems like there’s a lot less road kill out there than when I was a kid. So maybe animals are already adapting… or maybe I’m just misremembering.
It would be quite impossible to adapt, in an evolutionary sense, to safe highway crossing. What would likely occur is that intelligence in general would tend to be favored within populations who interact with roadways on a regular basis.
The fundamental key to natural selection is that the trait being selected for must be heritable. Highway safety is not heritable. General intelligence is.
For most species, the mortality rate due to roadkill is not all that great compared to other sources of mortality. Therefore selection will be small due to other sources of selection, and any evolutionary response, if it occurs at all, is likely to be slow. A century is probably far too short a time for this to happen.
In any case, adapting to roads may interfere with other adaptive behavior. For example, if an animal developed the behavior of not crossing roads at all, it could be at a disadvantage in finding food or mates. These latter might be a much more important consideration than potential death on the road - which after all, only happens a small percentage of the time an animal tries to cross a road.
Also, it just might not be possible for some animals to acquire the reaction time sufficient to deal with oncoming cars, or the ability to assess that a car is a threat even when it is far away. A turtle or armadillo may just not be able to see far enough ahead to see a car in time.
As for coyotes and dogs, avoidance of cars is far more likely to be learned behavior than something that has specifically been selected for. Many animals don’t have that kind of learning capacity.
I was wondering about this same question just the other day, with regards to squirrels, the plentiful fox squirrel of the eastern US in particular. They get munched in the typical suburban neighborhood with regular frequency. They tend to try to race across the street in front of a car, and then when completely safe, bound back across the road and under the wheels with disastrous result. I mused that this oddity ought to be extinguished, selecting for squirrels that don’t behave in this manner. Hasn’t happened yet, however.
Isn’t roadkills a sign of evolution? I mean, those animals smart enough to stay away from roads with heavy traffic will live to breed. Every pair of rabbits only needs to produce two more bunnies for the population to remain stable, a lot of bunnies will die and even if mommy rabbit can’t tell her young’uns to stay away from the highway, they will follow her and see her behaviour and those that pay attention will learn and those that don’t will feed the crows.
My thought on this has always been that another instinct is conflicting with the ability to get out of the way quickly. I imagine that, while a lot of small animals get hit by cars, probably even more are eaten by predators. And if you ever watch those nature shows, it appears that the best strategy for getting away from a predator is not to run away in a straight line. They tend to run in a zigzag pattern to try to trip up the pursuer. My theory is that when an animal displays the seemingly nonsensical behavior of turning around and running back into the path of the car, it’s because it’s perceiving the car as a predator, and trying to fool it. Since the instinct is based on what works when another animal is chasing them, and since that tends to happen much more than encounters with cars, the fact that cars only move in a straight line wouldn’t be incorporated into the behavior.
I don’t see why this would be such a huge problem - not all animals react in this way; if a mutation occurs that happens to modify instinct in such a way that they tend to run in a different direction, it will be positively selected by the increased survival rate around roads - it’s that simple. The reason it hasn’t happened much, if at all, is that cars have only been around a little while, in evolutionary terms.
But any distinctive threat can concievably elicit a different response - plenty of animals have different escape strategies for different kinds of predator attack (i.e. if threatened by hawks-duck & cover, snakes-run away fast, dogs-climb a tree) a moving vehicle is just another kind of threat, and possibly one that can be distinguished from the others enough to elicit a distinct response.
The paths that white tailed deer travel on are the same paths that they followed their mother on. White tailed deer, here in N.Y., anyway, live their life in a one square mile area. Unless they run into predators, fire, or hunters, they will follow that ‘run’ for their entire life.
When man erects an asphalt road, cutting right through the deers run, the deers instincts tell him that the run continues on the other side of the road.
If you see a deer crossing the road, it’s a good bet that there are more deer following. The ‘Deer Crossing’ signs that you see are not a warning that many deer have been hit in that particular area, but, that YOU are crossing the deers run.
