Pigeon Guillemots as a Model of Maritime Urban Adapters

Abstract

As the human population surpasses 8 billion and development encroaches at the edges of remaining wild areas, wildlife and humans are increasingly finding themselves in conflict for the same resources and, at times, even space. In the face of the sixth mass extinction, many species are being pushed to the edge of their tolerance of human presence. A paradigm has been introduced to describe three prominent categories of wildlife response to urban encroachment: urban avoiders, which cannot adapt to habitat significantly altered by humans, urban adapters, which may frequently occupy habitat overlapping with human use, and urban exploiters, which are primarily or exclusively found in conjunction with human populations (Rodewald & Gehrt 2014). Persisting in altered urban environments may place certain species under highly specific and amplified selective pressures that could alter their behavior and morphology over a short period of time (Marzluff 2012).