Cities Can Serve as Cauldrons of Evolution

From changes in gene flow to adaptation, the effects of urbanization are shaping the evolutionary trajectories of plants and animals.

Written byCatherine Offord

| 14 min read

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When ecology graduate student Lindsay Miles visited Las Vegas a few years ago, she had a clear objective in mind. “I’m looking for the really gross, dirty alleyways,” she tells The Scientist. Scouring these alleys after dark, Miles—with a colleague accompanying her for safety—located thin, wispy webs tucked away in concrete nooks and crannies. With great care and a bowl-like scoop, she trapped western black widow spiders (Latrodectus hesperus) clinging to the silk, dropped them into a vial of 90 percent ethanol, and put them in the back of her Jeep Compass.

Las Vegas was just one of the cities in the western United States that Miles visited in 2012 and 2013 on spider-collecting missions. Over a few months, she amassed more than 200 of the highly venomous but reclusive arachnids from these urban environments and from surrounding rural areas, and took them back to the ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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