Humans are Making Mammals Return to the Night Life

While shifts in behavior could help wildlife and people coexist, they might also affect the animals’ survival.

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ISTOCK, GROBLERDUPREEZMammals around the world are becoming more active at night, making it less likely for them to have run-ins with humans, researchers report today June 14 in Science.

This isn’t the first time mammals have retreated to the shadows. In the time of the dinosaurs, “all mammals were active entirely at night, because dinosaurs were the ubiquitous terrifying force on the planet,” study coauthor Kaitlyn Gaynor of the University of California, Berkeley, tells New Scientist. “Now humans are the ubiquitous terrifying force on the planet, and we’re forcing all of the other mammals back into the night-time.”

She and her colleagues did a meta-analysis of 76 studies on 62 mammals across six continents to look for shifts in the animals’ daily activities in response to humans. Most animals, including some that are primarily nocturnal, became roughly 20 percent more active at night.

One surprising result was that the type of mammal-human interaction didn’t ...

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Meet the Author

  • Ashley Yeager

    Ashley started at The Scientist in 2018. Before joining the staff, she worked as a freelance editor and writer, a writer at the Simons Foundation, and a web producer at Science News, among other positions. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a master’s degree in science writing from MIT. Ashley edits the Scientist to Watch and Profile sections of the magazine and writes news, features, and other stories for both online and print.

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