How cities are making our rats smarter and spiders bigger
Aesop, it seems, was literally right in his 2,500-year-old fable of the country mouse and the city mouse. The cousins who exchange visits, after which each returns home gratefully from his relative’s strange haunts, has been retold ever since as a metaphor for the profound changes urbanization brought to human life. Cities have always offered more of everything—opportunity and variety, stress and danger. It’s only recently, though, that it’s become clear this is no metaphor: Humans are not the only creatures to have been altered in behaviour, and even in form, by urban experience.
We may think we’ve created a barrier between human and wild, writes Diane Ackerman in The Human Age, her sweeping portrayal of just how thoroughly humanity has refashioned the world. But city species abound, “because urban animals (including humans) vary their habits and psychology to adjust.”
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