Central Park Mice Don’t Get Out Much
The good thing about studying rats is you don’t have to travel very far. Fordham University evolutionary biologist Jason Munshi-South studies biodiversity and evolution right here in New York City. His study subjects—rats and mice—are abundant here.
Munshi-South thinks of the city as a grand evolutionary experiment. When he looks at a map of New York City, he sees the city’s parks and green spaces as wildlife islands. Movement within islands is free, but between islands is restricted.
White-footed mice, for example, thrive in city parks but not on concrete and asphalt. Munshi-South can tell which park a mouse is from, and how it moves around the city, from its genetic code. Central Park mice, he’s found, are relatively isolated. Mice from Van Cortlandt Park and the other parks in the Bronx, where there are more trees and shrubbery, move a bit more freely.
It’s necessary to understand what cities are doing if we really want to understand ecology and evolution.
A few hundred years of the city’s history—during which time parks were constructed and then isolated from each other—is
