When Animals Take the Night Shift

SKaitlyn Gaynor and her colleagues noticed an intriguing pattern. It started with data from Tanzania, where motion-detecting cameras captured a trend: Antelope that had once roamed primarily in the day were now roving more at night. As Gaynor, a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley, and her fellow researchers discussed the change, they realized that a similar nocturnal shift had occurred in many other mammals, too. In Mozambique, elephants had begun traveling on roads is no exaggeration: , Gaynor and her co-authors offered evidence of nocturnal shifts in dozens of species that come into regular contact with humans, on every continent but Antarctica. Gaynor suspects that these behavioral changes are bringing with them rapid evolutionary change as well.