So much for high school biology.
Evolution, it turns out, isn't the long, invisible process we once thought.
Instead, it's happening all around us, all the time.
And we are it's primary drivers.
By shaping landscapes, dumping pollutants into rivers and lakes, and transforming wild areas into suburban ones, humans are spurning the creation of everything from wild animal hybrids to pests immune to poisons and superbugs that can't be killed with bacteria.
All of this is taking place at an unprecedented scale.
Bedbugs are becoming a new species of nightmare insects.
While you might be familiar (a little too familiar, you might say), with bedbugs, they didn’t always used to be the terrifying critters we know today.
Thousands of years ago, our cave-dwelling ancestors got along perfectly fine with bedbugs — mainly because they were nearly an entirely different species back then. Unfortunately, as humans migrated out of caves and into cities over thousands of years, they brought bedbugs along for the ride. The insects with traits that made them better able to survive their new urban lifestyle— such as being more active at night, when humans sleep, and having longer, thinner legs for hopping away from us quickly — outlived their less-evolved bedbug friends.
In just the last few decades, these city-dwelling insects have become almost an entirely separate species from their cave-dwelling cousins. In addition to their new penchant for the nightlife, today’s urban bedbugs have also evolved resistance to pesticides: They have thicker, waxier exoskeletons (to shield them from toxins) and faster metabolisms (to beef-up their natural chemical defenses).
Two distinct species of mice are mating and their hybrid mice pups are immune to pesticides.
Typically, members of two different species can’t mate with one another — and if they do, the offspring they produce are often infertile or so weak they die before they can produce any babies.
In mice, at least 50% of hybrids are sterile. But sometime in the past 50 years, when wandering Europeans brought together the Algerian mouse (Mus spretus) and the common house mouse (Mus musculus), the two species got to mating.
Miraculously, their mice pups were fertile. Although rare, this sort of thing can happen every so often with just the right combination of genes. In addition to their baby-making capabilities, the hybrid mice got another gift from their parents: a chunk of genes that makes them immune to the poison warfarin, meaning they can’t be killed by pesticides.
Unlike the house mice, the Algerian mice had this poison-resistance gene naturally — they likely evolved it as an adaptation to a vitamin-K diet (the same gene that’s responsible for warfarin-immunity manages vitamin K in the body.)
Clepto sea slugs steal genes from their food and incorporate them into their own DNA.
How to adapt to survive for months on nothing but sunlight? Try taking a cue from plants. Better yet, steal a few of their genes.
When food in the chilly coastal waters where they live runs scarce, the bright green sea slug snatches chunks of DNA from the algae they eat. Coupled with tiny energy-producing powerhouses called chloroplasts (which the sneaky slugs also pilfer from their algeae meals), the stolen genes are enough to allow the slugs to survive on nothing but sunshine for days.
The best part? The algae genes get passed onto the next generation of slugs.
Although future slugs will then come pre-equipped with the algae genes in their DNA, they'll still need to snatch up new chloroplasts to keep the process going. This gene-swapping process is called horizontal gene transfer. By doing it, the slugs are effectively bypassing traditional evolution, which typically happens over thousands or millions of years. So far, these sea slugs are one of the only known examples of this process occurring between multicellular organisms.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider