Humans created a new top predator that's taking over the Northeast — and that's just one example of the evolution we're driving

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 its primary drivers.

Numbers of the coywolf, a new hybrid of the coyote and the wolf, likely just topped a million.

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.

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Bedbugs are becoming a new species of nightmare insects.

Thousands of years ago, our cave-dwelling human ancestors got along perfectly fine with bedbugs — mainly because they were nearly an entirely different species back then. But as we migrated out of caves and into cities over thousands of years, we 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.

Two distinct species of mice are mating and their hybrid mice pups are immune to pesticides.

Sometime in the past 50 years, wandering Europeans brought together the Algerian mouse (Mus spretus) and the common house mouse (Mus musculus), and miraculously, their mice pups were fertile.

The hybrid mice can't be killed by pesticides — they inherited a chunk of genes from their Algerian parents that makes them immune to the poison warfarin.

Clepto sea slugs steal genes from their food and incorporate them into their own DNA.

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. That DNA, coupled with tiny energy-producing powerhouses called chloroplasts let the slugs to survive on nothing but sunshine for days.

And the algae genes have been getting passed onto the next slug generation via a process known as horizontal gene transfer. So far, these sea slugs are one of the only known examples of this process occurring between multicellular organisms.