faulker098

In June 2015, the whole world got to hear about the death of the lion Cecil in Zimbabwe, by an American recreational big-game hunter, i.e. , someone who kills big animals for fun. The whole idea of killing animals for fun seems distorted and out of place in our days, but this is a market that still generates millions of dollars a year. Every year, perhaps thousands of large animals, like lions, rhinos and giraffes are hunted by people who appreciate and can afford this dubious and expensive type of fun. A study has estimated that annually an average of 244 lions only are hunted in Africa! What was different in the case of Cecil is that he was a lion being studied and tracked during years by researchers from the University of Oxford. When his killing made the international news (you can guess that the large majority of hunted animals never does), we got to see what I remember as one of the most intense conservationist reaction by the general public in my life time. People were just outr

For years, fish scientists have alerted about the dangers of establishing a minimum fish size for a given species, as a way to assure that fish makes it at least through its first reproduction, disregarding regulations about a maximum size as well. But the topic has finally made the news. In an interview to BBC,Professor Adam Hart explained that we have for millennia intentionally selected size and other features of our domesticated livestock and plants, which has led to descendent organisms that differ genetically from their ancestors. This change in gene frequency is evolution, and, in this human-induced case, we call it artificial selection . However, not all human selection pressures are as intentional as those imposed by plant and animal breeders. Recent research is revealing that many of our activities exert significant unintentional selection on organisms, which has been labeled as " unnatural selection ". As we let it slip at the beginning of our post, one such exam