Submitted by AskScienceModerator t3_118wdoz in askscience
nationalgeographic t1_j9ll70j wrote
Reply to comment by Cat-astro-phe in AskScience AMA Series: I'm Dr. Christine Wilkinson, National Geographic Explorer, carnivore ecologist, human-wildlife interactions specialist, and performer. Want to know why a coyote wanders through your city? What happens when hyenas chew your tires during research? How to get into SciComm? AMA! by AskScienceModerator
I'm willing to bet that social media has a lot to do with what we're seeing, and that most of these behaviors are not new. That being said, human changes to the environment (even subtle changes) can create new situations that animals have to adapt to or may behave differently around.
On a more philosophical note, scientists/people in general often try to put things into neat boxes, and nature doesn't operate like that! Folks might think behaviors are new just because scientists of the past have not written about them due to the behaviors not fitting into our neat boxes. A great example: all of the homosexual and gender-bending behaviors in the animal kingdom that have been poorly studied or largely just ignored or written off as flukes.
[deleted] t1_j9lnrpc wrote
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