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(City traffic) So I'm here today to encourage you to think about New York City,
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not just as one of humanity's greatest achievements,
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but as home to native wildlife that are subject to a grand evolutionary experiment.
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So take this forested hillside in northern Manhattan, for example.
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This is one of the last areas left in the city where there is clean spring water that's still seeping out of the ground.
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You could drink this out of your hands and you'd be OK.
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These tiny little areas of seeping water contain huge populations of Northern Dusky Salamanders
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These guys were common in the city
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maybe sixty years ago,
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but now they're just stuck on this single hillside and a few places in Staten Island.
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Not only do they suffer the indignity of being
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stuck on this hillside,
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but we divided the hillside in two
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on two different occasions
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with bridges crossing from the Bronx into Manhattan.
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But they're still there
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on either side of the bridges where you see the red arrows
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about 180th street, 167th street.
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And my lab has found that if you just take a few segments of DNA
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from salamanders in those two locations
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you can tell which side of the bridge they came from.
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We build this single piece of infrastructure
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that's changed their evolutionary history.
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We can go study these guys, you know, we just go to the hillside
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we know where they are, we can flip over rocks, we can catch them.
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There are a lot of other things in New York City though that are not that
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easy to capture, such as this guy, a coyote.
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We caught him on an automatic camera trap somewhere,
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in an undisclosed location, not allowed to talk about it yet.
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But they're moving into New York City for the first time.
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They're very flexible, intelligent animals.
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This is one of this year's cubs checking out one of our cameras.
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And my colleagues and I are very interested in understanding
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how they're going to spread through the area,
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how they're going to survive here, and maybe even thrive.
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And they're probably coming to a neighborhood near you if they are not already there.
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So, there are some things that are too fast to be caught by hand.
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We can't pick them up on the cameras,
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so we actually set up traps all around the New York City and the parks.
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This is one of our most common activities.
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Here's some of my students and collaborators getting the traps out and ready.
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And this guy, we catch in almost every forested area in New York City.
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This is the White-footed Mouse.
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This is not the mouse you find running around your apartment.
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This is a native species, been here long before humans,
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and you find them in forests and meadows.
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Because they're so common in forested areas in the city,
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we're using them as a model to understand how species are adapting to urban environments.
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So if you think back 400 years ago,
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