Given the globally declining status of amphibians, understanding why some species are found in heavily modified environments is of considerable interest.
Crop weeds develop in highly modified environments and are one of the most severe threats to agriculture worldwide, because their invasive nature determines competition for resources with crops and at the same time they can be hosts for pests and diseases.
With necessary caution, the results can be used as a proxy for human diet in the past and reconstructions of anthropogenically modified environments.
Faced with change, a healthy organism is flexible and able to make further adaptive changes to bring itself back to homeostasis and normal functionality in the context of the modified environment [ 23, 236].
Placing other materials in the near field of this modified environment causes electrons to behave completely differently.
We have previously shown that abiotic conditions differ considerably between the natural and human-modified environments of W. auropunctata in its native range (Orivel et al. 2009).
And as Odling-Smee et al. 1996, Avital and Jablonka 2000, and Sterelny 2003 stress, animals' dispositions to modify the environments of both themselves and their offspring in certain ways are just as much potential objects of selection as are other of their traits.
The 1960s provided the earliest experimental evidence that modifying the environments of young rats, especially by adding complexity or enrichment, could alter the neurochemical and morphologic characteristics of their brains as well as their behavior (e.g., Bennett et al. 1964; Diamond et al. 1972 Diamond et al. 1974).
Indirectly then, they influence and modify the environment of others.
A personal-level approach focuses directly on changing actual and potential behavior in a working process with respective individuals, while an environmental-level approach aims to modify the environment of individuals such that adaptive capacity can develop and resilience is possible in adverse situations.
