There are more hedgehogs in urban centres than rural areas, said researchers at the University of Hamburg.
These "cute, little, pointy buggers" are a smart lot. They have moulded their lives to humans around them very well. In busy areas, they have changed to adapt to the hibernation patterns of rural hedgehogs.
Even though it has been 15 million years of evolution, the hedgehogs have managed to adapt very well to their environment.
In this year's Society for Experimental Biology Annual Meeting, experts linked the hedgehogs with temperature-sensitive transmitters, which could assess the hibernation, nesting activity and distances they roamed very well.
Most of the time the hedgehogs would stay indoors, but would go out of their homes in the nights to look for food and mates.
Surprisingly, none of the city-dwellers even know that they are sharing their parks with hedgehogs. "They told me there weren't any hedgehogs in this park, and yet I had just tagged seven of them," says Warnecke, a biology postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg in Germany.
"We found that urban hedgehogs had much smaller nightly ranging areas than their rural counterparts...and that they adjusted their activity to levels of human disturbance," said lead researcher Dr. Lisa Warnecke.
"This is a really important finding. It helps those of us who are working to save these animals provide better conservation advice," says Hugh Warwick, an ecologist with the British Hedgehog Preservation Society.
Hence, if you're an urban animal, take care that you don't disrupt this cohabitants' nests. You should also be very cautious about fences and gardening tools.
Warnecke gave her presentation on July 4 at the Society for Experimental Biology annual meeting in Brighton, England.
