Driving home last night it occured to me that I see a lot less dead foxes than
Badgers by the side of the road. Given that an increasingly popular census method counts the number of roadkill in an area and then predicts the number of mammals from that figure, I thought it would then be reasonable to assume that there are more
Badgers than foxes, would this be a reasonable assumption?
Thinking more about it though I decided that there are probably less dead foxes because they are possibly more intelligent/crafty than
Badgers and thus more able to learn to avoid cars on the road.
But we can take this line of thought a step further; cars have been on our roads for getting on for 100 years, is this amount of time long enough to weed out those individuals (
Fox,
Rabbit,
Hedgehog,
Badger whatever) more genetically disposed to being hit by cars (by favouring open spaces to sit, by being too slow to get out of the way or any other reason you care to make up)?
I'll rephrase the question couched in the above paragraph for more clarity: Is a century long enough for evolution to work on the 'fitness' of car avoidance? And if so, what are the potential consequences?
I almost put 'discuss' at the end of the question, but then it looked like a university exam question so I'll just say I'd be interested in your views.
