Pamela Yeh

There was a huge drought in the 70s and most of the plants had died off, the seeds had died off, but there were still like these really hard, larger seeds left.

And the birds that had bigger beaks that were stronger, they could break open these seeds because there's no other food left, were able to survive at a much higher rate.

and reproduce, exactly, survive to be able to stay and reproduce the following year, exactly.

And they found this in one year.

And the cool part was, well, that part was already cool, so they found a huge change.

From one year to the next, the bird beaks got a lot bigger because of this drought.

And then, though, there was a huge rainfall, and what you saw was a move back, and it was actually very similar.

So what we're doing in some ways has been seen before.

But it was just really strange because it was the pandemic causing this change rather than these natural variations and whether it was human, not even the pandemic, it was a human response to the pandemic that we closed everything and suddenly there were no people and we weren't eating outside.

How rapid changes happen, we have seen that before.

Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And when I think about this research that we did, that's one of the biggest takeaways that I really want people to get is that if we look, we can find amazing things.

I think evolution has to be going around and all these really interesting evolutionary effects like strong selection pressures.

has to be happening right before our eyes, but we just have to look and we have to keep our eyes open because there's always something going on.

I think that's one of the biggest takeaways.

This is happening right on the campus of our local university, UCLA.

It's right in many people's backyards.

But even if we literally looked in our own backyards, this is what's going on.

And there's probably so much more that we're missing.