Do cities create smarter animals? Behavioural monitoring of adaptive responses in urban wildlife

Bielby, KM (2026) Do cities create smarter animals? Behavioural monitoring of adaptive responses in urban wildlife. Masters thesis, Liverpool John Moores University.

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Abstract

Urbanisation has transformed natural landscapes into human dominated environments and has altered ecological communities across the world. These environmental changes alter habitat structure, resource availability and ecological processes, creating both challenges and opportunities for wildlife. Although population numbers of many species are seeing steep declines in urban areas, some species seem to be stabilising under these conditions. Understanding the mechanisms that enable wildlife to persist and thrive in urban landscapes is crucial for informing conservation strategies designed to support declining urban populations.
This thesis comprised two complementary studies that investigated behavioural and physiological responses to urbanisation. Specifically, I tested the hypotheses that urban-adapted individuals exhibit greater boldness and enhanced cognitive abilities than conspecifics inhabiting less urbanised environments, and that urbanisation is associated with increased energetic demands, reflected by higher metabolic rates linked to foraging requirements. I used the European hedgehog as my study species, with individuals sampled across an urbanisation gradient.
The first study examined the relationship between uncurling behaviour (as a measure of boldness) and cognitive performance through a series of behavioural assays assessing risk taking and problem-solving abilities. The second study investigated the relationship between uncurling behaviour and metabolic rate as oxygen consumption via flow-through respirometry. Together, these approaches explored whether variation in uncurling behaviour (as a measure of boldness) across an urban gradient was associated with corresponding differences in cognitive and physiological traits.
I found that uncurling behaviour did not differ across habitats, and urbanisation did not affect overall success rate in any of the three cognitive tasks, although hedgehogs from more urbanised areas took longer to pass the first task, i.e., removal of a lid from a bowl, while performance in the subsequent tasks, i.e. the time it took to move a panel to access food and finding an alternative entrance to the feeding station was not correlated to urbanisation. Similarly, neither uncurling nor habitat urbanisation significantly predicted variation in metabolic rate. These findings suggest that urbanisation does not appear to shape boldness, cognitive performance or metabolic rate in the study species. Furthermore, boldness was not associated with either cognitive performance or metabolic rate, indicating that these behavioural, cognitive and physiological traits may vary independently within this species.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Urbanisation; Cognition; Environmental adaptation; Metabolic rate; Erinaceus europaeus
Subjects:	Q Science > QL Zoology
Divisions:	Biological and Environmental Sciences (from Sep 19)
Date of acceptance:	20 August 2026
Date of first compliant Open Access:	14 September 2026
Date Deposited:	14 Sep 2026 09:02
Last Modified:	14 Sep 2026 09:02
DOI or ID number:	10.24377/LJMU.t.00029356
Supervisors:	Nowack, J, Beardsworth, C and Macleod, R
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/29356

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