CAUTION: NICHE CONSTRUCTION AHEAD1

Abstract

This fall, I watched as my neighbors waged war on moles (to be fair, it was the wife's mother and aunt, who became known as the It seems the moles were suspected as weapons-of-grass-destruction and were deemed to be dangerous to the way of life of free lawns everywhere. The mole patrol roamed the lawn each evening, pouring all manner of organic and inorganic chemical warfare into the burrows of the unsuspecting moles, setting up conventional implements of physical torture in mole runs, and finally chasing moving tunnels with sharp sticks. To my knowledge, no single mole succumbed to this police action, though I did notice that some crossed borders into a more protective sovereignty and dug up my yard. Not really caring about some dirt mounds in my yard, I found myself instead thinking about the selective forces faced by suburban moles and how their actions modified the microhabitat in which they lived. I did not realize it then, but the moles and the mole patrol they brought down upon themselves through their burrowing behavior are examples of niche construction, wherein organisms modify their surroundings and in doing so, alter patterns of selection. The extended phenotype of the moles-the molehills they created-altered the action of potential predators (the mole patrol). In so doing, the moles indirectly affected the soil by causing a variety of chemical cocktails to be poured into the ground. Finally, they relocated to a new and less-challenging selective by moving into my yard. As defined by Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman, niche construction occurs an organism modifies the featurefactor relationship between itself and its by actively changing one or more of the factors in its environment (p. 41). The authors cast a broad net that encompasses such a diversity of biological phenomena that it is hard to imagine a subdiscipline of biology that would not be touched by this concept. As summarized in a lengthy chapter on the evidence for niche construction, virtually all beings, live or dead, fit this broad criterion. Any living organism alters its environment, whether it be as simple and passive as a plant altering the wavelengths of light experienced by itself and others through reflection off of and transmission through its leaves, or as dramatic as the pond habitat created by beavers when they dam a stream. A predator that moves to a new foraging locality when food becomes scarce constructs its niche by relocating and thereby changing the selection it experiences. The mere act of respiration alters the mixture of gases experienced by other organisms in the community. Ironically,