This podcast is brought to you in part by PNAS Science Sessions, a production of the

proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Science Sessions offers brief yet insightful

discussions with some of the world's top researchers. Just in time for this spooky season of Halloween,

we invite you to explore the extraordinary hunting abilities of spiders featuring impressive

aerial maneuvers and webs that function as sensory antennas, follow science sessions,

on popular podcast platforms like iTunes, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

This is Scientific Americans, 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkins.

Boston and New York are famed for their rivalries. Everything from the Yankees versus the Red Sox,

to who makes the correct clam chowder. It seems even the local wildlife has hometown pride,

because pigeons that roost near Rockefeller Center are genetically distinct from those that

summer at the Cape. The finding is in the journal, evolutionary applications.

I don't think we could be in a city without thinking about pigeons, and for many people it's

one of the few daily interactions that they have with wildlife.

Elizabeth Carlin, a graduate student at Fordham University in the Bronx. As an evolutionary

biologist, Carlin was curious about whether pigeons in one city are closely related, genetically

speaking, to those from cities nearby. So she did a research-inspired road trip, making stops

from Boston to DC. I would drive to a city and then start talking to people at Starbucks,

anybody that I could chat with. I would start asking them questions about where they saw pigeons,

and kind of start to gather until that way. Once she'd found a flock,

she'd lay down some bird seed, and then use a net gun, which is basically something that

looks like a big flashlight, and it shoots a net out over the pigeons. With birds literally in

hand, she would take a DNA sample. I like to call it like a pigeon 23 in me, right? We're looking

...