What Is the Most Adaptable Animal? 10 Most Adaptable Animals

The red fox is the most adaptable wild animal in the world. It has the largest natural range of any wild member of the carnivore order, spread across North America, Europe, Asia and North Africa, and it lives on Arctic tundra, farmland, forest, desert edges, mountains and in the middle of cities such as London, Zurich and Tokyo. It eats rodents, rabbits, birds, insects, earthworms, fruit, carrion and food waste, and it shifts between them with the season.

Humans are more adaptable still, and a handful of animals that live alongside us, such as brown rats, rock pigeons and some cockroaches, rival the fox in cities. Among wild animals that make a living on their own terms, though, nothing matches the fox's mix of climate range, habitat range and diet. Crows, wolves, peregrine falcons and leopards follow on the AnimalDex tier list.

Adaptability here means how well a species copes with conditions that change or differ from place to place, whether by changing its behaviour, its diet or its habitat. It is not the same as being tough. An animal that survives extremes by shutting down, such as a tardigrade, is resilient; an animal that keeps working by changing what it does is adaptable.

Most adaptable animals tier list (top 100)What is the most resilient animal?What is the smartest animal?Red fox species page

This is the same top ten as the AnimalDex most adaptable animals tier list, in the same order, led by the Red Fox, Crow and Wolf. The list rewards three different routes to adaptability: flexible behaviour and learning (crow, octopus, dolphin), a broad range and diet (red fox, wolf, leopard), and the ability to take over new places, including places humans built (peregrine falcon, American bullfrog, lionfish).

Two entries are there for uncomfortable reasons. The bullfrog and the lionfish rank because they are invasive: their success in ecosystems they never evolved in is hard proof of how flexible they are, even though it is bad news for the native species around them.

See all 100 on the most adaptable animals tier list

Red FoxCrowWolfPeregrine FalconLeopardOctopusDolphinAmerican BullfrogLionfishCrocodile

The top five have little in common physically. What they share is a broad menu and the behavioural flexibility to change it.

Red fox: one species, almost every habitat

Red foxes weigh only a few kilograms, but they are true generalists: they hunt voles by hearing them under snow and pouncing, cache surplus food, eat fruit and beetles in late summer, and raid bins in cities. Foxes moved into British suburbs in the 20th century and now live in most large towns there. People introduced red foxes to Australia in the 19th century for hunting, and within decades they had spread across most of the mainland, where they have contributed to the decline of many small native mammals.

Crow: learning as a survival tool

Crows eat almost anything and learn fast. Carrion crows in Sendai, Japan, learned to drop walnuts at road crossings so passing cars would crack them, then wait for the lights before collecting the pieces. American crows remember dangerous people for years and teach other crows to avoid them, and they gather in winter roosts of thousands where information about food sources spreads.

Wolf: the same predator from Arctic to desert

Before centuries of persecution, the gray wolf had one of the largest ranges of any land mammal, from Arctic islands to the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula and India. Packs adjust their hunting to what is available, from moose and bison to deer, beavers and hares, and coastal wolves in British Columbia swim between islands and catch salmon.

Peregrine falcon: cities as cliffs

Peregrines breed on every continent except Antarctica. They naturally nest on cliff ledges, and tall buildings, bridges and cathedrals offer the same thing, with a ready supply of pigeons. After DDT poisoning wiped out much of the population in the mid-20th century, the species recovered so well, helped by city nest sites, that it was removed from the US endangered species list in 1999.

Leopard: the most widespread big cat

The leopard has the widest distribution of any wild cat, from rainforest and savanna in Africa to mountains, scrub and temperate forest in Asia as far as the Russian Far East. It eats anything from dung beetles to antelope, hunts mostly at night near people, and survives on the edge of cities: leopards live in Sanjay Gandhi National Park inside the city limits of Mumbai.

Red FoxCrowWolfPeregrine FalconLeopard

Some of the most adaptable animals on Earth do not make the top ten because their success depends on us. They are still worth knowing, because they are the animals most people see every day.

• Brown rat

  Has followed people to every continent except Antarctica. It eats almost anything, breeds year-round, and lives in sewers, farms, docks and riverbanks. A female can produce several litters a year.

• Rock pigeon

  A cliff-nesting bird by origin, it treats building ledges as cliffs and city squares as open feeding ground. Feral pigeons now live in towns on every inhabited continent.

• Coyote

  Once mostly an animal of the western plains and deserts, the coyote spread across nearly all of North America in the 20th century as wolves were removed, and it now lives in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York.

• Cockroaches

  A few of the roughly 4,600 cockroach species, such as the German and American cockroach, live almost entirely with people, tolerate starvation for weeks and eat nearly any organic matter.

Brown ratCoyoteCockroachHouse sparrow

CoyoteCockroach

Adaptability comes in different forms, and the best example changes with the question being asked.

LionfishAmerican bullfrogWater bear (tardigrade)How dolphin intelligence works in the wild

Biologists do not have a single adaptability score, but they measure its parts. Range size and the number of habitat types a species uses show ecological breadth. Diet breadth counts how many kinds of food it eats. Behavioural flexibility is measured by innovations: Louis Lefebvre and colleagues counted reports of birds feeding in new ways in ornithology journals, and crows, ravens and parrots topped the counts. A 2005 PNAS study by Daniel Sol and colleagues found that bird species with larger brains relative to body size were more likely to establish themselves when introduced to new regions.

The tier list combines these ideas: range and habitat breadth, behavioural flexibility, and the record of thriving in new or human-made places.

• Myth: adaptable means evolving fast

  Adaptation is genetic change across generations. Adaptability is what one animal can do in its own lifetime. The red fox did not evolve to live in cities; individual foxes learned to.

• Myth: adaptable means invasive

  Many adaptable species stay in their native range, and some invaders succeed mainly because they left their predators and diseases behind.

• Myth: the toughest animal is the most adaptable

  Surviving extremes by going dormant, as tardigrades do, is a different skill from staying active and changing behaviour as conditions change.

• Myth: only smart animals adapt

  Learning helps, but the American bullfrog and the lionfish succeed through broad diets, fast breeding and wide physical tolerance.

What makes crows so intelligentHow wolves hunt, survive and shape ecosystems