City Raccoons Are Evolving to Look More Like Pets
City Raccoons Are Evolving to Look More Like Pets
www.scientificamerican.com
City Raccoons Are Evolving to Look More Like Pets
18 comments
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City-dwelling raccoons seem to be evolving a shorter snout—a telltale feature of our pets and other domesticated animals
I wonder if it's softer food.
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For the new study, she and 16 graduate and undergraduate students gathered nearly 20,000 photographs of raccoons across the contiguous U.S. from the community science platform iNaturalist. The team found that raccoons in urban environments had a snout that was 3.5 percent shorter than that of their rural cousins.
Or maybe people in cities take more photos of “cuter” animals?
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If they're iNaturalist photo submissions then they're submitting every raccoon (and other animal) they see
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I don't think someone would notice a 3.5% shorter snout when they took the picture.
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If humans are more likely to take photos of racoons they find cute, we'd expect those racoons to have cuter features than the average racoon. It might not be actual change going on, is the point being made.
We don't conciously notice the snout length, just the ones we think are cute are probably slightly more likely to have a shorter snout.
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Not individually, but over nearly 20,000 instances.
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I mean every raccoon in the study was photographed. So this wouldn't explain any difference within that sample.
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I'm surprised the article doesn't mention the six decade long silver fox domestication experiment:
https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-018-0090-x
They bred the tamest foxes from each generation and started seeing shortened snouts and floppy ears. Although there is some dispute about the initial population from a study in 2019. To my understanding the researchers with the dispute question the existence of domestication syndrome though, so the experiment would still align with the article. And I think there is some dispute over the neural crest cell explanation mentioned in the article too.
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I just learned about this the other day and it immediately came to mind when I saw this article.
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If you're cold, they're cold. Let the trash panda inside your house.
18 comments
Wow that’s interesting!
This has absolutely blown my mind. I don’t think I’ve ever considered that, obviously.
Yeah, if you ever run across the theories of how dogs became so close to us, it started with wolves being willing to take the risks of scavenging near us, and eventually co-evolving (until selective breeding started).
Actively, intentionally domesticating a species is a slow process overall, and it wasn't something that I've seen any specialists suggest would have been the case with dogs, or cats.
In that case you might like the PBS Eons video on the domestication of house cats (and it touches on some of the generalised processes):
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CYPJzQppANo
It's a popular theory about why dogs were domesticated so much earlier than everything else. Wolves have a remarkably similar lifestyle to human hunter gatherers, and so early dogs could live either in parallel or in close proximity as conditions demanded. With other creatures, like pigs or horses, humans had to run a program and do so consistently for domestication to work. In some places, semi-feral dogs are still a common sight.