Urban Foxes May Be Self-Domesticating In Our Midst (sciencemag.org) 85
sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: In a famous Siberian experiment carried out the 1950s, scientists turned foxes into tame, doglike canines by breeding only the least aggressive ones generation after generation. The creatures developed stubby snouts, floppy ears, and even began to bark.
Now, it appears that some rural red foxes in the United Kingdom are doing this on their own. When the animals moved from the forest to city habitats, they began to evolve doglike traits, new research reveals, potentially setting themselves on the path to domestication...
Most significantly, the urban foxes, like those in the Russian experiment, had noticeably shorter and wider muzzles, and smaller brains, than their rural fellows. And males and females had very similar skull shapes. All of these changes are typical of what Charles Darwin labeled domestication syndrome. Overall, urban foxes' skulls seemed to be designed for a stronger bite than were those of rural foxes, which are shaped for speed.
Perhaps that's because in the city, a fox can simply stand at a human trash pile and feed on the food we've tossed out, where they may encounter more bones that can only be crushed with stronger jaws, Parsons speculates. Still, he emphasizes that the urban red foxes are not domesticated. But the study does show how exposure to human activity can set an animal down this path, says Melinda Zeder, an emeritus archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.
Now, it appears that some rural red foxes in the United Kingdom are doing this on their own. When the animals moved from the forest to city habitats, they began to evolve doglike traits, new research reveals, potentially setting themselves on the path to domestication...
Most significantly, the urban foxes, like those in the Russian experiment, had noticeably shorter and wider muzzles, and smaller brains, than their rural fellows. And males and females had very similar skull shapes. All of these changes are typical of what Charles Darwin labeled domestication syndrome. Overall, urban foxes' skulls seemed to be designed for a stronger bite than were those of rural foxes, which are shaped for speed.
Perhaps that's because in the city, a fox can simply stand at a human trash pile and feed on the food we've tossed out, where they may encounter more bones that can only be crushed with stronger jaws, Parsons speculates. Still, he emphasizes that the urban red foxes are not domesticated. But the study does show how exposure to human activity can set an animal down this path, says Melinda Zeder, an emeritus archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.
Just in time for the 2020 election (Score:3, Interesting)
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Well shit. This post hitting +5 interesting while containing all the relevant key phrases suggests that there are actually are bots on slashdot doing standard neverTrump moderation.
That or TDS made people genuinely retarded beyond belief.
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It should be modded funny. Modding insightful is just partisan trolling.
Classic TDS, attacking CNN is a standing order.
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No design (Score:2)
The skulls weren't designed.
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Well, sure, but they *seem* that way. Happens all the time. The anatomy of the eye looks like a sophisticated optical *design*, even though it isn't a design at all.
Re: No design (Score:2, Funny)
No, the factory wasn't designed. Go back to your book of fairytales and leave the science discussions to people who have a clue.
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"The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. ... The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life."
Don't insult Stephen Hawking [wikipedia.org] like that. It's disrespectful to the dead, and besides, you'll be joining him soon.
Re: No design (Score:2)
Google God of the gaps and learn something.
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When you learn logic, that is, the rules for proper inference from premises, and that it does -not-, ever, tell you what the proper initial premises are, get back to me.
Sigh, go to get groceries and the apes are still parroting. Evolution should start eliminating you people... er... hominids, faster.
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The initial premises of science have given you the technology that you currently use to spread your opinion.
Yes, thank you theists. Particularly Babbage, Faraday, Tim Berners-Lee, and Heisenberg for the foundations of Quantum Computing. [wikipedia.org]
Your initial premises have caused countless genocides throughout the history of humanity and still fuel hatred for those who believe different today.
Stalin and Mao, 50 million plus dead of their own citizens, as a direct ideological result of official state atheism. Case closed.
And, do tell, what is your objection to "genocide" (which the above naturally and by inescapable logic given their atheist premises, had no problem with), from an evolutionary perspective? You have absolutely none, other that what you parasite off o
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Face it on the level but I take you every time on a one on one [youtube.com]
Yep, still bored.
Kick you 'round the world, there ain't a thing that you can do.
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You are conflating atheism with science.
No, fool, you have based your brain on the formal False Dichotomy fallacy of "science versus religion", and this is just another iteration of your irrationality.
The big irony surrounding Stalin and Mao is that they killed so many people partially because they elevated themselves to the status of living Gods.
Yes, the standard directly irrational Dawkins/Hitchens parrot. So if they say they're theist, it's religion's fault, and if they say they're atheist, it's religion's fault? Absurdly demented, and transparently intellectually dishonest.
The problem with genocide? I'm a human. Like most others I have that evolutionary trait called empathy, which leads to the human concept of compassion.
Instincts are not ethics. That attempt to equivocate the conceptual level is wholly dysfunctional, and leaves you
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Learn your parroted irrationality?
There are no "gaps", that's a figment of your imagination.
If we understand the physics of it, God did it.
If we don't understand the physics of it yet, God did it.
There has been no change in what the average person would call "natural" versus "miraculous" for the last 2000 years, nobody is filling imaginary "gaps" but you and your deluded atheist masters.
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If you want to believe in a big sky fairy you carry on mate. Whatever makes you feel secure and gives your life meaning because it has so little of its own.
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You know nothing about my life, I assure you it's better than yours--and that if I chose to argue atheism, I'd make you look like an incompetent fool by comparison. You can't even do anything beyond the standard parrot tripe of "sky fairy", or know what a fallacy of equivocation is.
Now hurry up with your natural deselection, as you insist.
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Oh dear, has someone been triggered? :)
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That lame argument evasion?
Eh, no, but someone will be triggered consistently by the DNA manifestations you'll be leaving behind.
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The skulls weren't designed.
You're reading the fox news, then.
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"Designed" is a poor choice of word, but it doesn't seem to be intended to mean that there's an intelligent being behind it all. From what I've seen, "designed" is often used as a synonym for "well suited." Or as hyperbole, with the underlying meaning that a thing is so suitable for a particular purpose that it might as well have been designed for it.
I doubt the author meant that someone had come up with a specification for fox skulls, sent it off to the 3D print shop, performed a craniectomy on an unwitt
Selective Breeding (Score:5, Funny)
It sounds about as plausible as it does ridiculous, but I’d like to think there’s a mad Russian scientist that’s a hold over from the Soviet days that’s creating any army of feral murder foxes for when General Winter can’t keep enemies at bay.
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Racists and anti-racists are two sides of the same coin. They are full of hate and disdain and want each to suffer, because both fail to see the person inside.
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First off, not being racist does not make one anti-racist.
You're deflecting. Calling a comment racist where someone states a scientific fact on the link between melanin and adrenaline does make you an anti-racist. It doesn't even have to be true what he wrote, and you could have countered with other scientific facts, but you jumped straight to calling it racist.
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Now what could someone mean by "Explain a lot" ...
It means he had an epiphany. Why do you care?
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When a link is found between anything you still have to carefully examine the nature of that link.
You thought there was a link to racism. So why didn't you examine it more carefully?
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Russians are a special breed of their own. Last year did a Russian spray "T-34" on a polar bear...
Re:Selective Breeding (Score:4, Funny)
Must've been a dumb yank. Real Russian bears are Tu-95.
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Re: Selective Breeding (Score:3)
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https://petsfox.ru/buyfox [petsfox.ru]
Apparently it was outlawed last year.
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> but for obvious reasons arenâ(TM)t selling those to anyone or letting news crews film them.
Oh, they're letting film crew near them all right.
Those pesky ones that were revealing high level corruption.
It worked out well all around; the reports stopped and the foxes are full and happy.
hawk, apparently not considering the orphans
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Foxes are not naturally aggressive, they are mostly scavengers or go for small animals and insects. If they wanted to breed fighting animals they would pick one of the species of dogs they have over there. Dogs have the additional advantage of being pack animals and thus easier to train and control.
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Yes, they bred a second line that was selected for aggression, just to see if that worked too. And boy did it -- I've seen video, and those foxes hate the world and want to kill everything in it.
Chicken and egg (Score:3)
As I understand things, foxes which have more domesticated traits than normal fare better than those without in city settings, so reproduce more, die less, and thus the population changes. What I struggle to get my head around is where these traits come from to begin with. If mutations can generate these traits in cities, surely they can also in the wild, albeit in foxes who do less well reproductively. But then we should see some of these traits in foxes in the wild. Else where do the adaptations which lead to better success in the city come from in the first place.
Re:Chicken and egg (Score:5, Interesting)
life in the wild is harsh. to "do less well reproductively" means your strain gets extinct fast and those traits lost, regardless of how often they appear. it's the whole concept of selection. those russians simply altered the selection rules and there you got those same traits thriving. with these foxes same thing happened, though indirectly: by building cities with waste foxes can eat humans altered the rules of selection.
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"by building cities with waste, foxes can eat humans, altered the rules of selection."
commas exist for a reason.
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The urban and rural areas are different environments and the selective pressures are different. It's no different than the various species (or maybe sub-species) of birds in the Galápagos Islands that have different sized beaks that match the size of the seeds or other food avail
Re:Chicken and egg (Score:4, Insightful)
The Russians breeding foxes found that as you select for a more agreeable disposition, you get "cuter" animals. They literally look nicer when they are nicer. Assuming they weren't accidentally selecting for cuteness, this means that the one thing is tied to the other somehow. Perhaps hormones that promote aggression also affect appearance, or maybe both have the same root cause somehow.
Either way it explains why you don't have cuter foxes in the wild. The less aggressive and suspicious members of the species don't survive. In the city being cute is itself a benefit, because it helps you coexist with the dominant species in that environment, i.e. us.
Re:Chicken and egg (Score:4, Insightful)
Likewise on the physical features. Most babies (of all species) have proportionally-large eyes, round features, and so on, and so most social animals have positive instincts towards those features. An animal that 'fails to grow up' in a wild environment is selected against, but in a human environment, it's a very helpful mutation.
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That would not be a good example though for "childishness" though. It sounds more like a phenomenon of nurture vs a phenomenon of natu
Re:Chicken and egg (Score:4, Interesting)
There's also a possibility that if agreeableness and physical appearance are linked in some way for whatever reason that humans have themselves adapted to recognize this and that evolution has essentially encoded this bias into us because being able to detect animals which are more threatening is advantageous for survival. I really do feel sorry for people who reject evolution out of hand for religious reasons because it's truly some of the most fascinating science out there and there's still so much for us to learn.
Re: Chicken and egg (Score:2)
Re:Chicken and egg (Score:5, Insightful)
But then we should see some of these traits in foxes in the wild.
To do that you'd have to *look*. Foxes are actually far more common than most people realize, but in the woods they're nocturnal and shy. As a fisherman I've run across them on their way home in the early morning just before daybreak, but you could spend years tramping through those same stretches of woods during the middle of the day without realizing you're in a fox's territory
Urban foxes are a different matter. They're on *our* turf, and we're much more likely to run across them when they're out and about. They're also more habituated to us, and less likely to hide.
Now think in terms of *populations*. Theoretically the adaptations that occur in urbanized foxes also occur in forest populations too, but they don't confer any particular benefit. Those features are bound to be rarer in forest populations. Given that we seldom see forest foxes and even more seldom get a good look at them, it wouldn't be remarkable if we *never* happened to see those urban adaptations in a forest specimen.
It's a classic "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" scenario.
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This is well known among the
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So much so, in fact, Darwin spent the first 20% of his book The Origin of Species to the question of available variations in a genetic stock. [*] He did not use this language of genetics, he predated it. But his major question was, when you mix white with black you get gray. You can't get whiter than original white or blacker than the original black. So how can these variations happen that is outside the
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Observational error (Score:3)
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And all yours, too, mod!
The biological funnel goes only one place.
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Run, little fox, run.
Oh wait, some internet random-something clicked. Guess I should re-examine my worldview.
Totaly agree (Score:4, Interesting)
I saw my local Vixen and her five cubs playing on my grass yesterday. I got within 10ft of them before she called out a warning.
They are far less afraid of humans than say 10 years ago.
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Agree - had similar stuff in our garden a few years back. We still get our regular "rubbish drops" from the foxes who steal food (in packaging) from bins and then bring it to our garden to eat it.
The foxes seem to have moved on somewhat though, to make way for badgers. Badgers make a far greater mess of your garden, fences etc. and can make modest structural problems from burrow-building. We even had a pint of milk "stolen" from the front of our house, pushed to the back and broken on some steps on the pati
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I had a fox not 10ft from my kitchen window this morning. It was one of last years cubs. It climbed on top of a pile of old railway sleepers that I have waiting for the day when I build a 5th raised bed for my veggies.
The reason why foxes aren't fully domesticated (Score:2)
We have a few cameras installed in the garden and I can see our cats chasing them away.
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The cat that live next door have tried many times to intimidate the foxes that live on the other side to me. They may try and they fail every time. The Vixen is no match for those cats. The totally overgrown garden next door is as a result, a haven for nesting birds. My garden is a wasteland of birds due to the cats. I think we need to cull the number of cats around if we are to stop the drastic reduction in the numbers of garden birds.
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Odd. I had a killdeer nesting in the driveway last year. The cats, both feral and domestic, left it alone. The raven did not, and destroyed the nest when it finally noticed it.
Even with the cats, I lose too many strawberries to the birds. The cats are not getting nearly enough of them, or at least of the right species.
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You could try netting your strawberries. I cover my Cherry Tree to stop the magpies and the gulls. They will steal anything. I was really talking about the small birds such as Greenfinches, Various members of the Tit family and the like. I used to see goldfinches in my garden but no longer. The cats get them as soon as they start nest building.
From Hollywood, may be... (Score:3)
Dogs: "Been there, done that." (Score:2)
This is almost certainly how dogs developed form wolves. They started hanging out around succesfull human encampments, over time evolved to be tamer and dependent on human garbage. Then some humans started throwing them food and treating them as pets and boom, they got domesticated.
Did the same thing to my wife. ;D
Odd I immediately wondered (Score:3)
mmm Could living in urban areas lead to cultural domestication in some?
Just my 2 cents
Replay of Domestication of the Dog? (Score:3)
I've seen it suggested that the earliest stage of canine domestication was wolves that hung around human settlement, increasingly living off the refuse, self-domesticating before humans took an active role.
This could be considered a recapitulation of that process.
Evidence suggests Celts domesticated foxes (Score:1)