London Foxes Show Early Signs of Self-Domestication

[Judi Lynn]

The urban foxes have squatter snouts and smaller brains than their rural cousins, but they’re no house pets



Foxes may be evolving to live alongside humans. (Photo by Kate Green/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

By Theresa Machemer
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
JUNE 8, 2020

The National Museums Scotland has a collection of about 1,500 fox skulls, diligently labeled with their original locations in London and the surrounding countryside. And when researchers compared rural fox skulls to those from in the city itself, they found some key differences.

The results, published on June 3 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, show that while rural foxes remain adapted for speed and hunting small, scampering prey, urban foxes have different priorities. Their skulls reflect the different needs of a carnivore that scavenges in a city chock-full of human refuse, ripe for the taking by a cunning canine. Shorter, stronger snouts are better adapted for breaking open packaging and crunching leftover bones, and smaller brains are fine when their meals don’t run away, Virginia Morell reports for Science magazine.

Together, the characteristics resemble what Charles Darwin labeled “domestication syndrome,” a set of traits that accompany a wild animal’s transition to tameness and eventually domestication.

“What’s really fascinating here is that the foxes are doing this to themselves,” Kevin Parsons, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Glasgow, tells the BBC in a video. “This is the result of foxes that have decided to live near people, showing these traits that make them look more like domesticated animals.”

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/london-foxes-show-early-signs-domestication-180975042/

[Princess Turandot]

1. The Downing Street fox..

He gets snapped a lot because he saunters across Downing Street, where photographers are usually found waiting for Larry the Cat (and maybe Boris).

Link to tweet

[eppur_se_muova]

2. They're *adapting*, not domesticating. Still as wild as ever.

The shorter, stronger muzzle also appears in coyotes who move into areas where wolves have been wiped out ... more robust coyotes can prey on the wolves' former prey, such as young moose, which are too big for most coyotes. No one ever called such coyotes "domesticated", and in fact, they are extremely hard to distinguish from wolves.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

3. Sort of like the hypothesis that dogs were...

... the natural result of wolves who were less frightened by humans, and which would breed together while scavenging the human waste.

Silver fox experiment in Russia, resulting in tameness: