""I started wondering how our city environments potentially shape wild animals," Raffaela Lesch, a biologist from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the study's senior author, told SFGATE. "How might the environment where we live change them in a way that might be similar or the same to domestication? That's really the idea that sparked this work with the raccoons.""
"Domesticated animals often share physical traits like lack of pigmentation (i.e., white spots), curly tails, floppy ears and smaller facial skeletons - together called "domestication syndrome." In 2014, scientists came up with a hypothesis to explain this syndrome, linking an animal's tameness to mutations in neural crest cells, a type of cell that forms in vertebrate embryos. The new findings seem to support that hypothesis, the researchers said."
""[These new findings] indicate that once wild animals start spending time in the proximity of people, they become a little bit less afraid and perhaps even start showing physical signs of domestication syndrome," Adam Wilkins, a biologist at Humboldt University of Berlin who first put forward the neural crest cell hypothesis but was not involved in this research, told Scientific American."
Nearly 20,000 iNaturalist images were analyzed to compare urban and rural North American raccoon facial morphology. City-dwelling raccoons exhibit snouts approximately 3.5% shorter than rural raccoons that interact less with people. These morphological differences are interpreted as an early signal of domestication and parallel features grouped as domestication syndrome, such as reduced pigmentation and smaller facial skeletons. A hypothesized mechanism links increased tameness to changes in neural crest cell development. Increased access to human food waste draws raccoons closer to people, promoting selection for reduced fear and associated physical changes.
Read at SFGATE
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