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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday March 14 2018, @08:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the make-it-get-me-my-slippers dept.

Researchers have seen signs of "domestication syndrome", including patches of white fur and shorter snouts, in mice that had some contact with humans but were not subject to "intense and directed selection regimes":

The accident began in 2002 when scientists studying mouse behavior and disease transmission trapped a dozen wild mice in a barn in Illnau, Switzerland. The animals were free to come and go and nest and mate as they pleased. Their new digs were also safe from predators—the mouse doorways were too small to allow domestic cats, owls, and martens to enter. The barn also contained plenty of free food and water, provided by the researchers every few weeks. The mice that didn't mind the visits stuck around and eventually blossomed to a steady population of 250–430 animals. Some even began to run over the researchers' shoes instead of scurrying away. That's a sign that these animals had lost their fear of humans, even without the researchers deliberately breeding the most human-friendly mice, as scientists had done with the foxes.

Four years later, Anna Lindholm, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, began to notice white patches of fur on a few of the russet-colored mice. "It was really rare," she says—in some mice, the white splotches made up of as few as eight hairs. From 2010 to 2016, the proportion of adult mice with white fur patches more than doubled [open, DOI: 10.1098/rsos.172099] [DX], the team reports today in Royal Society Open Science.

Serendipitously, Lindholm had also been measuring the mice's heads for another project. And, just like the Siberian foxes, the mice became smaller and their heads shrank—about 3.5% on average. That's an "exciting" change that suggests self-domestication can occur as a result of natural selection, says Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved in the work.


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 14 2018, @10:05PM (7 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday March 14 2018, @10:05PM (#652630) Journal

    The study is about something that probably happens whether you want it to or not, as long as they have sufficient food and shelter apparently.

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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday March 14 2018, @10:21PM (3 children)

    by looorg (578) on Wednesday March 14 2018, @10:21PM (#652638)

    That is the part of the story, and the study, that seems a bit odd. They don't want to domesticate as such but at the same time they feed them and provide safe shelter and eventually notice that the mice are not afraid of them and scurry away anymore. That that would happen shouldn't be all to surprising. It's "self taming" when they are provided for, an easy life with shelter, food and protection. No wonder they settle in there and breed like mice.

    My question in that sense was related but not direct, why would we even want to domesticate mice? We normally want to kill them as fast as we can since they are normally considered to be pests -- I guess some people consider them to be pets (even tho they smell horribly and are not very long lived). But still why would we want that? Unless it's to set a trap so we can wipe them out, lure them in with the free food and then wipe them out.

    I guess they wanted to show that animals can self tame with or under the right conditions then that mice per say wasn't that interesting but just a simple form of research subject. I'm sure you could try and self tame tigers and poisonous snakes to but it would just be a lot more impractical and dangerous -- and it would probably be just as worthless as a self tamed mouse.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by vux984 on Wednesday March 14 2018, @11:43PM

      by vux984 (5045) on Wednesday March 14 2018, @11:43PM (#652689)

      The part that was interesting to me was they developed slightly smaller heads, and patches of white fur; so all these characteristics of being 'tamed' seem to come about together.

      "why would we even want to domesticate mice?"

      They don't want that, it was an accidental finding. They were studying behavior and disease transmission, and just wanted to isolate their test group, and keep them fed for the study, and that was enough to trigger the domestication traits.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday March 15 2018, @02:27AM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 15 2018, @02:27AM (#652745) Journal

      I think that if we could tame the mice, and train them to stay out of the pantry, mice would be alright. But, we haven't successfully trained dogs to stay off the sofa. Domestication may have it's uses, but I don't think we're smart enough to make full use of it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @09:23AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @09:23AM (#652854)

      Dude, art thou nearsighted? The study was funded by Microsoft! Embrace! Extend! Extinguish! Now with lab animals! Soon with you! Switch to an open source peer review system before it's too late!

  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday March 14 2018, @11:36PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 14 2018, @11:36PM (#652682) Journal

    That's only a part of the story. The other part is that they were protected from predators as long as they stayed inside the barn. It's an interesting question which portion of the environmental change is more significant, since in the fox experiment also they were protected from predators as well as fed and allowed to breed (as long as they qualified to stay in the experiment).

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @03:13AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @03:13AM (#652759)

    Isn't this more or less what happened with house spiders? They're more or less completely incapable of surviving in the wild due to their metabolic rate being set for indoors and the lack of food available compared with outdoors.