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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: 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!