{"id":312487,"date":"2025-11-28T15:25:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-28T15:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/312487\/"},"modified":"2025-11-28T15:25:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-28T15:25:07","slug":"city-life-is-reshaping-raccoons-and-may-be-nudging-them-toward-domestication-wildlife","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/312487\/","title":{"rendered":"City life is reshaping raccoons \u2013 and may be nudging them toward domestication | Wildlife"},"content":{"rendered":"

Raccoons living wild in cities in the United States<\/a> are beginning to show physical changes that resemble early signs of domestication, according to a recent study<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The study<\/a> found that urban raccoons had developed shorter snouts than rural raccoons, with the research produced by the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and published in Frontiers in Zoology. This is an example of a physical trait that appears across domesticated animals<\/a> that have adapted to living in close proximity to humans over long periods of time, along with other traits such as smaller teeth, curlier tails, smaller brains and floppier ears.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to know if living in a city environment would kickstart domestication processes in animals that are currently not domesticated,\u201d said <\/a>the study\u2019s lead author, Dr Raffaela Lesch, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. \u201cWould raccoons be on the pathway to domestication just by hanging out in close proximity to humans?\u201d<\/p>\n

To find out, Lesch and her team analyzed nearly 20,000 photos of raccoons uploaded from the US to iNaturalist<\/a>, a community science platform. They concluded that, across the country, raccoons living \u201cin close contact with densely populated human environments experience a reduction in snout length\u201d and observed a \u201c3.56% snout reduction between rural to urban raccoons\u201d.<\/p>\n

The paper argues that the domestication process across species begins with the \u201cadaptation of a subpopulation to a new environmental niche in the human environment\u201d and states that \u201cthe combination of the ready availability of refuse, ie, food scraps, and the absence of large predators make the human environment a niche of great potential.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it comes to raccoons, Lesch said<\/a> that \u201ctrash is really the kickstarter.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWherever humans go, there is trash\u201d Lesch said. \u201cAnimals love our trash. It\u2019s an easy source of food. All they have to do is endure our presence, not be aggressive, and then they can feast on anything we throw away.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no accident that raccoons living and breeding in cities are nicknamed trash pandas.<\/p>\n

Lesch said, in a statement emailed to the Guardian earlier this week, that \u201cin order to best take advantage of this human-centered niche\u201d the animals have to be \u201cbold enough to access resources yet nonaggressive enough to avoid being culled from the population\u201d.<\/p>\n

This, Lesch said, \u201ccreates distinct selection pressures favoring friendly and tame individuals\u201d.<\/p>\n

The study cites research that suggests<\/a> that raccoons with \u201cdampened\u201d flight-or-fight responses, that are calmer and less aggressive around humans, are more likely to succeed in these built-up environments, and that this can lead natural selection toward greater \u201ctameness\u201d.<\/p>\n

The shift in selection, the research suggests, has led to changes in the animal\u2019s neural crest cells, which are the cells that help form <\/a>the skull, facial bones and other traits, leading to a variety of physical and behavioral changes.<\/p>\n

These findings, Lesch said, \u201csupport the Neural Crest Domestication Syndrome hypothesis\u201d, which states that selection pressure for tameness affects early embryonic development. This, Lesch said, has the \u201cpotential to explain\u201d the combination of traits linked to domestication, including shorter snouts.<\/p>\n

According to a news release<\/a>, this selection toward \u201ctameness\u201d as well as the \u201caccess trash\u201d, leads to \u201ca trickle-down in development, resulting in traits like shorter snouts, which are common in domesticated animals like dogs\u201d.<\/p>\n

In the study, the researchers also pointed to similar findings that have been documented in the United Kingdom with red foxes, where foxes living in London were found<\/a> to have shorter, wider muzzles than rural foxes. In that study<\/a>, the researchers found that a shorter and wider snout \u201cmay be advantageous in an urban habitat where resources are more likely to be accessed as stationary patches of discarded human foods\u201d.<\/p>\n

Stanley D Gehrt, a professor of wildlife ecology at Ohio State University, described the new raccoon study, in an interview with the Guardian, as \u201cvery interesting\u201d and said that the findings fit \u201cwith a lot of the other things that we\u2019ve learned about how these animals are affected or how they adapt to urbanization\u201d.<\/p>\n

Urbanization for some species, he noted, can strongly influence their behavior, body and their population dynamics.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll have to see with more evidence and with other studies if it\u2019s actually a pathway to domestication or not,\u201d Gehrt added.<\/p>\n

Arina Hinzen, the founder and executive director of the Urban Wildlife<\/a> Alliance, a non-profit \u201cdedicated to the welfare of New York City\u2019s wildlife\u201d called the study \u201ca fascinating piece of work and a clever use of citizen science\u201d.<\/p>\n

Her main takeaway was that \u201ccity life is not only changing raccoon behavior, but it is also starting to show up in their bodies as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

She said that her group had not directly \u201cnoticed the physical changes\u201d.<\/p>\n

But she added: \u201cAs someone who works with urban wildlife in New York City, I see raccoons that are highly habituated to people and human environments,\u201d Hinzen said. \u201cThey routinely feed in trash, navigate buildings and streets, and show a much calmer response to people and dogs than truly wild raccoons.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Raccoons living wild in cities in the United States are beginning to show physical changes that resemble early…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":312488,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-312487","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312487\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}