Silver Fix Domestication Experiment

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This report is not mine. I am writing directly from Biomedcentral.com only deviating to make it easier to read in my words.

Ludmila Trut and a team of Russian geneticists have been running a very fundamental study in Siberia for the last 59 years. This experiment is run for the purpose to cultivate and study the process of domestication in real time. Truts mentor, Dmitri Belyaev sparked this experiment years before in 1959.

The subject of this experiment is Silver foxes.

Belyaev was a graduate of Ivanova Agricultural Academy in Moscow and a World War 2 veteran when he was hired at The Institute for Fur Breeding Animals in Moscow in the late 1930s. Based on his studies and his experience with the animals he worked with, he had an understanding of the traits that many domesticated animals share, which includes floppy ears, short, curly tails, juvenalized facial and body features, reduced stress hormone levels, mottled fur, patterns of fur, and relatively long reproduction systems. These traits are all today associated with domestication syndrome.

Belyaev theorized that all domesticated animals had to have ancestors that had at some point been tamed and bred based on their tameness. Because of these, he started his experiment with the guidelines that every generation of new foxes would be tested based solely on tameness, and the tamest 10% would sire the next generation. This allowed him to test if his foxes were inheriting the tameness by proving they were improving over time.

And so the experiment began In 1959 at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Siberia, soon after Belyaev was appointed vice director there. One of the first researchers assigned to his team was Trut, who soon became the lead researcher, and worked alongside Belyaev on every aspect of the study. Belyaev died in 1985 and Trut continues to work on the experiment to this day, over 85 years old. The very year this experiment began, it was almost shut down by uneducated politicians during Stalins era of leadership, because studies in genetics would have likely exposed many frauds within the agriculture department that had friends in higher places. Many good people lost their jobs and their lives.

Starting with a population of completely wild foxes, Within 6 generations (6 years) the foxes began to show astonishing improvement. The few tamest of the foxes licked hands, could be pet, picked up, would whine when researches leave and wag their tails when researchers arrived. Today these tame foxes make up the majority of the population. Belyaev was correct in his prediction that tameness could be bred.

In under a decade the foxes began to show physical traits well known in domestic animals, such as floppy ears and curly tails. Their stress levels by generation 15 were half as much as their wild ancestors, this stress hormone is known as glococorticoid. Their adrenaline gland became smaller and smaller. Serotonin levels increased. Juvenile features become more common, such as rounder, shorter muzzles and chunker bodies. Mottled and patterned coats were also appearing.

The fox chromosome 15 SorCS, a gene known for changes within these foxes, is linked to synaptic plasticity, which is associated with memory and learning. This is leading to a greater understanding of cognitive abilities within silver foxes. This study is an important foundation of how we understand genetics and domestication today, and is still running with huge success.

Sources:

Biocentral.com