Raffaela Lesch

We're still working on testing that hypothesis.

So we used iNaturalist.

iNaturalist is like this huge platform where anyone can upload images.

It was really exciting to have this amazing huge data set where we could really like look at a question that basically spans the entirety of the United States, which if you had to go out and collect that type of data just by yourself,

You'd be busy your entire life.

Yeah.

So the shorter snouts matter because basically we hypothesize that in the city environment,

we would be finding shorter snouts because they would be on the pathway to domestication compared to rural raccoons.

So the fact that we did find that urban animals have shorter snouts, that is a good first indication that urban raccoons might be on the pathway to domestication.

Again, like

That's like that first puzzle piece and there's many more puzzle pieces we have to add to be 100% sure about that.

Yeah, so the thing is, yeah, I mean, any photographic data that we have, there's a tendency that animals that are less afraid are easier to photograph.

So there is a good likelihood that we have a bias in those data.

But also, if we were to go out and trap animals,

I'd say on our campus, we want to like put little GPS collars on them to kind of look at their movement.

If we put out a trap, there's a good chance after, let's say, we capture seven different raccoons on day eight, we get raccoon number one again because it has kind of figured out that, hey, I get peanut butter in there and they might poke me, but it's not that bad, so I'll just come back.

So the problem with this in animal research is that we really –

always have some bias in our data.

It's very hard to not have some type of almost like personality bias in there where you usually get the bolder animals of a population in front of your camera, in your traps.

That I would say is just one of those downfalls about just working with wild animals in general.