Regina Barber

I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

So Rafaela, you were the lead author of a raccoon study that's been getting a lot of attention.

What question did your team want to answer?

Right.

Okay.

So let's take a step back and talk a little bit about the domestication syndrome hypothesis this work is based on.

What exactly is it and how do we identify it?

Yeah, where did you and your students get all that data to answer this question?

Yeah.

And you and your students looked at nearly like 20,000 photos of raccoons.

And in the end, like you did find that these raccoons, they did have some physical changes.

Like there were some with shorter snouts.

Why does this matter?

Yeah.

Could it be that the iNaturalist photos don't accurately represent like the full range of raccoons?

Why or why not?

Yeah, that makes sense.

Okay, another thing that actually I would love to ask you about, when we were looking into domestication syndrome and how it's been observed, one study kept coming up and it's this Russian fox experiment.

What did that study involve and was it successful in breeding domesticated foxes?

Okay.