Monkeys' cosy alliance with wolves looks like domestication (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Monkeys' cosy alliance with wolves looks like domestication (2015)

newscientist.com

82 pointsCryptoPunk20 comments

Isn't that just symbiotic relationship though? Article does not explain what monkeys get from this relationship with wolves and whether any species is changing another's behavior.

They don't get eaten by wolves. I bet the feral dogs mentioned in the article will think twice before going near wolf/monkey groups too, since both dogs and wolves are usually territorial.

"However, the geladas don’t seem to get anything from the relationship, since the wolves are unlikely to deter other predators such as leopards or feral dogs, he says."

Bit too loose for symbiotic. How about commensal relationship?

Or mutualism?

Don't babboons steal puppies and raise them to become their guard dogs?

http://www.thenaturalistsnotebook.com/our-blog/do-baboons-ke...

Maybe they benefit from a reduced rodent population in some way? Less disease or maybe even competition for food since this particular type of monkey grazes?

There are only a few species that are generically predisposed to domestication. We have domesticated pretty much all of them - and the rest failed, despite multiple attempts across thousands of years.

Zebras, for example, not "eligible". It looks like a nice horsy but the things are totally wild, and happen to be the number one source of zoo injuries because people are fooled by the harmless striped pony.

are foxes eligible for domestication?

because they havent been domesticated in premodern times, but have been succesfully domesticated in laboratory

Through highly intentional selective breeding.

Mind that the domestication of dogs also presumably resulted from artificial selection, though with a far weaker understanding of principles involved.

I believe a Russian man did domesticate them. IIRC it only took 30 generations to be very very doglike. I'm sure it Googles.

I somewhat doubt this is the way to look at it. Dogs took between 11,000 and 40,000 years to domesticate. That all started with dogs using up more of a carcass than humans would after a hunt and the humans just didn't care. Eventually, humans found that dogs can and would do more.

If my read is right it, any species could be tamed as long as they're evolutionarily ready to. Not all members of that species may be ready to either, as the writing points out a wolf did attempt to grab a baby gelada, was drove out, and was not allowed to return. Interestingly, they did not apply this logic broadly.

By "evolutionarily ready," do you mean artificially selected for docility or other amenable characteristics?

I think certain species are intractable and unable to be domesticated, while others seem to be much more pliable. It took only six generations [1] to domesticate silver foxes.

1. https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.118...

Agreed, mostly. I do think it's possible that a species can gain traits through evolution that make them more compatible with domestication. Dogs, when we domesticated them, were not the dogs we know today. They were wolves with specific evolutionary advancements that made them less hostile to humans. Of course, we can speed that up too a bit arbitrarily through selective breeding. That was all "evolutionarily ready" meant to me.

Realy wild to me that horse and zebra are so different that one can be domesticated and the other cannot.

Also Moose.

Probably needs Squirrel as a catalyst.

It's relative, with several tens of thousands of generations of selective breeding zebras can be domesticated. It's just not doable over a few dozen generations.

TIL that there are grazing monkeys.

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