So over generations you end up selecting for slow, dumb-witted flies as opposed to faster ones that can escape." When you flip the flies, the fast ones escape and the dumb ones remain. ![]() "In research labs you have to transfer your flies into a different container every two weeks. We don’t know why this happened, but Kulathinal has an interesting theory. Incredibly, mice whose ancestors had lived alongside humans the longest were the best at solving food puzzles. ![]() Inside each puzzle was a mealworm, which the mouse could only get by pushing or pulling a lid, extracting a ball of paper from a tube or opening the window of a Lego house. She then took the descendants of the original mice and tested them with seven different food puzzles. Guenther bred the mice for several generations in the laboratory. musculus castaneus struck up a relationship with us only recently – about 3,000 to 5,000 years ago. musculus musculus has lived with us for 8,000 years, and M. Mus musculus domesticus began living alongside humans 12,000-15,000 years ago, M. Each of the subspecies began cohabitating with humans at different times in our evolutionary history. Researcher Anja Guenther at the Max Planck Institute in Germany gathered 150 specimens from three different subspecies of house mice. And there's evidence that co-habiting with humans for so long has changed the very DNA of mice. Since then, the mouse has travelled to every corner of the globe, making its home wherever humans live. They are also bigger, lay larger eggs and have smaller brains than their wild cousins - differences that are also seen in chickens. They are more sociable with their flock mates and tend to be more interested in exploring their surroundings. The junglefowl have changed in other ways too. The reasons behind pets’ most revolting habits."The tamer birds we have bred come up to you and peck your shoes – they want to interact with humans." "If you walk into a pen of wild junglefowl they try to escape and move to the far end of the pen, flapping their wings in distress," says Jensen. His experiments also show us just how dramatic an effect proximity to humans can have on the behaviour of animals. ![]() By breeding red junglefowl that show the least fear of humans, in just 11 generations he has seen a noticeable difference. In his lab at Linköping University in Sweden, Per Jensen, a professor of ethology, is trying to recreate this domestication process in record time. The descendents of these birds, chickens, can be found on farms – and dinner plates – all over the world. Around 8,000 years ago, nomads in Southeast Asia began to keep red junglefowl, a tropical bird with bright plumage that still inhabits the forests and mangroves of southeast Asia.
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