I am reading Richard Dawkins "Ancestors Tale". In it he describes the old soviet union experiment to breed foxs for tameness and one of the effects was for the foxs to take on black and white coats like a boarder collie.

 

can anyone help explain to me (in laymens terms) why (by what mechanism) did the foxs coat colour change.

 

http://www.devbio.com/article.php?ch=23&id=223

 

Regards

 

Root.

Coincidence, either the what-the-soviets-where-looking-for gene was the same as the look-like-a-border-collie gene and just had two manifestiations or those two genes happened to come with the same foxes in the first generation of breeding so it stayed that way.

Coincidence, either the what-the-soviets-where-looking-for gene was the same as the look-like-a-border-

 

From what I understand, selection was based soley on tameness and not selected by colour.

 

collie gene and just had two manifestiations or those two genes happened to come with the same foxes in the first generation of breeding so it stayed that way.

 

But the collie is descended from wolves and not the fox unless you are suggesting that the fox shares close ancestory with the wolf?

 

Any more ideas, I don't like the sound of yours. No offence.

Any fox that was slightly darker than the rest of the cubs was chosen for breeding. When that fox had offspring, same method of selection was applied to the young. Twenty years down the track of human selection... you have your black and white fox!

well all dogs came from domesticated wolves. and they are particularly varied.

and I suppose it isnt so far fatched to say that any fox that looked friendlier was chosen by the breeder subconceously. I think it isn’t so far fetched to say that any fox that looked friendlier/nicer/tamer was chosen by the breeder subconsciously over the foxes with more of a ‘wild’ appearance.

Rooters, I don't think you understood my post. My first suggestiong was that the gene did two things, not that the foxes where chosen by colour; the second was merely that there was a look-like-a-collie gene, I never suggested any relation to the collie.

It might just be me, but the answers so far don't seem to be definitive enough, I went back to the link I provided and noted the caption below the picture

 

(A) Changes in the foxes’ coat color were the first novel traits noted, appearing in the eighth to tenth selected generations. In a fox homozygous for the Star gene, large areas of depigmentation similar to those in some dog breeds are seen.

 

Am I right to assume that the colour changed due to depigmentation caused by either a chemical change in the make-up of the off-spring or a direcr genetic change such as this "star gene"?

 

Thanks all

It could be a mutation that was in the original geen pool of foxes used in the experiment. If it was a resesive gene then the inbreeding caused by the selections could have made this mutation more predominant. Also it could be a natural part of the fox genetics which is needed in a resesive fasion (much like the gene involved in sickle cell enimia/malaria resistance) and caused by the small gene pool to become more dominant.

Rooters, I don't think you understood my post. My first suggestiong was that the gene did two things, not that the foxes where chosen by colour; the second was merely that there was a look-like-a-collie gene, I never suggested any relation to the collie.

 

That, in this case, is extremely unlikely. Far more likely is that the two (collie) genes were linked.