Forum | Insularity and early domestication
Oikos Forum paper:
Insularity and early domestication: anthropogenic ecosystems as habitat islands
Robert N. Spengler III
Maybe humans take too much credit for domesticating plants and animals. This Forum paper argues that the human-friendly qualities of our pets, livestock, and crops could have arisen without selective breeding or other human-centric mechanisms that are usually assumed. Instead, it explores an ecological mechanism: the island syndrome.
Think of early farms and villages as islands. The author draws parallels between the processes of domestication and island evolution, suggesting that the same ecological forces may be responsible for both. Both island plants and cultivated crops tend to have bigger and less dispersible seeds than their ancestors. Animals on islands and in human habitats can lose flight ability, fear responses, and patches of pigmentation, among other changes.
Why such parallel patterns of evolution? It could be that when plants and animals find their way to islands or other insular habitats—ranging from early villages to modern cities—they are released from predation and competition pressures. Domestication scholars and island biogeographers would benefit from comparing notes, the author concludes.
Oikos Forum is a place where ecological ideas can be kicked around and examined from new angles. Forum papers bring together multiple fields, push boundaries, and offer new ways of interpreting existing data. They strive for conceptual unification and serve as a point of departure for future work rather than simply summarizing previous bodies of theory and data. Through the Forum we seek to challenge current thinking on ecological issues and provide a high level of synthesis in the field of ecology.
Forum artwork and summaries by Abby McBride/Sketch Biologist
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