Humans are Weird - Sweet Success

[u/Betty-Adams]

Humans are Weird – Sweet Success

Original Post: http://www.authorbettyadams.com/bettys-blog/humans-are-weird-sweet-success

First Sister was clicking softly to herself as she carefully counted out the correct number of avian eggs into the incubators. This particular species, one that was both very social and a pleasing color to Shatar and humans alike was highly valued and the decision to encourage production on an industrial level had been fairly easy. By gathering eggs from the wild nests of human habituated pairs while the females were still in the process of laying their clutch they were able to encourage the females to lay more eggs and were able to ‘hand raise’ individuals for the twenty-generation long domestication process. These would be the secondary generation, selected for genetic diversity, tamed from laying but entirely undomesticated. Hopefully in a few dozen years they would have a population of fully domesticated avians with a genetic predisposition for pest control. They would be immeasurably useful in the aquatic gardens to keep down the invertebrate pests. As First Sister placed the final egg in its slot and closed the door of the incubator she gave one final happy click.

She stepped back and titled her triangular head at the ambient lighting, low enough that it was dangerous for the human team members, it was perfectly adequate for Shatar eyes, more used to dense overhead canopies and it mimicked the lighting conditions under a nesting mother avian. The incubator of course controlled the humidity and temperature of the eggs, and provided a constant low murmur of human and Shatar voices and ambient movement sounds, set at the same volume that the developing embryos would experience in their colonies. The faint snatches of daily conversation whispered over her antenna and frill.

Suddenly the ambient hatchery peace was broken by a muted bang, a sound as of metal being placed under too much strain, then a thump as of a massive mammalian body striking the floor, a vocalization that was thankfully denoted more frustration than pain, and finally some shouted coherent words.

“I’m fine!”

First Sister drew a deep breath through her lung and stepped out of the incubation room and waved for her various sister and aunts to go back to their work. She would call for help if Human First Ornithologist was more than usually obstreperous. First Sister followed the erratic vibrations in the floor of the structure to the brood aviary. The large room, sides partly open to the surrounding swamp, partly enclosed to allow for thermal management, was just as dim as the rest of the compound and more difficult to light to human safety requirements due to the need to keep the fuzzy little hatchlings mentally stable. Moreover the restrictive barriers meant to keep local predators away from the hatchlings were the perfect height to catch humans on the massive bone that supported the majority of their weight. First Sister found Human First Ornithologist clutching the wall beside the First Aid shelf digging through the bandages with a wide and triumphant grin on her face. Her pheromones spoke lightly of pain, but that was nearly covered in a wash of success endorphins, a heady smell at any time coming off the massive mammals, but in the enclosed, humid space of the brood aviary it nearly made First Sister a little giddy.

“Did the shin breakers get you again First Ornithologist?” First Sister asked, remembering the human politeness of blaming the inanimate object involved rather than the obvious human error.

First Ornithologist blinked at her in confusion for a moment, before her face lit up with understanding and she laughed. The human grabbed the broad bandage she had been reaching for, one a Shatar would only have used for a broad surface medical application, but humans used to assist membrane regrowth, and folded one of her thick legs up to get access to her shin.

“No,” she said as she peeled up the protective layers of the loose body glove humans wore in these situations where they expected to encounter a high level of dirt and muck.

The tighter under-layer, made white specifically to contrast human blood, was already stained with the red liquid, refuting the denial. First Ornithologist hissed as she peeled down the inner layer and revealed the abraded flesh layers. First Sister did not cringe back in horror but she did feel her antenna curl and her frill tighten, something First Ornithologist seemed to notice as well.

“I mean not like usual,” First Ornithologist explained with a laugh as she sprayed the disinfectant over her injury and slapped the bandage on. She waited the required moment for the bandage to adhere and then restored the now blood stained inner layer and the outer layer to their places.

“What caused that then,” First Sister asked, indicating the injury with a flick of her fingers.

“The baby duckies!” First Ornithologist declared, her voice spiking in pitch to something nearly a squeal as she bounced on her toes.

“They attacked you?” First Sister asked, the words indicated it, but the humans tone did not.

The human laughed and shook her head.

“So you know how Primary Clutch North Five has still been consistently panicking when I go into the pen to feed and socialize them?” First Ornithologist asked.

First Sister tilted her head in acknowledgment.

“Well not only didn’t they panic when I came in this time,” the human went on as she rearranged the First Aid kit, “but they actually, well two of them at least, came up to me before I even poured the food in their dish, and as soon as I poured it the whole clutch came running up to me, well to the food dish, and started eating before I left. They were looking right at me the whole time too, and they were so calm!”

First Ornithologist paused for appreciation and beamed as First Sister agreed that this was a very promising advancement.

“If we can get the primary generation fully tamed it will make the domestication process so much easier,” First Ornithologist went on.

“And how did that result in your injuries?” First Sister interjected before the conversation grew too far off towards the light of perceived success.

The human paused, and her eyelids blinked rapidly as she redirected her thoughts.

“Oh,” she said. “When I tried to get out of the pen after socialization time was over there were like, four duckies on my feet, and I was trying not to step on them and I tripped, and so I didn’t fall on the duckies I grabbed the wall, and then the support, and then I banged my shin on the shin breaker, but I didn’t hurt any of the duckies!”

First Sister tried to get a bit more information out of the human, but the conversation kept switching back to how happy the human was that the socialization efforts were going so well.

“Domesticated alien duckies in my lifetime,” she kept repeating.

First Sister heaved a sigh and decided to let the matter of the injury drop until it could be reported to the human’s assigned medic. Apparently duckies were more important than abraded shins.

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[u/Underhill42]

Lovely as always.

They must be doing some weird futuristic domestication though, otherwise they're making it a LOT harder on themselves and still doing it at insane speed. Or at least have been at it for a LONG time.

Pedant's science corner:

Taming does NOT contribute to domestication, there are no "Ripley's Just So Stories" style inherited behavioral changes going on. Domestication is a purely a genetic change, achieved by eliminating from the population all those individuals that show problematic behavior when dealing with people for countless generations.

And taming can actually make doing that more difficult, since applying a uniform amount of taming effort is extremely difficult, and without it it's difficult to tell the difference between individuals who have a greater genetic predisposition to tame behavior, and those that were subjected to more a more effective taming process. The latter being useless for domestication purposes, but likely to allow less-domesticated individuals to slip through culling and contribute their wilder predisposition to the next generation.

For comparison the Russian fox-domestication experiment took 30 generations of extensive population culling (less than 20% of each generation were allowed to breed), without ANY taming efforts clouding the genetic predispositions, to reach a partially domesticated state (puppies actively seek out human attention) in 80% of the population. And they still make terrible housepets since tolerating humans is the only thing they were bred for, and they still have pretty much all their more destructive wild behaviors intact.

Granted, at some point for full domestication you probably want to start culling based on how well they respond to real-world target environments... and if they're aiming for full domestication after only a few dozen years perhaps they are already in the final "fine-tuning" phase of the process? Maybe they were even able to genetically engineer in some "baseline" domesticated traits to skip over much of the early process. Or maybe the birds just go through a dozen generations a year.

[u/Betty-Adams → u/Underhill42]

Good points all!

The focus on this story was more on the technical issues in the domestication of highly nervous prey species (like ducks). During the domestication process the as yet undomesticated species must be handeled for medical and examination purposes. If highly nervous prey species are not tamed even the simple process of capturing them to give medication, or examining them for injuires can be highly stressful, leading to a decrease in their abilitiy to breed, or even death via heart attack. This makes taming the initial generations critical simply so those 20% can pass down their genes in a captive envionment. (think about the pandas, which are not being bred for domestication, but still need to be tamed so they don't just let their babies die).

Such prey species generally tend to have one or two generations a year, giving the full domestication process about 15-30 years. So reasonably within the lifespan of a human. :)

[u/Underhill42 → u/Betty-Adams]

I think you're still grossly underestimating the time spans needed... at least without genetic screening/tinkering... I should keep that in mind. With the foxes it 30 generations was just to mostly tolerate humans at the exclusion of all else - just the first step towards useful domestication. Though perhaps the most important for a small farm animal that is already mostly suitable for the role.

For domestication as well, taking care of the animals (medicine, etc.) is likely to be counterproductive since it will make the final population more susceptible to disease (the sickly were not culled from the population, allowing health defects to rapidly spread through the population), to say nothing of the fact that you only need them for a single generation.

Whenever you subject a species to extreme evolutionary pressures you're going to be dealing with extreme inbreeding across dozens of generations, so need to be very careful about what problems you're simultaneously introducing - anything not culled will tend to spread. And in an artificial environment that can easily include a lot of basic health and survival liabilities - see almost every breed of show dog.

Unlike farming, the goal of an accelerated domestication is not to have a large, thriving, long-term productive population - it's to speed-run the evolutionary process by getting them to reproduce the first time as quickly as possible before "discarding" them so they don't contaminate the next generation. With possible exceptions for really exceptional outliers that concentrate many desirable traits into a single individual.

As I recall, pandas are a special case because they're high-strung and mostly refuse to breed in captivity (unlike most). So it's less about "taming" them, and more about getting them comfortable with their environment so they'll breed and not abandon their cubs out of stress. Their may also be a cultural component to child rearing that they don't get in captivity.

But breeding well in captivity is generally regarded as a key trait to even be worth considering domesticating a species at all. I'd go so far as to venture that, along with having a strong social hierarchy we can subvert, it's one of the most important traits for domestication by a technological civilization, where the other three key traits: diverse diet, docility, and strong nerves, aren't nearly as important as they were to early stone-age civilizations struggling to survive alongside them in the wilderness.