Research Study Co-authored by 16 UA Little Rock Students Finds Raccoons Show Early Signs of Domestication
Raccoons, often called “trash pandas,” are showing physical traits consistent with the earliest stages of domestication, according to a groundbreaking new study published in the online journal Frontiers in Zoology.
The study, led by Dr. Raffaela Lesch, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is also notable for featuring 16 students as co-authors, which is an extraordinary achievement for so many young researchers.
The study, titled “Tracking domestication signals across populations of North American raccoons (Procyon lotor) via citizen science-driven image repositories,” analyzed nearly 20,000 images of raccoons from across the continental U.S. Researchers found that raccoons living in cities have shorter snouts than those in rural areas. This reduction in snout length is a classic physical change associated with the domestication syndrome.
“I wanted to know if living in a city environment would kickstart domestication processes in animals that are currently not domesticated,” Lesch said. “Would raccoons be on the pathway to domestication just by hanging out in close proximity to humans?”
Lesch points to a simple, universal factor as the answer: human trash.
“Trash is really the kickstarter,” she said. “Wherever humans go, there is trash. Animals love our trash. It’s an easy source of food. All they have to do is endure our presence, not be aggressive, and then they can feast on anything we throw away. It would be fitting and funny if our next domesticated species was raccoons. I feel like it would be funny if we called the domesticated version of the raccoon the trash panda.”
The research suggests that the selection for tameness needed to tolerate people and access trash leads to a trickle-down in development, resulting in traits like shorter snouts, which are common in domesticated animals like dogs.
Student Success Drives Scientific Discovery
The inclusion of 16 students as co-authors—five graduate and 11 undergraduate students—on a high-quality, peer-reviewed journal paper is a rare and profound example of student success.
Lesch structured the biometry class as a course-based undergraduate research experience, turning a potentially dry statistics class into a real-world scientific endeavor.
“The idea behind biometry, where students learn how to code and use statistics, is a class that is difficult to teach,” Lesch said. “I wanted to teach this class in a way that students would have their own data that they collect and analyze. The benefit is that I didn’t have to push students to complete the work. They were intrinsically motivated because they cared.”
For Alanis Bradley, an applied biosciences Ph.D. student from Texarkana, Texas, this marks her first published paper.
“This will be my first paper that I have published. It’s very exciting,” Bradley said. “That first foot in the door is very hard to move through, and this class gave me a good understanding of what I need to do in research. This class made the research process feel a lot less scary and made it feel achievable.”
Bradley added that she enjoyed the collaborative coding aspect of the course.
“I like coding because it is like a puzzle,” Bradley said. “We had other people around us who were interested in solving the puzzles and creating something between the 16 of us. I got to meet and know a lot of really cool people in that course.”
The students were involved in every step, including the rigorous task of sifting through nearly 20,000 images sourced from the citizen science project, iNaturalist.org. While Lesch wrote the initial draft, the entire class edited the paper as a group.
“We went through the entire paper and the students were yelling out if there were typos or to make edits,” Lesch recalled. “That is what I imagine the editing room of ‘Saturday Night Live’ is like.”
The co-authors from Lesch’s class are: Artem Apostolov, Alanis Bradley, Shane Dreher, Cole Dwyer, Jessica Edwards, Marie E. Evans, Nari Gu, Jacob Hansen, Jackson D. Lewis, Aiden T. Mashburn, Kelsey Miller, Eli Richardson, Wesley Roller, Adam Stark, Jackson Swift, and Oscar Zuniga.
Next Steps in Raccoon Research
The study’s findings support the Neural Crest Domestication Syndrome (NCDS) hypothesis, which predicts these types of anatomical changes. The researchers showed that raccoons, like dogs, also exhibit shorter snouts in urban areas compared to longer snouts in rural areas, where they face different environmental selection pressures like climate.
The project continues to evolve. Bradley is basing her Ph.D. research on validating the photographic measurements by 3D scanning the university’s collection of roughly 200 raccoon skulls, some dating back to the 1970s.
Furthermore, Lesch’s 2025 biometry class is repeating the study using other urban mammals, such as armadillos and opossums, to see if the findings hold true for other species. Lesch hopes this work informs how we view our expanding presence on wildlife. Additional students are applying for Signature Research Grants at UA Little Rock in order to fund cameras and GPS trackers to observe and track raccoon movement across campus.
“This will help inform us if human presence is enough to already start the process of domestication in a species,” she said.