Are rural raccoons becoming domesticated?

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26:57Okay, we're back and we're talking about domestication of animals, making them cute, making them live next to you, making them snuggle up to you at night, making them feel like they are part of the human family. Yay. All right. So, so we talked about the domestication syndrome in the last segment. And a bunch of our thinking about the domestication syndrome came from one epic experiment that started in 1959 in the Soviet Union. It was started by a geneticist named Dmitry Baleev at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Siberia. Just as an aside, anyone who knows about Soviet history, he was starting this experiment like around the time when you could get killed for doing genetics experiments that were not like in line with what Lysenko believed for how genetics should work.

27:46And his brother was a geneticist who got killed for like disagreeing with Lysenko. So anyway, this is intense, an intense period to be a geneticist in the Soviet Union. But he had this goal. He knew that since Darwin, there was this package of traits that people associated with domestication. He had this idea that if you took foxes and selected specifically for tameness, the genetics and the hormones that made that animal tame would also change a bunch of stuff about that animal alongside it reasonable and so you would get those other traits that would change too and you'd get these tamer animals and so he said let's go ahead and claim that we are breeding animals to try to get better fur for coats and stuff so that lysenko doesn't get us all killed but what we're actually doing is breeding for animals that are going to be tamer and over time he was able to become a lot more upfront about what the experiment was actually about.

28:43So just to make sure I understand, he's got a bunch of foxes. He's going to choose the tamest ones every generation and breed them. And then he's going to pay attention to other traits that change alongside tameness, even if they're not directly the things he's selecting for. Yes, exactly. Cool. He has in his mind the kind of traits that he's going to be looking for because this idea of a domestication syndrome, it wasn't called that at the time, but this idea of a domestication syndrome was already in people's heads because Darwin had been describing it for a while. But this seems very impractical to me.

29:14Like, don't biologists usually choose to do experiments on animals with very short life cycles so they can have, like, lots and lots of generations in an afternoon? Whereas, like, this experiment might take 5 ,000 years to show any results. Yeah, no, this is amazing. But, I mean, I think everybody's excited about domestic dogs, right? And so he wanted to pick an animal that was kind of close to dogs and see, like, can you make foxes that are like dogs? because that would be amazing. Like if you could do that, everybody would pay attention, right? Because everyone loves dogs. And I'd want one too.

29:44That sounds really cute. Yes, right? Me too. Me too. And so in 1959, this experiment starts. And another thing I love about the experiment is he found a woman to run it because at this time he was running an institute. And so he got a woman named Ludmilla Trout to start it. They start with 30 male foxes and 100 vixens, which are female foxes, from a fur farm in Estonia. and they knew that these foxes were already tamer than wild relatives because they had a history of being in fur farms for a while. And so domestication had already essentially started. They knew that. So they started breeding them.

30:19The pups stayed with just mom for about two months. Then they were caged with just their litter mates. And then at three months they were caged alone. And periodically they would take them out and they would try to like not have humans interact with them outside of these observation periods. they would take them out and they would essentially interact with them briefly. And when they were interacting with them, they would collect data on how the fox pups interacted with the people. This is like them trying to assess the tameness of the fox. Right. And this is not learned tameness. This is not like I handle you every day from when you're a puppy and see if you eventually get used to me.

30:55This is like you're encountering me for the first time outside of your cage. Do you A, bite me, making you a class three fox, Do you, B, allow me to pet and handle you, but show no, like, emotionally friendly response to experimenters? That was a quote. So essentially, like, you will put up with me, but you'd really rather not. Or class one is, quote, friendly towards experimenters wagging their tails and whining. Like your dog does when you get home. Whining. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So, like, excited to see you. They'd get class one foxes and then the class one foxes would breed with other class one foxes because that's what they were trying to get more of.

31:38And very quickly, they started to see more and more tame animals. And in fact, by the sixth generation, they were becoming so friendly that they added an elite class. And the elite classes were animals that were like really excited about engaging with the humans. They would like whimper to get their attention. They would sniff and lick them, and they were essentially starting to act like dogs by the age of one month. And how long does six generations take in foxes? This must have been like a decade. I don't remember reading that in the papers. I'm going to admit, I just looked it up on Google, how long until they're able to breed.

32:12And it looks like they're able to breed at nine to ten months old. What? Yeah, so they're able to breed pretty easy, but it does look like it's at least a year per cycle, maybe a little bit more than that. Another awkward fox question you probably didn't look up. Awesome. Is will foxes just breed with anybody we choose for them to breed? Like you put two foxes in a cage together and there's no question it's going to happen. Or some fox is like, eh, I'm not feeling it. Or I prefer a different style of fox or whatever. I did read that foxes that are particularly not friendly are difficult to breed in captivity at all.

32:44And so I think it could be if you like massively stress a fox out, they just have no interest in breeding, period. Yeah. But the more calm a fox is, the more receptive they are. It could be that they put some pairs together and the female or the male were like, no thanks. And maybe they would just try a new pair. They didn't find each other particularly foxy. Oh, I didn't see that one coming. And I should have. Amazing. Amazing. But this result already says something interesting. if by selecting for friendliness, you get more and more friendly foxes, that tells you that like friendliness is genetic.

33:24Yes. Yep, it does. That's cool. And by the 10th generation, 18 % of the babies qualified as elite. By the 20th generation, 35 % were elite. And 40 years into the experiment, which they are still doing. 40 years. Wait, they're still doing this today? Yes. It's an ongoing experiment? It's an ongoing experiment. 40 years in, 70 to 80 percent of the pups each generation are elite. Wow. I love super long running experiments. Like knowing how science works and how funding works and organization and recruiting students, whatever, having anything run for more than a few years is incredible. So like decades long experiments.

34:04Yeah, absolutely incredible. And they went through some lean periods, like when the Soviet Union fell apart and they just went to Russia. You know, I read some papers where they were talking about, like, we had to sell some of our elite pups to, like, rich people to try to get funding. We had to – it was tough. But anyway, they're still going. Okay, so they also noted some physical changes. For example, right when a fox is born, it tends to, like, not be afraid of much of anything. Like, its mom is just kind of taking care of it. It's exploring the world. It's hard to scare a fox. Right. And in the wild, the fear response kicks in around six weeks of age.

34:39But for the foxes that had been bred to be tame, fear responses didn't kick in until about nine weeks of age. And so the thought was that was giving them like a longer window to engage with people and learn that people are OK so that maybe they wouldn't become afraid of people. That last part is conjecture. But fear responses were taking longer to kick in. Stress hormone levels, if you measured them in the foxes, were lower. And so it looks like just sort of in general, life was less stressful for the foxes that were calmer. By the eighth to the tenth generation, they had a star-shaped white pattern on some of their faces.

35:14Yep. Oh, my gosh. Some of them had floppy ears. Some of them had tails that were starting to roll. Not all of them. They had different amounts of serotonin in their brain. So, like, even their brain chemistry was starting to change. And by about 15 to 20 generation, they had shorter tails and shorter legs. Some of them were showing some, like, muzzle changes. They had, like, overbites or underbites. Not all of the foxes had these changes, but some of them did. And they were starting to reach sexual maturity about one month earlier. And they were on average giving birth to one additional pup and they had longer mating season.

35:51So you were starting to see changes in reproduction as well. So we're hitting on some of those domestication syndrome traits that we were talking about. And this is like within a human lifetime, you were able to start seeing these traits, which is amazing. Like we don't know how long it took in dogs, but like with very focused selection, you were able to start seeing some of these traits show up already. Wow. That's amazing. But I guess one concern I have with the whole experimental design is, you know, it's not like blind in any way. if these folks are invested in this outcome, they could have chosen four foxes that were tame and four foxes that like had white patches on their foreheads, right?

36:31Yeah, totally. Okay, so first of all, the white patches on their forehead would have to show up though. You don't usually get those in the wild. So the fact that it shows up might say something about what the neural crest cells are doing because part of the idea is that the neural crest cells just like aren't getting where they need to go. And so you start getting white patches because you don't get melanocytes where you're supposed to have them. So the white patch showing up at all, like even if someone was selecting for it, the fact that it shows up at all suggests something about the mechanism working.

36:59Cool. But there have been actually a lot of critiques recently about this study. And there's this book called How to Tame a Fox. And while I was reading the book, I kept thinking, man, it sounds like they're trying to be really careful. But also there's like a stage where they're like, well, what if we take one of them and it lives with us in our house? and it's like and then at one stage they say well maybe this is an experiment that is on humans too and our response to these things over time because it is a two-way thing and i'm like it is a two-way thing but it just i think it to me it just showed how impossible it is to disentangle humans wanting to snuggle cute foxes and dogs like and so i it i can easily imagine that there was a little bit of bias where not only are you selecting for docile animals but if you start to see a little curl of the tail maybe you're willing to like imagine that an animal is a little bit more docile if you also see the curly tail because that is so cute and like you need to breed that animal and so not that i want to cast dispersions on any of these researchers like they they do seem amazing okay but recently there was a big brouhaha oh my gosh about this paper because okay so lord at all 2020 wrote this paper being like the domestication syndrome is like kaput and we should stop talking about the farmed fox experiment because it turns out that actually the farmed foxes came from fox farms in Canada that were started in the 1880s.

38:30And on these farms, they were selected for things like white spots in the fur because they wanted to sell that fur. and it's been known that some of these animals were like a little bit tame because they showed some photos of the foxes like sitting on the lap of someone and so the people who wrote this paper were like maybe the researchers didn't even know the foxes came from canada but a couple things i'm not sure if the the people who wrote this paper were frustrated that people seem to have not understood the farmed fox experiment or what but like when you read ludmila trutz papers she mentions like you know these animals had been domesticated before we got them and she references papers where they had mentioned that they came from farmed foxes in Canada and like I think they knew all of this and they had mentioned all of this in the papers and so none of this felt new to me I was like I'm pretty sure all of the papers that I read had said all of this stuff before but maybe people weren't reading the original papers certainly that happens in science a lot where people read references of the original papers instead of reading the original papers But anyway, so it is the case that these animals were a little bit tamer than you would expect wild animals to be and had already been selected for some white pigmentation.

39:47Although Ludmilla points out that the white spot on the head is a totally different mutation that hadn't really been seen in the Canadian foxes before. And just because the animals had been a little bit tame already doesn't change the fact that when you selected for it even more, they got all of these additional changes. Yeah, the experiment is about the changes, right? The input foxes will affect that, but they don't control the changes, right? Right, right. And so that was Ludmilla's counter-argument because I read this chain of arguments and counter-arguments. Oh, wow. And so it was a whole thing.

40:19Drama in biology. Drama! That's right. And so one interesting point that the Lord et al. paper made, though, was that when people talk about the domestication syndrome, They talk about it as though it is a thing where when you domesticate animals, you get all of these packages of traits that change. But there's tons of variability and you don't always see it. And they were really highlighting that we talk about it like it's a thing that definitely happens, but it's a thing that happens in an inconsistent way and we don't have a good framework for predicting it. And people talk about the farmed fox experiment as if it proved that domestication syndromes happen.

40:58But this is one example in one place. And it hasn't been sort of like we don't have a consistent framework that looks at a bunch of different animals. All right. And that is important to keep in mind when we are about to jump into the raccoon experiment. All right. One more thing to keep in mind before we finally talk about the raccoon experiment is one of the things that we've been talking about is how the domestication syndrome is often associated with changes in the shape of the head. Yeah. And in particular, like shorter snouts. There was a group of researchers that looked at wild foxes by looking at fox heads that were in museums and were collected from around the time when foxes were probably collected to go into the Canadian fox farms that would have subsequently provided the animals that would have ended up in the Russian farmed fox experiment.

41:47And they looked at measurements on those heads and compared them to the domesticated foxes from Russia. So this is like an effort to sample foxes before they were even selected for the fur farms. That's right. Yes. This is an effort to really get like, what do wild foxes look like? What do their heads look like? They looked at the heads of the domesticated foxes from today, from the Russian farmed foxes. And the Russian farmed fox experiment also has what they call a control treatment, where essentially they randomly breed the animals that are still aggressive. Oh, OK. So those are supposed to look like the wild animals.

42:25And what they found was that their controlled animals that were bred in Russia have very similar head shapes to the animals that are super tame and are super friendly that were bred. So it looks like selecting for being super friendly is not necessarily what's changing the shape of the head. Right, because selecting for tameness or not both led to changes in the shape of the head. Exactly. So something about being in captivity does seem to change the shape of the head because the head was very different than the wild foxes. But the difference between the very docile and the aggressive farmed foxes, there was some difference, but it was very small.

43:07And the difference between the wild ones was huge. So something about being in captivity changes head shape, and it's not necessarily selection for being super friendly and snuggly. So it turns out it's complicated and it depends. Exactly. Yes, it's complicated and it depends. Okay, so there was a lot more complication we could have talked about. We only have an hour. Sometime I have to get to the raccoons. Daniel's being very patient. Let's take a break. And when we get back, I will actually address Matt's question.

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47:10Okay, we're back and we are talking about domestication, how it influences animals, if it influences animals, and what it can tell us about raccoons. But before we move on to the raccoons, Kelly, I have to blow your mind by asking a question that will really, really surprise you. Oh, okay. Go ahead. What is the Latin name of the silver fox? Volpes Volpes. Yeah. And as you know, I'm not a big fan of Latin names, but this one is super cool because it's doubled. Why is it doubled? Do you know? I don't know. Are you just trying to trick? You're just asking to trick me? I specifically didn't look it up because I was like, I'm not going to bring it up because Daniel doesn't want me to.

47:48I'm not asking to trick you. I assumed you have this deep well of knowledge about silver foxes and their Latin names, and you rejoice in the Latin inscrutability of it. Oh, no, thank you. But I've stopped looking it up because I was like, well, Daniel, what's the point in looking it up if Daniel's not going to let me say it? This is part of my Kelly domestication experiment.

48:12All right. All right. So now I'm going to Google. What does Volpes mean? Volpes is Latin for fox. I see. So the Latin name of silver foxes is fox fox. Fox fox. Yes, that's right. It's a pretty foxy fox. So yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. They studied fox foxes. All right. So let's move on to raccoonus raccoonus. Oh, no. It's prion loader. Come on. Oh, no. Prochion loader. I can't say it. I didn't practice it. You're setting me up for failure. Now, every time you're not going to know. But tell us about the raccoons and Matt's question and whether raccoons are becoming domesticated. All right.

48:52So we're specifically talking about a 2025 paper in Frontiers in Zoology by Apostolov et al. This is a paper out of Raphael Alesha's lab. And it is called Tracking Domestication Signals Across Populations of North American Raccoons. raccoons, scientific name, via citizen science driven image repositories. So, all right. So here's what they did. Have you heard of iNaturalist, Daniel? iNaturalist. iNaturalist. iNaturalist. No, I have no idea what that is. Oh, man. Okay. So it's this amazing image repository where you can like take a picture of something, load it up. And if you know what it is, you can say like, I am at this location and here is what the species is.

49:33And other people can like weigh in about whether you got the species ID right or not. Or if you want to know what it is, you can like experts can weigh in to tell you what it is. And it's just essentially location information, photos and species identification information. So you can try to figure out what it is that you're seeing no matter where you are around the world. Cool. It's not just cool, Daniel. This is amazing. This is really cool. It's mind blowing. Thank you. It's an international network of Latin names all around the world. Yeah. Yeah, I thought you were getting the attitude right, but then you went to Latin names and now I think you're being sarcastic.

50:07But anyway, all right. So there is a database of something like 20 ,000 photos of raccoons from all over the United States. Okay. And the authors were wondering, okay, are raccoons in urban areas, so essentially raccoons that are living closer to us, eating our trash, for example, showing signs of a domestication syndrome relative to raccoons that live in the woods? All right. So like a raccoon that lives near me might look different than a raccoon that lives in Irvine because it is in a higher density area and might be eating from a trash can, whereas there's a lower density of people out here.

50:47So a raccoon out here might need to forage for its own food. Does that make sense? Yeah. So in urban areas, they interact with humanity more. And the question is whether this unintentional interaction with raccoons is changing raccoons in the way we might expect from domestication syndrome hypothesis. Exactly. Yes. And it's very cool when you come up with a really grand hypothesis that's hard to test and then figure out a way to test it with existing data. Yes. That's super cool. Yes. Amazing. Amazing. And so they were like, all right, we've got all of these photos that people have taken. and we could ask if raccoons in urban and rural environments have different snout lengths.

51:29And so we would guess that the raccoons that are eating your trash have a shorter snout based on the domestication syndrome idea than the raccoons that are out in the woods near Kelly. And so they took the pictures and these pictures don't have like rulers on them, unfortunately, So you can't get like absolute measurements, but they wanted to get ratios. So essentially what they did was they took pictures and they measured the relative distance between the tip of the nose and the tear duct. So they had to be able to see the eye and then the distance between the tip of the nose and where the bottom and the top of the ear connected to the rest of the skull.

52:09And so if you have a shorter snout, then the distance between the tear duct in the eye and the nose is going to be shorter relative to like the whole head length. Does that make sense? I think you're saying that they measured the nose to ear distance and the nose to eye distance. And they use that to get a ratio to say like, how snouty are you? Because they couldn't get absolute measurements on these raccoons. They're just pictures of raccoons and you can't tell. is this a really huge raccoon or is it really just close to the camera? Beautiful. Yes, exactly. Thank you. That's what they did. But they can't use anything in the images to calibrate.

52:48I mean, if you see a raccoon that looks like the size of a house, you know it's not actually the size of a house. And usually there's something else in the image that can tell you, oh, this raccoon is really close up or something. But anyway, I'm sure they thought of that and tried it and it's too hard. Yeah, yeah. I mean, some of these images don't really have any helpful landmarks. And so anyway, they didn't do that for whatever reason. And so then the next step, they had these 20 ,000 images, but they wanted to make sure they weren't reusing images of the same raccoon. So just in case one person every day took 50 pictures of the same raccoon and loaded them all up, they only used one image from each person who uses iNaturalist.

53:28Oh, okay. And then they made sure that they were only using images of raccoons that were alive or freshly dead or raccoons that were, I know, or raccoons that were facing the right way. Because, you know, if a raccoon is sort of facing at the wrong angle, you might not get the right ratio that you're looking for. And so after they passed the images by a bunch of different criteria, they ended up with 249 images, which is pretty small samples. That's the sound I made. That's the sound I made. It's not just that it's a small sample size, but it's a huge selection effect, right? Yeah. One of these criteria could easily be biasing their subsample.

54:08I agree. And they ended up with 38 rural raccoons and 211 urban raccoons. Wow. So pretty small subset for the rural raccoons, which are supposed to be like the baseline. Yeah. 211 urban ones. Okay. And so then they made those measurements that we talked about, making the ratios, data. There were a lot of different authors, and it looks like a bunch of different authors were making these measurements. And they weren't all getting the same measurements. So one author looked at the different measurements made by the different members of the team, 13 images, and found 68 % inter-rater reliability, which doesn't sound great to me.

54:54So the way I've used these measures in the past has been like, if I analyze the same photo five times, this is a measure of how similar those analyses are. So if I get a one, that means every time I analyze the photo, I get the exact same answer. Or you can have five different people analyze one photo. And if they all get the same answer, then the answer would be one. And if they all get a different answer, then the answer would be zero. And so I looked up the paper that was cited in this paper for how these reliability analyses should be understood. And the paper says that if you get a value less than 0.5, you've done like a poor job of being reliable.

55:43If it's between 0.5 and 0.75, that's moderate. Good is between 0.75 and 0.9. And excellent is greater than 0.9. So this paper had 0.68, which puts it at moderate reliability or moderate consistency in answers. That tells me, like, why are you writing this paper? Like, go back to your study design and start over. What frustrated me is that 249 images is not a lot of images. And so I would have just been like, OK, three people are going to each measure every single image and we're going to like average or we're going to like I don't know, we're going to do something like there. 249 images is not a lot.

56:26We're going to find some way to make sure that we're all getting the same answer. Why can't they just write a computer program to analyze these images? In some unbiased way. Yeah. Or that. I don't know. That might have been hard, but they just needed to find a Daniel. So anyway, that that amount of reliability sounded a little low to me personally. Yeah. Anyway, so so then they looked up USDA plant hardiness zone. So they essentially were looking for a possible impact of like weather on snout length because these were raccoons from all over the United States. and then they looked up some census information to figure out if these raccoons were rural raccoons or urban raccoons.

57:02So they looked at where these raccoons were tagged on iNaturalist to figure out if they were found in the middle of a city or out in the middle of nowhere. And then they did some statistical modeling. And essentially what they found was that in warmer areas, snouts tend to be shorter. So there's an impact of climate. And they found that there was an impact on urban areas where urban raccoons did tend to have shorter snouts. And so that is in the direction that we expected. They found that they had 3.6-ish percent shorter snouts between rural and urban raccoons. And I assume they did some statistics and found that this is a meaningful difference for these samples.

57:50Yeah, but it's worth noting that they had initially done a model that included a bunch of years. But when they did that more complicated model that included a bunch of years, it had what's called a high variance inflation factor. We're not going to get into statistics. They ended up deciding that it was better to restrict the data to what they saw from 2020 to 2024. So after looking at an even smaller subset of the data, that's where they got that 3.6 % snout reduction. So it ends up being a pretty small data set. But, I mean, their conclusion, to be fair, is pretty conservative. Okay. Essentially what they say is we want to highlight raccoons as a new opportunity for observing early stage domestication patterns in a mammalian model system with no possibility of introgression or hybridization with other already domesticated mammalian species.

58:40Basically, they're like, maybe early domestication is happening here. The raccoons aren't going to be like mating with our cats or wild pigs or something like that. And so this is a system. Why not? Why can't we have a cat-raccoon hybrid? That sounds super cute. Sure, yeah. Well, we're going to have Scott Egan on the show to talk about what is a species, and he'll give you an answer, Daniel. And so there's a lot of room for further work. So, for example, this study also didn't look at whether or not the raccoons were males or females, and sexual dimorphism, which is when males and females look different.

59:16That could have also explained some of this variability. There's also some raccoon subspecies throughout the United States that look a little bit different. That could have explained some of the variability, too. I think you could do an experiment. And this is gross, but hear me out. There's a lot of raccoon roadkill around the United States. You could have people go out and collect raccoons from urban areas and rural areas all across the United States, get those actual measurements or actually even, you know, collect the craniums and make a lot of different kinds of measurements. And, you know, really start to get at some of these values in a more concrete way.

59:51You could know if they're males, know if they're females, know where they came from. But this is like an early attempt to answer this question using citizen science data. And like I love citizen science data, but it also comes with so many complications that come with using data collected, you know, for purposes that it wasn't necessarily intended for by people who like, you know, one of the filters they had to use was, is this even a raccoon? You know, so like there might have been people who were like, it's a raccoon, but it's a bobcat or like, you know, and so, you know, they were trying to see what the best they could do with this data set was.

1:00:29And, you know, they got an interesting answer consistent with the hypothesis. I don't feel like I would say we've got a slam dunk here, but good reason maybe to go out and try to collect the data in a bit more of a hands on rigorous way. And there's lots of interesting issues there. Like maybe people in urban versus rural environments are taking pictures of raccoons for different reasons, right? Urban people are more scared of this. They're showing it to their landlord or something. And rural people are like, hey, cool, here's my friend, the raccoon. And that could be influenced by how cute or how scary they look.

1:01:01I know there's all sorts of possible complications there. Yeah, right. Yeah. And you'd have to think about, you know, could the roadkill ones be biased in any way? Like, are the rural raccoons that are on the road like the more aggressive raccoons because they're the ones that are willing to get to the road? And so, you know, any experiment where you're taking advantage of a sample of animals that you can easily get your hands on, you've got to wonder how those data are biased in some way that made it easy for you to get those data. All right. So then zoom out and big picture it for us, Kelly.

1:01:31Do you think that this domestication syndrome thing is real? Is it useful? What do you think the future is going to tell us? All right. So here is my gut feeling. I do feel like when you select for one trait in an animal, those traits are usually controlled by genes and hormones that influence lots of other traits. And so I think most of the time when you domesticate an animal, you should expect a lot of things to change. And it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of the time when you are selecting for something like animals that are less likely to bite, a lot of the same traits would change in animals that we domesticate.

1:02:10And so I imagine that we will find a domestication syndrome has like, I don't know, maybe two or three traits that are pretty consistently changed across species. I'm not going to bet my life on that, but like it wouldn't surprise me if we found that. And so, yeah, I guess that's what I would guess. All right, that makes sense. Let's send this back to Matt to see if we have answered his question.

1:02:56Fun fact that none of you asked for, though. Vulpus Vulpus isn't the only animal to get the double Latin treatment. For the Western Gorilla, we have Gorilla Gorilla. Plus, if Daniel goes full mafia-like villain, he's got a wicked smart, friendly, and classy Discord community to build up his future empire. So come join us as we talk about the universe, space, geology, biology, other things that end in ology. The secret to a great Discord obviously is having a pet section. Our members are high energy and enthusiastic, intelligent people from all walks of life, and we'd love for more of you to join in on the conversations and obviously share your pets.

1:03:31Honestly, as one of the moderators too, we have a rarity when it comes to Discord communities. Everyone here is wicked friendly and smart and extremely civil without needing constant intervention. So really the biggest credit goes to our Discord community for keeping it that way. We hope to see you and your pets soon. Thanks Daniel and Kelly. All right. Thank you very much, everybody on the Discord for creating such a fun and inclusive community. If you think the internet is toxic, you have not been to the DKU Discord. It's a bastion of creativity and support. Come join us for conversation. And pet photos!

1:04:07Short snouts and long snouts all are welcome. And goats. When I finally do become a mafia villain and get my own pet lions, I'll post pictures on the Discord. I can't wait.

1:04:24Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman. He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and XDNKUniverse. Come engage with us. You can email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. We really do want to hear from you. And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

1:05:04And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

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