Surprising genetic findings from research on wild and domestic rabbits

A new analysis shows that feral DNA can help pet rabbits survive in the wild, shedding new light on the evolution of an animal that can wreak havoc on the environment.

In a paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers looked at the relationship between rabbit genetics and “feralization,” an evolutionary process in which the offspring of domestic rabbits living in the wild shed traits that helped them survive in human environments, and instead adopt those of feral animals.

The researchers sequenced DNA from 297 rabbits in six populations in South America, Europe and Australia, all places where rabbits have been introduced in the past 200 years. They compared the genetic information with the DNA of other wild and domestic rabbits.

To their surprise, the researchers found that all of the rabbits examined had a mix of wild and domestic DNA.

“This wasn’t what we expected to find,” Leif Andersson, a professor of veterinary integrative biosciences at the Texas A&M University School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and a co-author of the study, said in a press release. “We expected feral rabbits to be domestic rabbits that had somehow relearned how to live in the wild. But our findings show that these rabbits already had some of the wild DNA that helped them survive in nature.”

The researchers found that the offspring of domestic rabbits quickly lost the docility and coat color that humans prefer in rabbits, trading them for traits that allow them to thrive in the wild.

That may explain why rabbits in Australia, a continent now overrun by feral rabbits, did not immediately take over when domestic rabbits were first introduced. The rabbit population did not increase until after 1859, when the introduction of just 24 wild and domestic rabbits started a population explosion that continues to this day.

Today, there are at least 150 million feral rabbits in Australia. The animals are considered invasive pests, competing with livestock and native animals, destroying native plants and crops, and even affecting groundwater uptake.