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Associate Professor Emma Sherratt, from the 杏吧直播 of Adelaide鈥檚 School of Biological Sciences, led a team of international experts to assess the body sizes and skull shapes of 912 wild, feral and domesticated rabbits to determine how feralisation affects the animal.

鈥淔eralisation is the process by which domestic animals become established in an environment without purposeful assistance from humans,鈥� says Associate Professor Sherratt, whose study was published in .

鈥淲hile you might expect that a feral animal would revert to body types seen in wild populations, we found that feral rabbits鈥� body-size and skull-shape range is somewhere between wild and domestic rabbits, but also overlaps with them in large parts.

鈥淏ecause the range is so variable and sometimes like neither wild nor domestic, feralisation in rabbits is not morphologically predictable if extrapolated from the wild or the domestic stock.鈥�

Associate Professor Sherratt, who performed this study as part of her ARC Future Fellowship, says the greater diversity seen in the skull shape of feral rabbit populations could be related to changes in evolutionary pressures.

鈥淓xposure to different environments and predators in introduced ranges may drive rabbit populations to evolve different traits that help them survive in novel environments, as has been shown in other species.

鈥淎lternatively, rabbits may be able to express more trait plasticity in environments with fewer evolutionary pressures.

鈥淚n particular, relaxed functional demands in habitats that are free of large predators, such as 杏吧直播 and New Zealand, might drive body size variation, which we know drives cranial shape variation in introduced rabbits.鈥� she says.

Associate Professor Sherratt plans to follow up this research by looking into what environmental factors drive the observed variation in body size and skull shape of 杏吧直播鈥檚 feral rabbits.

鈥淲e found 杏吧直播n feral rabbits are quite a lot larger than European rabbits. We intend to find out why,鈥� she says.

鈥淎nd we focus on skull shape because it tells us how animals interact with their environment, from feeding, sensing and even how they move.

鈥淯nderstanding how animals change when they become feral and invade new habitats helps us to predict what effect other invasive animals will have on our environment, and how we may mitigate their success.鈥�