A 35.5 pound fox! That’s the size of a typical coyote bitch in my part of the world.
Why are the foxes getting larger?
I would submit that they are simply evolving to fit a niche that has been left vacant when wolves were extirpated from the British Isles. Something very similar happened when wolves were killed off in the Eastern US, and Western coyotes wandered in. They grew larger in size to be more effective predators of deer.
I also think that fox hunting ban in Britain has had an effect. The fox hunts always exerted upon foxes a relatively strong selection pressure to remain small. If a fox is small enough, it can fit into the narrowest places and avoid the hounds. With the hunting ban, there is no longer much of a selection pressure to remain small. A larger fox that exists hounds hunting it has certain advantages in obtaining access vixens and good hunting territory, and its prey choices become wider. A fox of that size might be a threat to some of the smaller deer species– and it certainly would be able to take relatively large lambs.
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I don’t think the hunting ban has been in effect long enough to have any influence on the fox size in Britian. It might however be that hunting drove foxes to become more urban (as coyotes also have) where hunting was not allowed and food from trash readily available. Looking “dog size” might have also been a plus. If the hunting ban was a major factor, one would have thought that the foxes would have been larger in those areas where there was no hunting before the official ban.
It would be interesting to find out if this is just a single freak animal or if the foxes in Kent are actually larger in general.
Oh yes, it’s been in effect long enough.
Dog size can evolve very rapidly through just modest selection pressures.
The urban issue is not mutually exclusive to my reasoning.
This particular fox was killed in a farm field. Large size might require more food, but if large size opens up new prey opportunities, large size becomes an advantage.
Now that humans have eliminated the apex predators in most environments & are themselves much less prone to hunt, evolutionary pressures are creating new apex predators. These new predators are keyed in size to the largest potential prey by virtue of the fact that a larger predator that can kill larger prey will have more to eat & thus be more successful. If large prey species are not available then the reverse is true. Ain’t evolution elegant?
i live in kent and no they arent particularly big. most of the ones i see are normal size. they are a lot bolder than they used to be. we are having trouble with foxes just walking into peoples houses and not being all that bothered to have a human try to chase them out. a couple of years ago there was a very bad attack on two babies in london when the fox got in the house and walked upstairs to the babies bedroom and then for some reason attacked them. the babies were ok but badly scarred. there main source of food around here seems to be rubbish as people will put there rubbish out overnight when they are not supposed to. i wander if this maybe having an affect on some foxes, if you are getting regular food and good food at that because people are so wasteful and not having to survive on the odd rabbit then maybe they will get bigger. also people do feed them. maybe we will get some kind of split with our foxes urbans become almost a different type to the country fox who is generally still very nervous of people and has to survive on what he can. also urban foxes are seen more in the day time now. normally they are only about at night but again they seem to be changing there habits.i wander what urban foxes will become in the future.
tracey
just watched the video and see it was shot in east grinstead which is about 40 miles away in surrey. now he was shot in the country but our country sadly isin like your lovely vast areas (hint of jealousy there). he could, living in surrey have lived in a semi rural area, there are plenty of large housing estates around where foxes can bin raid and then slip back quite quickly into a rural area. if you go further north or over towards the west country you do get much more rural areas. so this chap could have been a semi rural fox half living in a small town and half in the country..
the big maidstone chap from last year was only about 5/10 miles from me depending which side he was killed in. i live in chatham where the famous dockyard is that built nelson’s flagship hms victory.
tracey
I know that European foxes are often larger than ours, which are about the same size as native ‘gray fox,” genus Urocyon.
Muntjac numbers are increasing in the UK. I wonder if these larger foxes are evolving to hunt them.
Now that’s an interesting speculation. Muntjac weigh in at 22-35lbs. I wud propose that Roe deer (run 22-55lbs) wud also be subject to predation by foxes of this size and there is already a goodly population of them in Britain.
[…] when exposed to selection pressures. We’ve seen this in Eastern coyotes, domestic dogs, and even red foxes in England. So this finding doesn’t surprise me in the […]
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