Isn't that just symbiotic relationship though? Article does not explain what monkeys get from this relationship with wolves and whether any species is changing another's behavior.
They don't get eaten by wolves.
I bet the feral dogs mentioned in the article will think twice before going near wolf/monkey groups too, since both dogs and wolves are usually territorial.
"However, the geladas don’t seem to get anything from the relationship, since the wolves are unlikely to deter other predators such as leopards or feral dogs, he says."
Maybe they benefit from a reduced rodent population in some way? Less disease or maybe even competition for food since this particular type of monkey grazes?
There are only a few species that are generically predisposed to domestication. We have domesticated pretty much all of them - and the rest failed, despite multiple attempts across thousands of years.
Zebras, for example, not "eligible". It looks like a nice horsy but the things are totally wild, and happen to be the number one source of zoo injuries because people are fooled by the harmless striped pony.
I somewhat doubt this is the way to look at it. Dogs took between 11,000 and 40,000 years to domesticate. That all started with dogs using up more of a carcass than humans would after a hunt and the humans just didn't care. Eventually, humans found that dogs can and would do more.
If my read is right it, any species could be tamed as long as they're evolutionarily ready to. Not all members of that species may be ready to either, as the writing points out a wolf did attempt to grab a baby gelada, was drove out, and was not allowed to return. Interestingly, they did not apply this logic broadly.
By "evolutionarily ready," do you mean artificially selected for docility or other amenable characteristics?
I think certain species are intractable and unable to be domesticated, while others seem to be much more pliable. It took only six generations [1] to domesticate silver foxes.
Agreed, mostly. I do think it's possible that a species can gain traits through evolution that make them more compatible with domestication. Dogs, when we domesticated them, were not the dogs we know today. They were wolves with specific evolutionary advancements that made them less hostile to humans. Of course, we can speed that up too a bit arbitrarily through selective breeding. That was all "evolutionarily ready" meant to me.
It's relative, with several tens of thousands of generations of selective breeding zebras can be domesticated. It's just not doable over a few dozen generations.
