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Long-established Urban Fox Populations Showed More Exploration and Problem Solving

Female red fox standing near vegetation and a stone structure
Research · Behaviour

Red fox populations (Vulpes vulpes) in cities with a long history of urban foxes showed more extensive exploration of unfamiliar objects and higher success with novel food-related problems than rural or more recently urbanised populations. The study treats these as population-level behavioural differences across locations, not stable personality measurements of individual foxes. A 2026 study tested wild foxes across Great Britain using standardized puzzle tasks rather than relying only on observations of ordinary urban behaviour.

Researchers placed novel food-related objects at 284 sites and compared responses from rural populations, recently established urban populations and places where foxes have lived in cities for more than 40 years. Foxes at 27.4% of the sites touched the experimental objects, while foxes at 12.4% successfully solved the tasks.

Long-established urban foxes explored more and solved more tasks

Urban foxes were more likely than rural foxes to make physical contact with the unfamiliar objects. Additional differences appeared within the urban populations. Foxes from places with the longest history of urban occupation — particularly London — spent more time exploring the tasks, used a greater variety of exploratory behaviours and showed higher problem-solving success.

Some urban differences appeared earlier than others

Not every measure followed the same pattern. Recently established urban populations were just as likely as older urban populations to touch the objects, and the rate of urbanisation between 1994 and 2020 did not by itself predict whether foxes would touch or solve the tasks. This suggests that some behavioural differences may appear relatively early after urban colonisation, while others become more pronounced only in populations exposed to city environments over many decades.

The duration of urban exposure therefore helped explain behavioural variation that a simple urban-versus-rural comparison would miss.

Sources and image credit

  1. Morton, F. B., Thompson-Jones, D., Adaway, K. A., Sutter, K. M., Matos, C., Freer, G. B., Fletcher, G. A., & Soulsbury, C. D. (2026). Time in the city: long-term urban exposure predicts greater exploration and problem solving in wild red foxes. Animal Behaviour, 238, 123644. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2026.123644Primary peer-reviewed open-access study, published online 10 July 2026

Image: Alexis Lours — female red fox photographed in France; representative image for the urban-fox study. Source: Wikimedia Commons. · CC BY 4.0 · Source

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