A gene that is important for human hearing could determine whether a dog’s ears are pendulous like a basset hound’s or stubby like a rottweiler’s, according to a genetic analysis of more than 3,000 dogs, wolves and coyotes.
The study, presented on 11 January at the Plant and Animal Genome Conference in San Diego, California, found that DNA variants near a gene called MSRB3 are linked to ear length in dogs. The results were also published in December in Scientific Reports.
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The project was inspired by Cobain, a gregarious, nine-year-old American cocker spaniel whose hobbies include morning swims in a local creek and following people from room to room. One day, Anna Ramey, an undergraduate working in a canine genetics laboratory at the University of Georgia in Athens, gazed at her dog Cobain’s long, floppy ears and wondered: why?
She took the question to her colleagues, and the project was born. “We realized that people had studied ear carriage before — like pointy, erect ears versus floppy, dropped ears,” says Tori Rudolph, a geneticist at the lab. “But no one had looked at ear length in dogs.”
The length and carriage of dog ears vary widely from breed to breed. Some of this evolved naturally: short, upright ears are thought to lose less heat than long, droopy ones, and canines from cold climates tend to have smaller ears than do those that hail from warm regions.
But selective breeding has also shaped dog ears. The basset hound’s long ears are said to boost its hunting acuity by sweeping scents towards its nose, whereas a German shepherd’s upright ears might slightly enhance its hearing.
Rudolph and her colleagues analysed the genomes of thousands of canines, looking for differences in sequence that correlate with ear length. The search led them to a region of the genome near MSRB3, a gene that codes for an antioxidant protein that has been linked to ear size in pigs, sheep and goats. Some mutations in the gene are associated with hearing loss in people, and previous studies have linked the gene to ear carriage in dogs.
The DNA variants that Rudolph and her colleagues found could boost MSRB3 activity, increasing the rate at which ear cells proliferate, she says.
The analysis focused on small, single-letter changes to DNA, but some of the physical variation could be controlled by other types of genetic variant, such as large deleted or duplicated regions in the genome, says Claire Wade, an animal geneticist at the University of Sydney in Australia, who reports that her dog Sage has medium floppy ears whereas Phoenix has ears that are short and “sticky-uppy.”
After looking at sequence variation across a variety of dog breeds, Rudolph, inspired by her two golden retrievers, Erin and Brooks, now wants to see what can be learnt from looking at a single breed. “Golden retrievers have really, really variable ear sizes and ear lengths,” she says. “They would be my ideal next step.”
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on January 13, 2026.
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