13. House cats and wild cats are black for a different reason.
Uh-oh: we’ve reached unlucky number thirteen. Worse: black cats!
Please don’t freak out, even if you happen to be one of the forty million people in the US who admit that they feel uncomfortable on the thirteenth floor of a building.
Superstitions happen everywhere. In some cultures, the unlucky number is different. Chinese mobile owners, for example, pay extra to avoid a “4” in the phone’s number (when spoken, “4” sounds like the word “death” in their language).
Black house cats haunt the halls of human misperception, too — but not always in a bad way.
Some Europeans and Asians consider them lucky!
Perhaps that positive catitude goes all the way back to Ancient Egypt, where temple personnel and those who came to worship saw a resemblance between the goddess Bastet and black cats.
That’s understandable. As shown in most tomb paintings, Egypt’s cats generally looked a lot like their tabby African wildcat ancestor. The gene mutation for black cat fur, which geneticists suspect might have started about 2,500 years ago, would seem divine in that society.
Of course they wanted more.
Today’s cat fanciers know how to manipulate house cat genes. Back in the Pharaoh’s temple catteries, trial-and-error selective breeding for black fur worked, too — increasing the number of special cats as well as unintentionally fixing this mutation into the domestic cat line (mutations themselves aren’t all that unusual, but they quickly disappear unless these new gene forms can be inherited).
Down through the centuries, this and other artificial selection choices by H. sapiens have given modern house cats their varied and decidedly non-African wildcat appearance.
In the midst of it all, the once rare black cats now outnumber house cats of all other solid colors.
Any remaining Bastet believers might attribute that to divine intervention.
It might give the superstitious among us a bad feeling about the future.
But all it really means is that the primary gene causing black fur in house cats tends to dominate others.
Meanwhile, outdoors, at least five small and large wild cats, including the original black “panther,” have a mutation that works in a way similar to Fluffy’s (filling in light-colored bands on each hair). The mutation details are different in each group.
Some Latin American cats, including another kind of black “panther,” have taken a different route. Their color gene mutation works the way most of us assume all fur is blackened — by adding in more dark pigment.
Latin America’s “black panther” is the jaguar, but I just love this twelve-year-old video of a little black guiña (a/k/a kodkod) really enjoying its meal!
Finally, a few cats in the American tropics, like the oncilla, occasionally have black fur for reasons that wildlife biologists have not yet figured out.
The major difference between Fluffy and other shady members of the cat family is this:
- Fluffy’s black fur comes from artificial selection.
- Wild cats get theirs from natural selection.
What exactly Nature might be selecting for isn’t always clear to experts. Whatever the reason, it must be important because black fur — technically, melanism — has evolved at least four times in the cat family and shows up in a third of all feline species.
Genetics and evolution can be mind-boggling, so let’s instead concentrate on something sillier: why are there quotes around the word “panther”?
14. Black “panthers” are not panthers.
Mountain lions have many names, including “panther.” And there have been no confirmed sightings, at least in the United States, of a black panther.
What to do if you meet a panther while outdoors.
What about all those zoo cats and images of black “panthers”?
You are looking at either a leopard or a jaguar (and it is a joy to behold, since its spots still show up in the right lighting).
The melanistic leopard has an ASIP gene mutation similar to Fluffy’s, while the jaguar’s is that “add more pigment” MC1R mutation.
Forbidden love? Of course not — and besides, both of these jaguars have the same scientific name: “Panthera onca.”
This is just how the popular names for wild cats have developed.
It’s ironic because the word “panther,” according to etymonline.com, does come from Latin and Greek words for “leopard”!
Speaking of the pard (another old-timey name for leopards and reflected in their scientific moniker Panthera pardus)…
15. There is a place on Earth where almost all local leopards are black.
This is a short entry because:
- Scientists are still trying to understand the major point: What do wild cats get out of melanism? It must be something important, since a third of family Felidae has this mutation — but what?
- The coolest fact can be put very simply: Leopards in just one area on Earth are black!
That area includes rainforest on part of the Malaysian Peninsula as well as a bit of southern Thailand.
There are mant different cat species in this preserve, which is great! But that “panther” is really a leopard — “Panthera pardus.” Anywhere else, people would be excited about its melanism; here, spotted leopards are the rarity. (“Yay, dogs! — The dholes.)
Why there? The boffins are working on it.
Current thinking is that humidity, nearness to the Equator (bringing in something called Gloger’s Rule), and camouflage needs have something to do with it.
Meanwhile, leopards are endangered and the rainforest is being cut down, so conservationists really need to know how many of the big cats are left.
Individual leopards can be identified (and counted) with camera traps. But no one could count the unusual black leopards of Malaysia and Thailand: they come out at night and the black fur hides their spots.
The boffins found a way. They tweaked their infrared flash camera traps to reveal each black “panther’s” spots!
This isn’t from that study, but the spots on this rescued black leopard show up even in sunshine:
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___. 2018. Gloger’s rule. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloger’s_rule Accessed August 25, 2018.
Flight To Wonder 