I need to know if these cats are being sold into the the pet trade or not
Nope! These little kitties are from black jaguar white tiger foundation, a big cat rescue and sanctuary, and the man in the video is Eduardo Serio. He regularly gets orphaned cubs and cubs rescued from the pet trade, when the zoos don’t have enough room. He doesn’t normally socialize with them like this but the margay and jaguar cubs here had already imprinted on humans and can no longer survive in the wild, so he’s been raising them
A 22-month-old female scaredy cat tiger appeared to get the shock of her young life when she encountered a dead leaf floating on a pool of water in the Bandhavgarh National Park, India. Clearly unusure about just what was approaching her, the partially submerged youngster’s tail shot up in the air and with teeth bared she let out her most fearsome growl – all in an effort to scare the humble leaf away.
Picture: HERMANN BREHM / NPL / Rex Features
I CAN’T BREATHE
OMFG I AM DYING!
this is like the happiest thing I have encountered in a while
they should form a support group.
I lost it when I saw the tail, before I even read the comment oh my god
My name is cat And wen I see An unnown thing Approaching me Prepared to fite I show my teef I growl real loud I scare the leef
Nicknamed Marble, this zebra has an area of small scrambled stripes on it’s back, giving it a marbled look. [x]
A reconstructed quagga-like animal, it’s legs clean, and it’s rump and belly nearly free of markings. The stripes it does have are fairly narrow for a plains zebra. It’s tail and mane are much lighter, and has a faint brown wash along it’s back.[x]
Two reduced striped animals, the middle with a few stray stripes on it’s rump and legs, the one on the right has a nearly all white body and legs. Both have a fewer number of facial markings as well.[x]
A diluted, brown striped adult zebra. Zebra foals are born brown and white, but this one didn’t seem to lose it’s baby colors. [x]
Blonde is a term applied to leucistic zebras. Albino is sometimes used for the really light animals, like this blue eyed and creamy tan striped one, however I keep reading that true albinism has not been recorded in equines, so I’m hesitant to use that term.[x]
This abundistic has stripes that thicken and meld together on it’s back and neck, forming white spots.[x]
Dotted and dashed with white on a black background, this heavily abundistic zebra has a very unique and striking look.[x]
The back of this abundistic Burchell’s(E.q. burchellii) is so densely marked, it’s a nearly solid blanket of color ticked with a bit of white. The rest of it’s stripes and brown shadow stripes are jagged and messy.[x]
Unfortunately, without the help of the naturally camouflaged striped coat, this extremely dark abundistic foal was an easier target for predators and didn’t make it into adulthood. Still in it’s dark brown baby coat, it probably would look very similar to number 8 but with a darker face, smaller spots, and wider white stripes on it’s rump.[x]
This chart from MessyBeast is a great example of the differences in color morphs. While the graphic is specific to big cats, much of it does transfer to other species.
The opposite of albinism called melanism, a recessive trait where the skin and fur are all black.
nature & real talk
Holy shit that’s majestic.
Yes, the powers of Photoshop are indeed majestic
So far the closest thing we have to melanistic lions are the black-mained Asiatic lions
(Panthera leo persica), and it’s not known whether lions are even able to be melanistic!
The only melanistic big cats we know of are jaguars…
…and leopards.
We do, however, know of abundism in other big cats! What’s abundism you may ask? Well, it’s basically when places that normally have a lot of melanin end up producing an abundance of it. So an abundistic tiger looks like this:
And an abundistic cheetah looks like this:
And just for good measure, here’s an abundistic leopard:
This has been a PSA!
Oooh okay, I want to jump in here, purely because I saw this and it brought back my childhood fascination with king cheetahs so I had to infodump.
As far as I can tell, that is actually a king cheetah, not an abundistic cheetah. From a brief bit of research, the king cheetah coat pattern isn’t strictly caused by abundism, but is actually caused by a recessive mutation in a gene responsible for coat patterning.
It was found that a mutation in the Taqpep gene is what causes the king cheetah coat pattern where “the black spots coalesce into larger areas, and multiple longitudinal black stripes appear on the dorsum“. Just to illustrate this a little better, here’s a regular cheetah on the left, with a king cheetah on the right
The scientists who discovered that this mutation was responsible for king cheetah patterning actually first discovered the mutation in domestic cats. It is the same gene that causes the blotched tabby mutation (as opposed to the striped/mackerel tabby coat pattern).
It gets slightly more complicated after that. The scientists also found that, while the Taqpep gene is responsible for patterning the areas of yellow vs black coat colour, it isn’t directly responsible for producing a darker coat (the taqpep gene is found in low levels in both light and dark areas of the cheetah/cats skin). This raises the question, if Taqpep isn’t directly changing coat colour, then what is?
After some investigation in fetal cats (and some confirmation tests done in lab mice), it was found that Edn3 was the gene responsible. Edn3 produces a hormone that up-regulates the differentiation and grown of melanocytes (the cells that produce melanin). So, putting things all together: it seems that Taqpep expression sets up an invisible zones of patterning, and these zones determine the level of expression of Edn3. By extension, this increases the number of melanocytes present in the skin, and thus the yellow vs black coat colour. Mutations in the Taqpep gene lead to wider, more erratic zones of colouration, which leads to the blotched coat pattern responsible for king cheetahs.
Okay, so, I know this wasn’t really at all related to the original post, or even the comment above, it was mostly just my sudden need to infodump my knowledge on king cheetahs. I do apologise if I’ve over-stepped, and if people would rather I removed my comment and just made a separate post, I can do that. Also, I apologise for any factual errors I’ve made in this post; it’s mostly what I’ve learnt from quickly skimming through the paper and trying to summarise what I could (the paper itself is very informative and goes into a lot more detail than I have if you’re interested in this kind of thing). If you spot any glaring mistakes, let me know and I’ll happily edit this where necessary.
Reference:
Kaelin, C., Xu, X., Hong, L., David, V., McGowan, K., Schmidt-Kuntzel, A., Roelke, M., Pino, J., Pontius, J., Cooper, G., Manuel, H., Swanson, W., Marker, L., Harper, C., van Dyk, A., Yue, B., Mullikin, J., Warren, W., Eizirik, E., Kos, L., O’Brien, S., Barsh, G. and Menotti-Raymond, M. (2012). Specifying and Sustaining Pigmentation Patterns in Domestic and Wild Cats. Science, 337(6101), pp.1536-1541
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