Photographs of first confirmed case of a cougar with leucism have recently reemerged. Apparently cougars rarely have genetic color aberrations. For examples, black cougars (caused by melanism) has never occurred within the species though other cat species do occasionally produce all black animals. It is unclear why cougars are so uniformly tan or gray but it may just be a random quirk of genetics. Other big cats have had fascinating color differences such as this "strawberry leopard."
So red and delicious. A regular leopard is more colored like the picture below with a higher level of definitions and more black. I think the thought is that the red is a result of an overproduction of the red genes and under production of the black gene, which is similar to why people produce freckles.
What other color variations have you seen in big cats, especially naturally occurring as opposed to weird inbreeding that happens among animals such as white tigers in capitivity?
No comments:
Post a Comment