Caturday felid trifecta: Cats falling in zero gravity; awesome working barn cats; the Chinese Mountain Cat; and lagniappe

For a long time astronauts have been tested by subjected them to short “zero-gravity” conditions using “reduced-gravity aircraft“. These planes fly up and down on a parabolic flight path, creating a free-fall condition for part of the flight:

Initially, the aircraft climbs with a pitch angle of 45 degrees using engine thrust and elevator controls. The sensation of weightlessness is achieved by reducing thrust and lowering the nose to maintain a neutral, or “zero lift”, configuration such that the aircraft follows the same path that an object in free fall, with no air resistance, would follow. Engine thrust is used to exactly compensate for drag. Weightlessness begins while ascending and lasts all the way “up-and-over the hump,” until the aircraft reaches a downward pitch angle of around 30 degrees.

But of course the first question an ailurophile would ask is, “Well, what about falling cats?”  We all know that a cat held up and dropped to the floor only a foot above the ground will nevertheless right itself and land on its feet.  And SCIENCE has also learned how cats do this, using a clever evolved pathway called “the righting reflex“:

But what happens to a cat released in zero gravity, when there is no cue to tell up and down? The article below explains: the cats go haywire:

An excerpt:

The first experiments were conducted on board a Convair C-131 Samaritan, and yes, there is absolutely video of the proceedings. A similar experiment involved releasing pigeons inside the C-131 during parabolic flight. The humans seem to have had a somewhat cavalier attitude towards having eyes.

It’s fascinating to watch. The narration for the video says the cats’ “automatic reflex action is almost completely lost under weightlessness”. Almost – but not quite. Although the cats seem disoriented, they are still able to twist and turn their bodies around as they try to figure out where they are going to fall.

That was far from the end of the experiments. A 1957 paper in The Journal of Aviation Medicine documents experimenting with eight kittens in T-33 and F-94 aircraft performing parabolic flights – “not only to satisfy our own curiosity,” wrote Siegfried Gerathewohl and Herbert Stallings of the US Air Force, “but to clarify the role of the otolith organ during weightlessness.”

. . .All these kitty-cat shenanigans helped scientists understand cats. In 1969, mechanicians Thomas Kane and MP Scher of Stanford University published an analysis in the International Journal of Solids and Structures that described the motion of a falling cat as two cylinders that twist in relation to each other in order to right themselves quickly while falling.

The research had implications for humans, too. The same two scientists also wrote a 1969 document for NASA that used mathematical models to better understand the motion and orientation of the human body in freefall.

And of course you’ll want to see a video. But oh, those poor kitties! I hope they got plenty of treats for having to do this. But note the lessons that the cats imparted to human astronauts in zero gravity:

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Here’s a 3½-minute video showing three barn cats doing their job.  Note how well they supervise the goats, keeping them in line. and also ensure that the small d*gs do not engage in bad behavior, giving them a swat for bad behavior.

The cats also walk on tightropes, count barn swallows, consume leftover milk, patrol the fence line, and keep each other company with cuddles.

 

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Finally, Matthew sent me this tweet from Bluesky (I’m now on it) showing the Chinese mountain cat, Felis beiti. As Wikipedia notes:

It is endemic to the Tibetan Plateau of western China, where it lives in grassland above elevations of 2,500 m (8,200 ft). It has been listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List since 2002.

Have you ever heard of the Chinese mountain cat?I hadn't until I read Ruth Kamnitzer's piece on this small cat that was only photographed for the first time in the wild in 2007.news.mongabay.com/2024/11/easy…

— Rhett Ayers Butler (@rhettayersbutler.bsky.social) 2024-11-20T04:48:24.473Z

Here’s a photo of a captive cat from Wikipedia. Looks like a household tabby, no?

Click on the article from Mongabay (below) to read about Chinese scientists who found and studied the cat:

 

From the Mongabay article:

In 2018, Han Xue-song, then a researcher with the Beijing-based Shan Shui Conservation Center, was in the Sanjiangyuan region on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, surveying black-necked cranes (Grus nigricollis). At an elevation of more than 4000 meters (13,000 feet), this is a windswept land of alpine meadows and rolling hills that stretch as far as the eye can see.

On this particular day in mid-September, Han and his colleagues were taking a break by the side of the road when they spotted something on a distant hillside. The animal was difficult to make out, but looked like a red fox (Vulpes vulpes), which are fairly common in the area. Han took out his camera, snapped a couple of pictures with its powerful 400-millimeter lens, and didn’t think much more about it.

But later that evening, when Han downloaded the photos, he was in for a surprise. A strange cat — about twice the size of a domestic cat, with straw-colored fur, tufted ears, a white lower lip, and startling blue eyes — was staring back at him. Beside her was a small kitten. It was only after Han sent the photo to another biologist that he realized the significance of the find.

“Even at that time, when we had the picture in our hands, we didn’t know that’s a Chinese mountain cat,” Han says. “Most of us had never heard of that species.”

The Chinese mountain cat (Felis bieti) is China’s only endemic felid, and one of the least-known small cats in the world. Historically, most records came from skins or museum specimens of dubious origins. It wasn’t until 2004 that scientists figured out the cat has a very confined distribution along the eastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and it was another three years before biologists captured the first photographs in the wild. The species is classified as vulnerable to extinction on the IUCN Red List, but until very recently, almost nothing was known about its distribution, habitat use, or threats.

. . .In 2020, Liu Yan-lin, a professor at Qinghai Normal University, undertook the first comprehensive survey of Chinese mountain cats in and around the newly established Qilian Mountain National Park, a 50,200-square-kilometer (19,400-square-mile) protected area on the northern edge of the cat’s range.

. . . . Liu found that the Chinese mountain cat lived on the southern side of the Qilian range, and it appeared to be particularly abundant in Menyuan county, a high-elevation basin between the Qilian and Daban mountains. The county is a mix of small- and large-scale agriculture and tree plantations, as well as native shrubland and grassland. It’s inhabited by Han Chinese, pastoral Hui and ethnic Tibetans, and Liu says he was surprised that it appeared to be a stronghold for the cats.

“At the beginning, before I did the survey, my impression was that the cats live in remote areas, far away from people. But after the survey in the Qilian mountain [my impression] changed,” Liu says. “So, it’s actually living nearby people, even with the people.”

To figure out what was going on in Menyuan county, Kong Yue-qiao, a doctoral candidate at Peking University co-supervised by Liu, took on the first ecological study of the Chinese mountain cat in the wild. {JAC: Sadly, the article is in Chinese]

Kittens!:

More kittens:

But they are introgressing with domestic cats. That is BAD!

In 2021, Luo co-authored a study that found there was ongoing and recent genetic introgression between Chinese mountain cats and domestic cats. Genetic introgression is  the transfer of genetic material from one species into the gene pool of another, which happens when two species interbreed over numerous generations.

Those findings were worrying, Luo says, but only based on genetic samples from four Chinese mountain cats. To figure out the full extent of the problem, they needed more samples.

Over several years, Luo and her team managed to collect samples from 51 Chinese mountain cats on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Luo and her colleagues haven’t yet published the results of their analysis, but she says they found evidence of a greater degree of introgression, with gene flow going both ways.

For example, Luo sampled one cat that had most of the markings of a Chinese mountain cat, except for a small patch of white on one paw and slightly-darker-than-usual stripes; the genetic analysis revealed about one-third genetic introgression from domestic cats.

Here’s a hybrid:

Dogs and cars are also a danger to these cats, but the scientists are hopeful that now that we know more about this threatened species, better conservation measures will be applied.

Like this one:

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Lagniappe.  I initially had trouble getting this one, but perhaps you won’t. Give it a try.

h/t: Ginger K., Merilee, Matthew