Tag: cats

Caturday felids: We are Siameses if the environment pleases

October 31, 2009 • 6:42 am

One of the best examples of “gene-environment interaction” is the gene (allele) producing the coloration of Siamese cats.  The expression of this gene depends heavily on the ambient temperature that the skin experiences while the fur is growing. Cat World describes it (read this web page for a lot more information, particularly if you have a Siamese or Himalayan):

Siamese cats carry a gene known as the Himalayan gene. This gene is seen in other species, such as the rabbit and the mouse. It is a mutation at the C locus and it causes partial albinism. This gene is recessive to the full colour C gene.  This means you need two doses of it (homozygous) for the Siamese colour to show up. If you mate a Siamese to a Siamese, you will get Siamese offspring. If you mate a Siamese to a black cat, you will get black offspring which will carry one dose of the Siamese (cs) gene at the C locus.

The Burmese also shares the same type of gene, which is known as cb.

The cs and cb genes are co-dominant and hence if you mate a Siamese (cs) to a Burmese (cb) you will get a Tonkinese (cs/cb), which has “mink” colouring.

This gene is heat sensitive, the cooler the area, the darker the colour. Which explains why a Siamese has dark extremities such as the face, tail and legs. The body being the warmest part of the cat remains lighter in colour. You will notice your Siamese get darker in the winter months, especially if your Siamese is an indoor/outdoor cat.  Siamese cats are white at birth, this is due to being in the constant warmth of the mothers womb. This colouring varies from Siamese to Siamese.

Courtesy of my friend the British geneticist Steve Jones, here are three pictures of Siamese cats that experienced different temperatures:

First, a “normal” Siamese:

 

Siamese

Next, Siamese living in a cold environment.  Note the heavy dark pigmentation appears more widely over the body:

darksiamese

This is a Siamese living in a hotter climate.  It’s almost white, and note the tabby-like pattern that now appears on the tail:

whitesiamese

Finally, someone has shaved his initial into the side of this cat, which then re-grew the fur under cold conditions.

Esiamese

Caturday felid

October 17, 2009 • 6:05 am

by Greg Mayer

As a herpetologist with a cat, I’m always interested in feline-reptilian interactions, and here’s a South African tortoise that either doesn’t like cats, or likes them so much that it gets close enough to annoy them and drive them away. Note that the orange tabby, at least, appears to regard its interactions with the tortoise as playful, much as Peyton regards her interactions with me (in the second video), thus demonstrating, once again, the rudimentary moral sentiments of cats. (Try to ignore the dreadful soundtrack.)

This clip from South African TV provides the context of the clip.

The original video by Salvelio Meyer, sans soundtrack, has had embedding disabled, but you can see it at Youtube, by clicking through the image below.

Dogs can be moral, too.

October 16, 2009 • 9:42 am

by Greg Mayer

WEIT readers know that cats are a frequent subject of posts here, and that the origin of the moral sentiment is another, although not quite as frequent, subject. The two topics have occasionally joined hands, mostly in the person (?feline) of my cat Peyton (see here and here). Well, it turns out dogs can have a moral sense too. PZ Myers has a wonderful video of a dog in Chile going out into a busy highway to rescue another dog which has been hit by a car.

Actually, despite our well-known ailurophilia (digression: OED take note– you don’t have this word yet!) here at WEIT, we’ve long known that dogs have rudimentary moral sentiments, and Darwin included observations of his dogs (the second of which was named Bob) in his writings on the subject (see  here, especially chap. 3, and here both links are to The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online).  A sample (Descent, vol. 1, p. 77):

I have myself seen a dog, who never passed a great friend of his, a cat which lay sick in a basket, with-out giving her a few licks with his tongue, the surest sign of kind feeling in a dog.

Here’s a review on the subject Matthew did a couple of years ago, entitled “Are mammals moral?”, for the Times (the Times, not the New York Times).

Caturday felid

October 10, 2009 • 6:19 am

by Greg Mayer

I met this pale wraith of a cat in Fredericksburg, Virginia, during the same trip that I visited the National Museum of Natural History.

Cat sleeping on the stone fence at the Sunken Road, Fredericksburg, Va.It’s spectral appearance seemed appropriate, because it was sleeping atop the stone wall along the infamous Sunken Road of the Battle of Fredericksburg. On December 13, 1862, in a series of massed assaults, 30,000 Union troops attempted to cross 400 yards of open space in order to reach the Confederate infantry entrenched behind the wall on which the cat lay. None made it. To the cat’s right, 8,000 Union soldiers fell, dead or wounded; a lesser number of Confederates fell behind the wall (right side of the photo). It was upon seeing this slaughter that Robert E. Lee remarked, “It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.”

Caturday felids: fishing cats

September 26, 2009 • 6:16 am

Fishing cats, Prionailurus viverrinus, are small Asian cats that live mainly near coastal wetlands. Yes, they do catch fish, but they also eat rodents and other things. (Click here to read about them, and make sure to listen to their weird cries by clicking on the sound bar near the top of the page).

Here are some fishing cat kittens earning their name:

More fishing cat kittens from the Cincinnati Zoo:

Caturday felid: kittehs and epistemology

September 19, 2009 • 6:43 am

When I visited Greg Mayer last week, he explained that his cat Peyton was a “philosophical cat.” I naturally asked why, and Greg explained:

Cats are realists

One of the oldest philosophical debates is between realism and idealism. Both come in several flavors, but the basic difference is between their views of the external world: according to realists there is an external world, while according to idealists, there really isn’t an external world beyond our minds. If a tree falls in a forest, and there’s no one around to see it or hear it or smell it, does the tree fall? To a realist, obviously yes: just because an event or object is outside my (or anyone’s) perception has no bearing on whether or not the event occurred or the object exists. Scientists are almost invariably realists of one sort or another. But a much more important question is: what about cats?

My cat, Peyton is a realist. She unambiguously continues to believe in the existence of objects even when she cannot perceive them. I might have inferred this from her ability to get around the house, and to find places and things that are outside her immediate perceptual purrview. (For example, at night, she knows the beds are upstairs, even when she’s downstairs, and thus goes upstairs to sleep.)

But the most striking demonstration of her belief in the continued existence of objects that she can no longer perceive comes when playing catch and chase with her. She will run after, catch in the air, and/or bat around some toy (whether a store-bought toy mouse or a crumpled piece of paper). If I hold the toy out in front of her, she will follow the movement of the object in my hand. If I make a sweeping motion behind my back with the toy, as though I am going to throw the object from my right to my left, say, she will not follow the hand/object around my right side. Rather she darts to the left, anticipating the trajectory of the object, even though she can no longer see the object (or my hand) once it passes behind my back. She does this even if I do not complete the motion and release the object. She clearly continues to believe in the existence of the now-unperceived object; and even more, she is able to estimate where it will end up if it continues the motion it had when last seen. This is clearly an adaptive way to view the world, especially if you depend for food on catching small animals in the underbrush that are trying to run away from you. It’s pretty adaptive for idealist philosophers, too. Here’s an incident from Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

“After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — ‘I refute it thus.'”

And a video clearly demonstrating feline epistemology:

And don’t forget that there’s a golden cat below the fold!

World’s dumbest kitteh

September 16, 2009 • 10:33 am

o.k., I’m putting up a midweek kitteh because I’m cranky and need some laffs.  This is possibly the world’s dumbest cat:  look what it goes through to get a drink!

h/t: Christina Purcell

_________

Update: I have a new theory about this kitteh. It recognizes the stream as something to drink, but doesn’t know how to access it.  In its first try, it sticks its head under the stream to try to lap it up, but fails miserably; however, it does lick up the water falling from its sodden head.  It then figures that that’s the best way to get the water. To support this theory, I adduce the fact that the cat is continuously lapping while its head is under water. It wouldn’t do that if it were just trying to cool off.