Tuesday, June 30

Kitties!


8 comments:

Mandula said...

Aaaaawwwwwww!!!! :)))))))) Pls insert a siberian one too, pretty pleeeeeez! :))))

Metamatician said...

=D

They actually ARE Siberians, in their summer colouration. They only get whiter in the winter.

Then there are "albino" tigers which may be Bengals or Siberians (Amurs), but which have a skin condition which makes them pure white with black stripes.

Contrary to popular belief, these are not always Siberians, they can be any of the 4 species of tiger left.

Mandula said...

Oh, thanks a lot. :) Smartiepants. :)

Metamatician said...

Here are some beautiful white tigers that happen to be Indian (Bengal) tigers:

White kitties

As you can see, the species doesn't matter, though Siberians are of course by far the largest cats on earth. It makes me laugh when people talk about who would win between a lion and a tiger. First, they would never natural fight, because their territory doesn't overlap, but secondly, if we're talking adult males, the tiger is about 50% bigger then the lion. The fight would be over in a couple minutes. And if we're talking female, lions females hunt in packs so that might get them an advantage if they could set up an ambush, but a tigress would be just about impossible to ambush in its natural terrain, plus it can swim and is MUCH bigger than a female lion. To make it fair you'd need a small pride of female lions, and then that's not really a 1-on-1 fight anymore!

Anyway, there are also albino lions believe it or not, and they look maybe even more striking because they are pure white without any stripes (of course)! They are much rarer than white tigers of course. Albinos occur in almost every mammalian species, some are just more common than others for whatever genetic reason (inbreeding perhaps).

"Panthers" are also not a true type of big cat, they are just black versions of another big cat, usually a puma (mountain lion), where they are pretty common in North America, a Jaguar in South America, or a Leopard in Africa. If you look closely at the right angle in the sun, you can see their spots, stripes, or whatever the "normal" variety of the cat has for markings - they're just an individual who was born with an overproduction of melotonin, making them black, but most likely they were born into a litter which included normally-colored cats as well. It IS a genetic trait as well though, so you do sometimes see "families of panthers" - even though, again, they could be panthers of any of several different kinds. I never knew that growing up; I thought panthers were an actual species of cat.

Panthers of lions and tigers are almost never seen, and again, no one really knows the reason with any certainty. There are some theories, but I think until more genetic work is done, people are mostly just guessing :)

Mandula said...

:melting: Amazing animals, interesting facts. In my childhood I believed that panther and leopard is the same animal with different colouring, because panther is "párduc" in hungarian, leopard is "leopárd", and I could put these two words together as "leopárduc". :)

Metamatician said...

So you were right as a kid!

Thanks for visiting and commenting :)

Metamatician said...

I think you'd have to nick one from the zoo.

I think by that night you'd be down to one cat, though, not six.

Hans said...

wow, news to me about panthers! thanks and great pictures of tigers! gorgerous white ones too.

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