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KIARAsART — black and white jaguar family
Published: 2012-05-07 20:40:28 +0000 UTC; Views: 1655; Favourites: 15; Downloads: 0
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Description
species: Jaguar (Panthera onca)Status: near threatened
distinguish it from the leopard: .... by its rather fatty, compact muscular body and a roundish head. Its fur is clearly separated in white and yellow, leopards colors are more clouded into each other. -- and of course their habitat! Leopards live in Africa, Jaguars live in the jungle of the Amazons. They do not occur in vice versa countries and habitats.
black panther: It's only a black version of the normal jaguar. Black versions of animals are caused by melanism (since melanin is the pigment that makes your, mine, your pets and the leopards back fur and hair black or dark brown)
black panther 2: leopards as well are called black panther, as these big cats as well do occur quite frequently in a black variant.
White jaguars? [link]
- As in any other animal leucism can occur. Leucism is a dilution of the fur color by whitening it. You know it from white horses, cats, rats, or any pet with a partial white pattern, like black & white patterned ponys. You may as well know it from white tigers, which have diluted orange and gray stripes.
The two jaguar babies in my photos are right now called to be the only 2 white jaguars to exist. - They where nearly totally white when born: [link]
However, don't expect them to be all white anymore. They have a diluted orange fur color.
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Comments: 6
So was the black Jaguar their mother? That's really interesting as I always thought the two pigment disorders were on opposite sides of the spectrum, however something equally odd happened recently in India as well with luecisstic tiger cubs! [link]
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Ah sorry, I forgot to answer your first question. Yes, the black jaguar is their mother. The father was of a normal orange color (in a separate cage).
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Thanks for the link. I had seen that news some time age already, though. It's really interesting. Thanks to you I googeled another time and found [link] another footage of a melanistic tiger. However, it seems like the melanistic tiger (at least the one in my link) rather appears (see text) as if its stripes where expressed broader than normal. That would be like in the genetic mutation of the king cheetah, which's spots are larger and melted together.
The reason for all 3 cases might be a too high inbreeding ratio.
The white tigers in the zoo in India might (like most white tigers in zoos) be bread with close relatives to make the recessive white gene coming to display.
The black orange tiger in the Indian reserve might be caused by the (hypothetical) small number of individuals living in that reserve. It's often the case that reserves are far away from each other, hindering the populations in different reserves to exchange their genes, resulting in inbreeding.
The king cheetah mutation might as well be existing due to that the species underwent a genetic bottleneck* during the last ice age. Making all Cheetahs so close related that organs will not be rejected by any another cheetah receiving it. (Sorry, but I don't remember where I had this info from)
*A genetic bottleneck is when individual numbers are reduced a lot, and the species recovers (in numbers) to be abundant egain afterwards. A bottleneck hence results in inbreeding and thus all animals the new abundant number of the species is made of, close relatives. Which in turn increases the probability of DNA mutations becoming visible in the phenotype.
Unfortunately I don't have info which genes need to be changed to get either leucistic or melanized phenotypes. But for the tiger I would assume that the DNA strand for either is coded on another gene; as leucism must be a mutation of the orange background color, and melanism of the gene that determines the broadness of the stripes. - But that's only my hypothesis on that puzzle.
Sorry for the long text, but I am really interested in these occurrences as well
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As am I, very interested in them! 
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Oh thank you! I missed that indeed!
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