American scientists from Harvard University have traced the history of eye color evolution in the cat family back to their common ancestor that roamed the Earth more than 30 million years ago. The study was published in the scientific journal magazine iScience.
Modern large and small cats have a wide range of irises. For example, cheetahs have golden eyes, snow leopards have blue eyes, and leopards have green eyes.
In the new study, the team identified and classified different eye colors in 52 feline taxa.
The researchers then began reconstructing the cat ancestor’s eye hues.
They found that the first pre-cat lineages (the ancestors of cats and their closest relatives, the linsangs) had only brown eyes. However, after the linsang species split, gray-eyed cats appeared as well as brown-eyed cats.
“This was probably due to a genetic mutation that sharply reduced the pigment content in the eyes,” the paper’s authors said.
The color-determining pigment melanin can exist in two forms: brown eumelanin and yellow pheomelanin.
To change from a brown eye to a gray eye, a decrease in eumelanin will be required. This reduction will cause the eye to be neither completely brown nor completely gray, but brownish-grey, as the researchers found.
Gray-eyed cats later paved the way for the colors green, yellow and blue, creating a link between brown eyes and the new colors.
The researchers found no significant relationship between activity pattern, zoogeographic region, habitat, and eye color uniformity, leaving open the question of the adaptive advantage of having different eye colors.
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Source: Gazeta
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