Yellow-eyed tigers, blue-eyed snow leopards and other felines may owe their unusual eye colors to their common gray-eyed ancestors. The work was published in the preprint catalogue. bioRxiv.
The closest living relatives of cats, including linsangs, hyenas, and genets, have brown eyes, suggesting that the common ancestor of all these groups had brown eyes. But in representatives of the cat family (felines) eyes of other colors, including green, blue, and yellow, appeared millions of years ago.
In a new study, scientists used online images of cats to document the eye color of more than 40 cat species. They then combined this data with information about evolutionary relationships between living and extinct cats and used a statistical model to predict the eye color of the first cats.
It turns out that the ancestors of all cats probably had gray and brown eyes. The color of the animal’s eye is determined by the amount of two pigments: eumelanin and pheomelanin. Browns have more eumelanin, yellows have more pheomelanin, grays have moderate amounts of both, and blues and greens have low levels of both pigments. Scientists suggest that an unknown ancestor of all cats had reduced levels of eumelanin in the eyes due to a random mutation. Later, other mutations resulted in other colors.
Scientists have not found a clear connection between eye color and behavior or habitat. It is therefore possible that eye color is related to the preferences of feline sexual partners, that is, sexual selection.
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