Have you ever wondered why green cats don’t exist after millions of years of evolution? Shouldn’t this color be more adaptive to various environments? 🐱🟩 #Evolution #GreenCats #Adaptation
The Mystery of Green Cats
Evolutionary Adaptations
Could green fur provide an advantage to felines in the wild?
Environmental Factors
Are there specific reasons why green cats haven’t emerged naturally?
Let’s delve into the fascinating world of feline evolution and explore why green cats remain a curiosity rather than a reality. 🌿 #CuriousCats #FelineEvolution #GreenFurMystery
I was just looking at my pet cat and asked him why he wasn’t green, and he just went on licking his ass, so he’s not much help. Figured I’d ask yall
Red pigments are common in mammals, whereas green ones aren’t.
But a tiger’s typical prey animals are dichromats, making them effectively completely red-green colourblind. So an orange tiger blends into the foliage from their perspective.
It’s one of those “eh, good enough” solutions where evolution went down the path of the first easiest thing that worked rather than the truly robust answer.
There are only two types of pigments that have ever evolved in fur. One is very dark brown, and one is reddish. This gives a spectrum of shades of black, brown, blond, orange, and reddish hair. It’s impossible for these colors to mix to green, and there hasn’t been any sort of mutation in a mammal that produces a green-like pigment.
It’s also worth noting that the ability to see orange and red is limited to only primates in the mammal family. Every other mammal only has 2 cones, so orange and red would just be greenish to them, anyway. Think of a red-green colorblind person trying to see a tiger in a dense jungle. Green and black just look like leaves casting shadows. Primates, and by extension humans, just don’t have that weakness because we have a third cone, giving us full color vision.
Well, one interesting thing to note is that there are no mammals that have green fur. The closest we’ve got are sloths that sometimes have algae growing on them. So it seems that no mammal as had the right mutation to produce a green pigment
Now tigers being orange is actually much better camouflage than you think it might be. Most mammals are dichromats, meaning they only have two types of color receptor in their eyes. Humans, on the other hand, are trichromats with three types of receptor. Most mammals are essentially red-green colorblind compared to humans. That is, they cannot tell apart red, green, and yellow.
Try putting a picture of a tiger into a colorblind filter [like this](https://pilestone.com/pages/color-blindness-simulator-1) (select protanopia as the type of colorblindness) to get an idea.
Now that I’m thinking about it, green is quite rare on mammals.
We don’t exactly know. Pretty much all mammal pigmentation are derived from variants of a chemical called melanin (it gives us our skin and hair colours). Melanin produces a range of blacks, browns, red and yellows, which is why pretty much all mammals are dark or have earthy colouring.
It seems that mammals either lost the ability to produce more vibrant pigments very early in our evolutionary history or separated from reptiles before it emerged in them. It does seem a bit strange that green wasn’t an evolutionarily favoured as camouflage. That said, bark, fallen leaves, dying plants, mud, sand, dust and pretty large share of stones are brownish. Darkness and shadow are, well, dark. So, being earthy isn’t a bad camouflage strategy for a pretty broad range of terrestrial environments. I guess melanin did the job well enough for cats.
Orange = green for herbivores
Stripes are the most effective camouflage.
Why would green increase survival?
Ok, Sam I Am.
Also, orange color with stripes basically how sunlight looks along with the shadow of a few leaves.
Green cats are just that good at hiding.
But, yes, the breeding program got to good enough and went wide there.
They dont need to they have been able to enslave humans for thousands of years. They are already safe from extinction
As above mentioned most of their prey animals can’t see reds and oranges, also Humans have (as compared to many other animals) incredibly advanced eyes for seeing fine detail and color.
Tiger has stipe and blend in with jungle environment just fine
Are there even any green mammals?
Part of it comes down to the fact that evolution doesn’t decide how it mutates. Evolution is the result of *random* genetic abnormalities. Green might be the “best” color overall, but if genetic mutations don’t produce enough green variants to “beat” the competition, it doesn’t stick around.
A tiger can absolutely disappear into a pattern of sunshine, shadow, and jungle. There’s a very brightly colored red and white paint horse I know, think emergency equipment bright. I thought she was missing, I was unable to spot her in her paddock standing still in the partial shade of a tree. These colorations evolved and work, even when you think another color could work better. Try to observe these animals in their environment, and see.
Evolution is not about creatures becoming the absolutely most perfect organisms they can possibly be within their environment. It’s about organisms becoming good enough to survive.
Not being green was never a disadvantage for cats that got them killed en masse, so any cat that may have carried a mutation for green fur did not get the chance to dominate the gene pool with only their offspring surviving and other colored cats getting killed before they could reproduce.
If we are talking domestic cats evolution knew the birds needed some chance to escape.
Most animals can’t really see full-spectrum color because they don’t need to. So tigers, etc., don’t really need to be green to be unseen.
There’s some people mentioning deer color-vision, there’s some people mentioning that’s not quite how evolution works. Both of those are true and important, but there’s a much simpler answer to this: go look at a picture of a tiger or a cat hiding. You’ll see immediately why they aren’t green. Tigers are only traffic-cone orange in children’s picture books, and forests, meadows, and other natural environments are not really green like a golf course. They are mostly brown and yellow.
Domesticated cats are somewhat “custom” but also the variety of colors do match the environment. Ever see film of Africa, for example? It’s hardly green grass.
We had a very white female kitty…. Friends told us we didn’t have to worry about her bringing home….. Prey.
Boy, were they wrong. She was a stone killer.
Well, for one thing many animals have limited color vision and the depth of colors we see can appear to be similar shades of grey to a majority of critters. I’m going to go ahead and assume you’ve never seen the bright orange hunting vests that people wear, because when you don’t see the full range of colors some of them can look identical (like green and orange, as a random example…)
Assuming this is in fact a serious question, if there had been an evolutionary advantage to being green, then more creatures would be, but the simple fact of the matter is that humans, among a few other select groups of animals have exceptional vision compared to most, especially prey animals. So most creatures don’t see as clearly, or with as much rich color detail as we do.
Also that assumes that evolution is selecting for traits that YOU think would be beneficial, but that’s not how it works. Things evolve. Slowly over time, random replicators selected by non random means and the things that help them survive and successfully produce a new generation can be strange, counterintuitive, or just plain crazy to us but we think in miniscule time scales. It’s like you’re looking at a single piece of a 5000 PC puzzle and wondering why it doesn’t look right…. It doesn’t look right because you’re literally incapable of seeing the whole picture.
How can we be sure it didnt, though?
Have you ever seen an orange cat hiding in a green bush while hunting birds? We see red/orange, the birds don’t.
Roars in Battle Cat.
Why aren’t you green?
This is why.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7078823/Tigers-orange-confuse-prey-green-experts-say.html
Evolution doesn’t say that the best-suited traits will appear. It says that out of those that appear, the best-suited ones will propagate more.
It has nothing to do with what appears, only with what stays/spreads.
That’s how tricky mother nature is, there’s no green cats yet they’re still camouflage in their natural environments
A lot of the stuff they eat can’t see red so they’re going to look green anyhow.
Fun fact Tigers are green to their prey.
Animals aren’t sensitive to the same “visible light spectrum” that we are. I use quotes because it’s really just the *human* visible light spectrum
Animals don’t see color like humans do.
Because cats environments are usually grassy areas like fields not lawns.
Most animals can’t see color the way humans do. Their eyesight is entirely different. Its why good hunting cammo is shades of orange black and grey. What is needed for hiding for prey or ambush predators is patterns that hide their shiloette.
Same reason why chickens didn’t lose weight and grow bigger wings. It’s all still a theory.
Most animals they prey on cannot see orange.
No
It’s basically a habitat evolution. Animals like reptiles and avians are more amongst foliage and many have green colouring, but mammals evolved amongst more earthy colours.
Cat’s are nocturnal hunters so that wouldn’t be of any benefit.
Prey species don’t see color. Well most of them
Evolution does not create perfection. It creates “good enough”
Tigers don’t blend in with their environment for human eyes. But they do for their prey.
Tigers are orange to confuse their prey who see them as green https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7078823/Tigers-orange-confuse-prey-green-experts-say.html?ito=native_share_article-nativemenubutton