Here are the parents of the white jaguar cubs I mentioned earlier.
The mother is a black jaguar named Molly:
The father is a spotted jaguar named Mescal:
The white color is likely the result of a recessive trait both parents were carrying. It just so happened that this pairing produced these cubs.
Assuming that both of these cats are homozygous for their respective colors, this pairing would have normally produced black cubs. The black coloration in jaguars is caused by a dominant allele. In leopards, it is caused by a recessive allele.
See related post:
Thanks. Now how many white leopards have been found in the wild?
Probably just Snow Leopards. I doubt any white mutants that are born in non-snowy regions last long.
Amur leopards aren’t white.
There is some debate about whether snow leopard are related to common leopard. A mitochondrial DNA study showed that they were most closely related to tigers.
Snow leopards are gray with black spots.
I love dogs, and especially Goldens, which is why I check this blog. But I have to say that I think the large cats are the most beautiful animals on the planet.
That is a stunning photo of the spotted jaguar.
I find it fairly implausible that this was an accident. Maybe I’m too cynical.
To stir you suspicion a bit, this zoo recently produced some white tigers.
White tigers are heavily inbred.
I suspected as much. The melanistic jaguar was a red flag. They are going for colour morphs for sure.
I do not understand how the zoo may have knowingly produced these kittens if no was born white before. That I do wonder is whether we will see the same thing with them as with the white tigers. Inbreeding to produce an undesirable appearance in nature just because visitors want to see the “unique” animals.
Well, you can get some weird things happening when you bred animals together. Recessives can pop up when you least expect them.
I’m not a fan of breeding white tigers. I’ve made this clear on other posts on this blog.
But I’ve never heard of white jaguars before.
I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Although, yes, they did breed some white tigers earlier this year.
Since white jaguars are so rare, I have to wonder whether the parents weren’t related. As for white leopards, I don’t ever recall reading of any.
Precisely my point. They white ones do not occur naturally, or they sometimes do, and do not survive.
I wonder if this isn’t a case of a zoo breeding a more ‘desirable’ animal to sell or trade to other zoos. If so, the the zoo breeders while supposedly more scientific than dog breeders are still going for the unusual and breeding to it. as though they were orchids or something..
Isn’t this what caused dog breed types to proliferate and become so inbred to each other, over time, that their gene pools do not have enough distinct individuals in the first place?Less than 100 is considered a path to raise the coefficient of inbreeding upward and upward over time.
I wonder about zoos in general. How much do they contribute to keeping a healthy population going, if not growing?
You can’t brush all zoos with a broad brush. Most of the respected institutions are doing a lot. The smaller ones and the roadside zoos, well, they often aren’t helping at all.
Will they stay white …Or will they darken as they age? Also do the cubs have light spots like the jaguar?
-Jan
Oh, I just answered the spot question when looking at the photo in the previous post…
White jaguars ARE reported to occur naturally and to live as adults. I don’t have documentation of that & have not seen any photos of white jaguars before now but the excellent and well-researched site messybeast.com has this intriguing information:
“Ghost jaguars” are sometimes reported. They have greyish white fur with faint markings on the flanks and have been reported in Paraguay. Albino jaguars with almost invisible markings have also been reported. Albino and partially albino jaguars have been reported from Paraguay. Spanish soldier-naturalist Don Felix de Azara described a jaguar so pale that its rosettes were only visible in certain lights. Rengger described a greyish white skin with faint shades of markings on the belly and flanks, the claws had been white according to the hunter who shot the animal. There is also the possibility of red (erythristic) jaguars although I am not aware of any reports. Leopard-spotted jaguars are reported sporadically from Peruvian rainforest.”
There is nothing abnormal about black jaguars and spotted jaguars breeding; it occurs very frequently in the wild and many color morphs occur naturally.
Melanistic coloration in jaguars is dominant, but I think it may be an incomplete dominant, although I do not know whether that has been confirmed. I have seen clear, well-documented photos of jaguars both captive and wild that range all the way from very beautifully marked, clear rosettes on a bright yellow coat, through intermediate colors that look like a spotted jaguar rolled in soot, to an inky black coat on which it’s hard to see the rosettes.
White jaguars are such an unusual animal that I believe if any of the ancestors of these cubs were known to be white, there would be photos or at least articles about them SOMEWHERE. I’ve searched extensively since I saw this blog and I have not found any. I really doubt that the zoo knew what they had until the litter was born.
Unusual color morphs of all cat species were undoubtedly much more common before the cats themselves became so rare, if only because the gene pools were larger and ranges more geographically contiguous. Most of them probably existed unseen by any human eyes, or were killed as trophies precisely because they were so unusual (that human penchant for novelty again). There are many reports of unusually colored cats being seen or killed, before photography was developed or easily available, Some of them are false, of course, or exaggerated (human nature again). But many are from reliable first-hand witnesses.
Not all white tigers or lions are the result of inbreeding (although nearly all those in captivity are); spontaneous white mutants occur from time to time. Most of them probably do not survive to adulthood, but then, most cubs and kittens of any kind son’t survive to adulthood. Who knows how many may have survived to live and breed in times past, before the wholesale extermination of predators that occurred since the invention of the firearm? Most white or whitish wild cats still have some degree of cryptic coloration: spots, stripes, etc. It’s not inconceivable that the occasional wild white mutant contributed its genes to its species.
[…] a black Jaguar, with her white cub. And here's the Dad. LINK Sign in or Register Now to […]