Natural History

This "strawberry" leopard appears to be unable to produce black pigment. Its nose and lips, as well as the skin around its eyes, appear to be reddish brown.

From io9.com:

You’re looking at the only known example of what conservationists are calling a strawberry colored African leopard. The big, pink-hued cat — which makes its home at South Africa’s Madikwe Game Reserve — is affected by erythrism, a poorly understood genetic condition that causes him to either overproduce red pigments or underproduce dark pigments in his coat.

“It’s really rare,” explained Luke Hunter, president of the wild cat-conservation group Panthera, whom Madikwe officials consulted with about the cat’s unusual coloration. “I don’t know of another credible example in leopards.”

According to National Geographic, erythrism is unusual in [wild] carnivores, which makes sense if you think about it — pinkish fur, after all, is probably not the most ideal form of camouflage for animals whose predatory techniques rely on stealth. But this particular leopard appears to be doing fine. “He’s obviously a successful animal,” said Hunter.

This is the first one that has been seen in recent times. However, Messybeast.com, a great resource for information about just about anything relating to unusual animals, has several images of taxidermies of what appear to be red leopards with a similar mutation, though much darker red in color. (There are some really interesting morphs on that page. The “cobweb panther” looks like a melanstic leopard with ich!)

There is some suggestion that these dark red leopards are faded black leopards, which is a possibility.  Spots can still be seen on black leopards, so exact chemical make up of the fur on the spots is different from the fur that comprises the background.

So it is possible that these red leopards are faded black ones. The fading could have happened due to age or the treatments used to preserve the skin.

I am not sure if anyone has examined these mahogany red leopards to see what they exactly are or were.  DNA could be extracted from at least some of these taxidermies. And then we could find out if they were black leopards or not.

This strawberry or red coloration is likely a recessive trait, and this should be of concern to leopard conservationists.

Several years ago, a brown and white giant panda was discovered in the Qinling Mountains.

It is generally pretty uncommon for very rare recessive traits to be expressed in the wild.

It’s just the nature of recessive traits. They can only be expressed when they are homozygous, and in nature, there is usually enough mixing of genes to keep recessives  diluted in a population.

When the brown panda was discovered, there became lots and lots of worries about inbreeding the Qinling Mountain pandads, which are the more stressed and fragmented of the two populations of giant pandas. Habitat fragmentation may mean that these pandas are becoming inbred, and a sign of that inbreeding is the sudden appearance of unusual recessive traits that are normally hidden.

We don’t typically think of common leopards as being endangered at all.

They are currently the most widespread of the big cats, and range from South Africa all the way to the Russian Far East. They are currently extirpated from much of North Africa and the Middle East, and there is an unusual isolated population of leopards on Java, which are somewhat smaller than normal common leopards.

However, genes do not flow across Asia and Africa as they once did.

As I noted earlier, leopards no longer exist in most of the Middle East and North Africa. Only isolated populations still exist.

And even within the core of leopard range in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the habitat is greatly fragmented.

Leopards and lions no longer cast genes across vast areas. Very often, they are left in smaller preserves, where it is very easy for genetic bottlenecks to form. Dominant males, which rule prides in lions and overlapping territories of females in leopards, are not overthrown on a regular basis, making it more and more likely for a male to wind up mating with his daughters. New blood in the form of enterprising young males no longer enters the gene pool.

Madikwe is actually trying to solve some of these problems. There is a current move to create a corridor between it and Pilanesberg National Park.

This corridor would allow more of a gene flow to exist between populations of lions and leopards, and it would be a great asset to genetic sustainability of wildlife in this region.

This is more and more of a problem than one might expect.  Leopards are considered “near threatened” by IUCN, and lions are considered “vulnerable,” a much more serious distinction.  If lions and leopards cannot exchange genes over a larger area, the better for both species. Neither has experienced much inbreeding in their natural history, and thus, they have no had an opportunity to experience much purging or evolve any inbreeding tolerance.

Unusually colored wild animals often attract attention, but they can be indicative of more serious problems.

This cat seems to be doing fine.

Let’s just hope the population in which he lives will continue to thrive.

***

I should note that there are situations in which recessives can exist at much higher levels than one might normally expect.

One of these traits has a certain selective advantage, it will appear much more frequently than normal recessives.

Among these is melanism in leopards.

Melanistic leopards are most common in jungle or rainforest environments — particularly in Southeast Asia– where it may confer an advantage. A black cat can easily hide the shadows of the night, and because leopards are the consummate ambush predators, this might explain why there are so many black leopards– even though this is a recessive trait.

There is some suggestion now in the literature that melanism may also enhance the immune system.

But if recessives do not confer any advantage, they normally aren’t very common at all.