Black Panther
A black panther or black panther is a leopard ( Panthera pardus ) or jaguar (Panthera onca ) whose fur has a continuous black color instead of the usual black rosettes on a gold-yellow background. Under favorable light conditions, the actually spotted coat can still be seen. These panthers are therefore not a species of their own, but a form of melanism .
In the leopards, the black color is caused by inheriting a recessive gene . The recessive gene can also be present in the normal-colored, as it is suppressed by the dominant gene, which is responsible for the yellow color, and thus has no influence on the coat color. The recessive gene can be passed on by normal-colored animals, so that black leopards can be present in a litter, provided that both normal-colored parents are carriers of the recessive gene responsible for the black coloration.
In contrast to the leopard, the gene responsible for the black coloration is dominant in the jaguar, so that black young animals can already appear if only one parent animal has the gene. This also means that normal-colored young animals can arise if the parents are black, but both parents carry the recessive gene for the patterned coloring.
Coat colors are caused by the different distribution of melanins in the coat, which is given off by the melanocytes (pigment cells) to the coat hair. A distinction is made between black eumelanin , which gives the hair a brownish to blackish color, and pheomelanin , which gives the fur a yellowish to reddish brown color, with the dye melanin . The dominant gene in the jaguar and the recessive gene in the leopard cause a higher production of eumelanin.
Black flies occur particularly in Southeast Asian subspecies of the leopard such as the Java leopard . It is therefore also assumed that numerous animals that are kept in zoos as black panthers without subspecies status are likely to be representatives of the rare Java leopard.
There are also black leopards in Africa. Black leopards were filmed in the Kenyan Aberdare National Park as part of the BBC series Wildes Afrika (first broadcast in 2001) .
A well-known fictional black panther is Bagheera from Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book.
Web links
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- ↑ Berlin Jaguardrillinge: Flauschfaucher. on: spiegel.de
- ↑ Schwarzer Panther on big-cats.org ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ maya-culture.de ( Memento of the original from September 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ jaguare.de
- ↑ Spartaco Gippoliti, Erik Meijaard: Taxonomic uniqueness of the Javan leopard; an opportunity for zoos to save it. In: Contributions to Zoology. 76 (1), 2007, pp. 55-58.
- ↑ BBC Two - Wild Africa, Mountains, Black leopard. Retrieved February 15, 2019 (UK English).
