A Michael Broad Blog
It is no surprise to me and perhaps others that both domestic dogs and cats have smaller brains than their wild cousins from whom they have descended: the grey wolf for dogs and the Eurasian wildcat for cats. The reason is obvious: domestication, which has removed the challenges for survival and the lesser need …
Introduction: the title refers to the feline meow. It is a request sound – “I’d like some food please”. The cat makes other sounds which are used in interactions between adult cats such as the agonistic hiss and growl. It is the meow which is the standard vocalisation of the domestic cat and it …
The similarity of all cat species from the modest domestic cat to the massive Siberian tiger, in terms of their anatomy and behaviour, indicates that through eons of evolution, this species of predator has been perfected. There is no more work for evolution to do. This is the thought of an evolutionary biologist, Anjali …
I am going to challenge the general consensus constantly repeated on the internet in hundreds of thousands of articles that domestic cats can get stuck up trees because they don’t have the ability to get down. Does that sound strange to you? How did nature over millions of years of Darwinian evolution fail so …
No. Small wild cat species do not hibernate. You may know that animal hibernation evolved to improve the survival of certain species by conserving energy through lowering their basal metabolic rate in response to a lack of resources during the winter months. The “basal metabolic rate” means the body’s minimum energy consumption necessary to …
James Sanderson and Patrick Watson in their book Small Wild Cats make what I think is a very interesting suggestion or theory as to why all members of the Felidae family i.e. all cats, are hyper-carnivores meaning that they can only eat meat and that their digestive systems and anatomy have evolved over millions …
Natural selection and selection pressures over millions of years of evolution is the reason why the Andean mountain cat has a predominantly grey coat while the sand cat has a sandy-coloured, even coat. These small wild cats illustrate how evolution works. The process is not about cats consciously adapting to the habitat where they …
Pallas’s cat (Latin, scientific name: Otocolobus manul) is considered to have the thickest coat of all the cat species. The obvious conclusion is that this small and charming-looking wild cat species needs a thick coat because they live in a very cold and harsh habitat. I’m told that the coat is so dense that …
