What causes Panther Locales?

addicted

Established Member
I was wondering what causes the different Panther Locales, I'm assuming that different food items in different areas would have something to do with it. Also different foliage would cause them to adapt to blend better?

If their environment decides their appearance, will keeping/breeding them in captivity eventually (over several generations) cause the appearance of a certain locale to change?
 
Natural Selection and Geographic Isolation.

By selectively cross breeding, line breeding, etc. you can alter the appearance of these animals over the course of several generations, like anything else.

BUT the current effort is to preserve them as found in nature, primarily to avoid being a part of the cornsake/nascar sect I'd imagine. Thank god.

P.S.
See you have Degus.. one of my favorite animals! I had over a dozen at one point.
 
Quoted From Dr. Gary Ferguson:

"The bottom line about color differences is, of course, I do not know. However, I speculate that in F. pardalis there has been a lot of population bottlenecking throughout the range and that differences among current populations in male coloration has resulted from evolution by genetic drift, i.e. I don’t think there is yet good evidence for adaptive evolutionary causes for the current differences. The more interesting color difference is the ability to rapidly change the entire head and body color during social displays in eastern populations and the more gradual seasonal changes in western populations that only allow rapid color change around the eye turrets and face. Eastern populations probably evolved in heavy rainforest habitat while the western populations probably evolved in more seasonal savannah habitat. In the east it may be more important for males to remain dark-colored most of the time to absorb heat when it is more overcast and only “brighten up” temporarily throughout their daily activity when they court or combat. Who knows? There are some interesting geographic difference in both F. oustaleti and F. lateralis. In both of these species the differences are more among the females than among the males. I think that F. pardalis, F. oustaleti and F. lateralis each represent a collage of yet-undescribed cryptic species that future taxonomists, using DNA data will discover."

http://chamworld.blogspot.com/2008/03/chat-with-dr-gary-w-ferguson.html
 
Genetic drift and/or random chance can influence not only male color possibilities, but also female preference. In many colorful/conspicuous animals, female mate preference can relatively quickly sway male characteristics - so, all the ladies loved the first male Ankaramy that had a chance mutation leading to pink, his genes were amplified in the next generation, more females preferentially mated with the pink males, etc. (A gross oversimplification.)
 
Very interesting info, thanks for your responses. I was just thinking about how the poison dart frogs loose their poisonous protection when kept in captivity because of their diet. That led me to think of the different Panther locales and their cause and purpose, it would be a shame to loose all that flashy colour!

Every characteristic of an animal is it's way of surviving, competing for life. Does anyone think that a captive chameleons ability to possess strong, bright colors, has anything to do with whether or not they've come into contact with other chameleons?

P.S.
See you have Degus.. one of my favorite animals! I had over a dozen at one point.

Yes I have 2 girls, Big Mamma (7 yrs) and Tips (3 yrs) They're very cute and full of attitude. We have 2 cats and 2 dogs, they all like to watch the Degus do their thing but when they get sick of the audience, they throw food and (this is gross) POO!!!:eek:

Here's some pics of the 2 mischief makers:p
big mamma.jpg tips.jpg
 
A lot of the captive-bred panters are being selectively bred for color (i.e. the solid, sky-blue Nosy Be, which generally isn't that solid or that blue in nature), so I don't see them losing their colors any time soon. I know of no indication that chameleon color is dependent on diet (aside from that a malnourished animal will not be showing its best color potential), unlike the pink in flamingos, or the poison in dart frogs.

Of course, most breeders' chameleons are, in fact, exposed to other chameleons...:)
 
Okay, I am just going to throw this out there... Melanocytes/photophores in the dermal tissue seem to be locale specific. I would off the cuff suggest that microenvironment accompanied with bottleneck and selected pressure on breeding play and enormous role. Diet is important but more importantly is the exacting environments role on the physiological response
to surivalability, ie. accompaning fauna/flora/temp/humidity/photo-availability and predator pressure. The huge factor is lightly put-- in-vivo v. invitro... sorry for the analogy but most my work is cell based assays.
 
hmmm... well... i think of it this way... there are black people, brown people, yellow people, white people, pale people, kinda tan people...etc..etc.. makes the world more interesting doesnt it?! lol

i say quit asking and be grateful that there are so many beautiful, different looking animals on this planet.

this world we live on kicks ass!!!
 
i say quit asking and be grateful that there are so many beautiful, different looking animals on this planet.

This sentiment is a great example of the mentality that is wrong with so many people these days. When you quit questioning, you quit learning and you become doomed to failure. Hopefully you weren't being serious, but wow...

On a somewhat related question, can we enable the negative reputation function so we can not only acknowledge good posts but bad ones too? It just isn't fair that posts with an inordinate amount of stupid aren't acknowledged for their contributions as well.

Okay, I am just going to throw this out there... Melanocytes/photophores in the dermal tissue seem to be locale specific. I would off the cuff suggest that microenvironment accompanied with bottleneck and selected pressure on breeding play and enormous role. Diet is important but more importantly is the exacting environments role on the physiological response
to surivalability, ie. accompaning fauna/flora/temp/humidity/photo-availability and predator pressure. The huge factor is lightly put-- in-vivo v. invitro... sorry for the analogy but most my work is cell based assays.

You're definitely on the right track. Locale variations are a complex mix of founder effect, bottleneck and selection, in addition to factors such as diet. Natural barriers limit gene flow between locales and you have situations were individual populations express traits in different frequencies because of various environmental and ecological factors.

Chris
 
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"This sentiment is a great example of the mentality that is wrong with so many people these days. When you quit questioning, you quit learning and you become doomed to failure. Hopefully you weren't being serious, but wow...

On a somewhat related question, can we enable the negative reputation function so we can not only acknowledge good posts but bad ones too? It just isn't fair that posts with an inordinate amount of stupid aren't acknowledged for their contributions as well."

Thanks Chris, you proved my point. :)
 
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Great thread!!!! Very good question for sure. Colorcham lol, I understand the point you were trying to get across. You were just expressing you love for the planet Earth and all the great colors panther chameleons have. :)
 
"This sentiment is a great example of the mentality that is wrong with so many people these days. When you quit questioning, you quit learning and you become doomed to failure. Hopefully you weren't being serious, but wow...

On a somewhat related question, can we enable the negative reputation function so we can not only acknowledge good posts but bad ones too? It just isn't fair that posts with an inordinate amount of stupid aren't acknowledged for their contributions as well."

Thanks Chris, you proved my point. :)

What exactly was your point?
 
nothing dude, this entire time i was goofing off, i wanted to hear a response like the one i got.

the only way we will ever know is for ppl to continue searching for answers.

i am the opposite of what i said before lol. all i do is ask ?'s... its my life story...

you're right, i love planet earth lol, who doesnt?

enjoy the holidays every1~!~~!!
 
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