Mapping black panthers: Macroecological modeling of melanism in leopards (Panthera pardus)
“…Recent analyses have indicated that melanism can reach very high frequencies in some leopard populations (e.g., Southeast Asia reported by [14]). In addition, there have been confirmed reports of melanistic leopards in India, Abyssinia, and Ethiopian Highlands, Java and Malaysia, Aberdare Mount Kenya, Highlands of Nepal, as well as a doubtful occurrence in South Africa [19,26,28,54]. These observations are restricted to some areas and may support the hypothesis that melanism can provide an adaptive advantage in certain ecological conditions [5,18].…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
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“…Recent analyses have indicated that melanism can reach very high frequencies in some leopard populations (e.g., Southeast Asia reported by [14]). In addition, there have been confirmed reports of melanistic leopards in India, Abyssinia, and Ethiopian Highlands, Java and Malaysia, Aberdare Mount Kenya, Highlands of Nepal, as well as a doubtful occurrence in South Africa [19,26,28,54]. These observations are restricted to some areas and may support the hypothesis that melanism can provide an adaptive advantage in certain ecological conditions [5,18].…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
“…In other hand, melanism in jaguars is inherited as a dominant trait, caused by a 15-base-pair deletion in the MC1R gene that leads to a "gain of function" mutation favoring the production of dark melanin (eumelanin) in the background regions of the coat [11,22]. Although the trait has been well known in these species for many years and easily identifiable in nature (e.g., [15,17,[23][24][25][26]), its geographic distributions, as well as the environmental factors that may influence its persistence in natural populations, are being discovered recently [26][27][28][29].…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
“…Observations of black leopards ( Panthera pardus ) primarily come from Southeast Asia, with few observations in Africa (da Silva et al, ; Sunquist & Sunquist, ). In the most extreme case, leopards in Peninsular Malaysia show melanism nearly to fixation in the population (Kawanishi et al, ).…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
“…Melanism in leopards is associated with a mutation to the Agouti Signaling Protein gene that causes a loss of the normal function (Eizirik et al, ; Schneider et al, ) and is recessive in its inheritance (Robinson, ). The adaptive significance of melanism is not clearly understood, but most hypotheses suggest environment as a potential driver (Eizirik et al, ; Ortolani & Caro, ), with higher frequencies of black leopards found in tropical and humid environments (da Silva et al, ).…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
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