A mystery of the cat world
As we all know,
Black and white cats are commonly seen in the life.
Like half white and half black.
More white color.
More black color.
But did you realize something?
Why don’t black-and-white cats have light-coloured backs and black bellies?
Japanese Twitter alights over one of the great mysteries of the cat world.
With thousands of retweets, one person, however, presented an interesting theory as to the reason why this occurs. According to @Valquasard, we have to go right to the very early stages of embryonic development to understand the entire process.
With white being the natural, unpigmented shade, as the embryo develops, the cells responsible for pigmentation move downwards from the vicinity of the spinal area.
As these pigmentation cells migrate they encounter inhibitors, causing T-wave patterns that may form speckles or stripes.
For solid colours, the cells responsible for pigmentation will migrate from the back and all the way to the front of the animal. In the case of two-tone piebald cats however, these cells stop before the journey is complete, creating the black-back-white-belly combination we see today.
Sometimes the pigmentation cells move randomly, which explains the reason for the adorable love-heart shape on the chest of current Instagram star Zoe the cat.
As for the reason why pigmentation cells fail to complete their journey of migration to the stomachs of black and white cats, a paper published earlier by researchers at the Univeristies of Bath and Edinburgh suggests a faulty gene reduces cell multiplication rates, meaning there aren’t enough pigment cells to cover the entire skin, leaving the animal with a white belly.
So you see,
It’s not a joke.
Just ran out of ink.
Ran out when just start.
When finishing painting the back.
When coming to the belly.
When reaching the paws.
Last of the last, the two must be outliers.