Kipling And Leopard Spots: "Just-So" Story Or Good Biology?
Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - 10:50
in Psychology & Sociology
Leopards have but tigers have stripes. Why the difference? British Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling, author of "The Jungle Book" and other stories, suggested the difference was because the leopard moved to an environment "full of trees and bushes and stripy, speckly, patchy-blatchy shadows". Was he right or was that a just-so story?Experimental psychologists (nee behavioral ecologists(!)) from the University of Bristol wanted to know and they investigated the flank markings of 35 species of wild cats to understand what drives the evolution of such variation. They captured detailed differences in the visual appearance of the cats by linking them to a mathematical model of pattern development. read more