Pallas's cat subspecies
Please help me understand the external differences between the three varieties of Pallas's cat. I didn’t really understand much from the descriptions online.
And I’m also curious: in zoos, are these subspecies kept apart when mating, or is this not taken into account when pairing them up?
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From my understanding, there are 3 subspecies mentioned on the site: Otocolobus manul manul (Zelenogorsk, Lev, etc.), Otocolobus manul nigripectus (Sun Sanlang, Sun Daniang, etc.) and Otocolobus manul ferrugineus (Nano, Mano).
I think nigipectus pallases have darker fur (especially in the chest area) compared to manul pallases and ferrugineus pallases are the orange colour variant.
There appears to be hybridization between the subspecies in zoos: Bor/Bol is probably the most famous example: His mother Tabby was a nigripectus pallas and his dad Oscar a manul pallas.
grushalevson, I still never figured out nigripectus.
The word itself means “black-chested.”
Wikipedia says: “It is characterized by a grayish coat, which in winter takes on a distinct silvery-gray hue. The black stripes are more pronounced.”
But isn’t a grayish coat characteristic of the subspecies manul manul?
Take Grusha, for example:
We can see both a dark chest and bright stripes. So is he nigriectus?
And then there’s Tabby:
She is listed as nigripectus, but in terms of coloration she is completely indistinguishable from other gray manuls.
And then there’s Pepe:
She is quite dark, which means that, according to the description, she too should be nigripectus. But she is manul manul.
anna_yu, Grusha is partially nigripectus through his maternal grandma Tabby but its classified as manul because that's a larger percentage of his ancestry.
The comparison of Tabby being fairly light but belonging to the nigripectus subspecies and Pepe being quite dark but in the manul subspecies is really interesting. I think in both cases, their subspecies classification is inference from the country of origin of their ancestors: Tabby's ancestors are from China/Tibet where the nigiripectus subspecies is native while Pepe's ancestors are from Russia where the manul subspecies is native.
The colouration in the photos might also be impacted by camera settings because there are photos of Tabby where she looks darker and photos of Pepe where she looks lighter.
EDIT: I corrected "manul species" to "manul subspecies"
As I understand it, all manuls belong to one species: otocolobus manul. Within a single species, animals freely interbreed and produce fertile offspring, regardless of which subspecies the parents belonged to. Problems begin beyond the species level: for example, a horse can be crossed with a donkey, but the offspring will be sterile, not fertile.
Manuls have 2 or 3 subspecies, and they are distinguished according to their habitat range.
Otocolobus manul nigripectus is native to Tibet; in coloration they are darker, and there are probably other differences that are not obvious to a non-specialist.
Otocolobus manul manul are the ones we know best; this is the main population living in Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and the Altai Mountains in Russia. It so happens that zoos also mainly house manul manul. Nigripectus are less represented; for some reason, the Chinese are not too concerned with conserving manuls and breeding them in zoos, because it seems that all the Tibetan manuls living there ended up in zoos as lost or abandoned, emaciated kittens. In other words, they are rescued when human intervention and help are indispensable, but the zoo population is not maintained.
Nigripectus and manul manul have often been mixed; one example is the large, successful manul family from all the Japanese zoos, whose ancestors included both.
And there is also the subspecies otocolobus manul ferrugineus, native to the westernmost regions of manul territory: Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia. But scientists tend to believe that the redheads are not a subspecies at all, but the very same manul manul, only with a reddish tint predominating in the fur: this helps them camouflage among the sun-scorched plateaus. The Yerevan trio are apparently the only zoo manuls at present that were born in Iran.