Variability of coat‐colour and markings system inFelis silvestris

Abstract

Populations of Felis silvestris, the European, Asian and African wildcats, and the domestic cat, are characterized by a variable, genetically controlled, coat-colour and markings system. Samples of the three Italian cats, the European, the Sardinian (belonging to the African group) and the domestic striped tabby were studied for composition and occurrence of coat-colour and markings patterns, as well as for their association with craniometric and splanchnometric categories. Intergroup differences in the coat-colour and markings system were consistent with known metric differences. It was thus possible to distinguish, objectively, the three cats from each other by means of coat patterns, even more clearly than with metric procedures. Distances between taxa, calculated through the relative frequencies of the coat patterns, were fully consistent with those measured from allele frequencies for polymorphic loci. This confirmed the polytypical species status of Felis silvestris.

Toward a genome-wide approach for detecting hybrids: informative SNPs to detect introgression between domestic cats and European wildcats (Felis silvestris)

“…Eighteen putative wildcats were allocated with high posterior probabilities to the domestic cluster and therefore were excluded from the analysis. This was in agreement with previous reports for the species (for example, Oliveira et al, 2008a, b), suggesting that morphological identification of European wildcat and domestic cats might not be as straightforward as some authors advocate (Ragni and Possenti, 1996;Daniels et al, 1998;Kitchener et al, 2005;Puzachenko, 2002;Yamaguchi et al, 2004a, b;Krüger et al, 2009;Platz et al, 2011). A variety of issues could lead to misclassification, including (i) dead animals might have been highly degraded at the time of collection and discrimination of obvious morphological characters might not be possible; (ii) cats belong to past generations of admixture and demarked diagnostic traits are no longer expressed; (iii) samples were noninvasively collected (for example, scats and hairs) and morphological discrimination was not possible; (iv) overlap of morphological features; and (v) conservation biologist and naturalist bias of their morphological evaluation toward the collection of wild specimens.…”

“…Morphologically identified wildcats (Schauenberg, 1969(Schauenberg, , 1970Ragni and Possenti, 1996) were selected from ISPRA (Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale) and CIBIO/UP (Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos, Universidade do Porto) tissue bank collections (F. s. silvestris, n = 130) taking in consideration the natural distribution of European wildcat and the fragmentation of its populations in Europe (Pierpaoli et al, 2003). Sampling was performed across diverse European geographic localities by randomly selecting a few available samples from each location (Table 1; Figure 1).…”

“…Wildcats have been domesticated from African wildcat (F.s. libyca) ancestors 10 600 years ago (Vigne et al, 2012), and since then wild and domesticated forms have remained fully interfertile (Robinson, 1977;Ragni and Possenti, 1996). Hybridization between wildcat subspecies is thought to have initiated when feral domestic cats started their expansion across the range of wildcats (Driscoll et al, 2009), thus occurring perhaps for several thousands of years in some regions.…”

OCCURRENCE OF LUNGWORMS IN EUROPEAN WILDCATS (FELIS SILVESTRIS SILVESTRIS) OF CENTRAL ITALY

“…Standard data concerning sex, estimated age (based on genitalia, proportion and size of body and dentition), general condition, head and body, hind foot and tail lengths, and weight (Ragni and Possenti 1996) were collected. The identification of each individual as F. s. silvestris was based on external coat pattern, and other morphologic characteristics, including intestine and cranial indexes (Ragni and Possenti 1996).…”

“…The identification of each individual as F. s. silvestris was based on external coat pattern, and other morphologic characteristics, including intestine and cranial indexes (Ragni and Possenti 1996). The identity of some wildcats that showed physical patterns compatible with hybrids with domestic cats was confirmed by genetic analysis using autosomal microsatellite markers (Randi et al 2001).…”