![]() Cliff Bull, the owner of the Craig View Veterinary Clinic, shared a set of images to Facebook which showed him with a different spotted zebra in South Africa:ĭr Cliff Bull was recently asked to dart and work with a Zebra Colt with the same mutation called Pseudo Melanism which is when an animal with a patterned coat has more pattern than usual. In September 2019, shortly after the photographs of Tira went viral, Dr. In 2014, for instance, a similarly spotted zebra was photographed in Botswana. Tira is not the only zebra with this rare condition. National Geographic photographer Frank Liu posted a few additional photographs of this polka-dotted zebra to his Instagram page along with this video: ![]() In the case of Tira and other pseudomelanistic zebras, Barsh believes the melanocytes are all there, but the melanin itself, for some reason, does not manifest correctly as stripes. In zebras, melanocytes are uniformly distributed throughout their skin, so that a shaved zebra would be completely black. “There are a variety of mutations that can disturb the process of melanin synthesis, and in all of those disorders, the melanocytes are believed to be normally distributed, but the melanin they make is abnormal,” Greg Barsh, a geneticist at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, says by email. Specialized cells called melanocytes produce melanin, the red, yellow, brown, or black pigment that determines hair and skin cell color in mammals. This genetic mutation can cause abnormal stripe patterns: Ren Larison, a biologist studying the evolution of zebra stripes at the University of California, Los Angeles, told National Geographic that Tira has a condition called pseudomelanism. Tira told the Kenyan outlet Daily Nation, "At first I thought it was a zebra that had been captured and painted or marked for purposes of migration. The zebra was named Tira after Antony Tira, a tour guide and photographer at the reserve who first spotted the rare animal. This is a genuine photograph of a zebra born at the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya in 2019. But at least we can take solace in the certainty that zebras will always have stripes, right?Įnter a photograph supposedly showing a zebra that was born with "polka dots" instead of stripes: OK, so maybe the animal kingdom still has a few surprises up its sleeves. For instance, bulls always have two horns (except this three-horned cow), puppy tails are found on the animals' rear (except for this " unicorn" puppy), fish can only survive in water (except for this " snakehead" species), and tarantulas absolutely cannot swim (except for the ones that can). There are a few things that we know for certain about the animal kingdom.
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