How many people can refuse a kitten that rolls over its belly, sticks out its meat pads, and squints its eyes? As one of the most fascinating animals for humans, cats have almost occupied people's lives. But in addition to petting the cat, have you ever wondered where the cat in your arms originated and how it was domesticated? Or, conversely, as plausible, how did they domesticate people?
The latest study shows that the earliest domestic cats were domesticated by African wild cats about 10,000 years ago, and common Chinese cats such as large oranges, three flowers, small blacks, and a whites are also descendants of African wild cats.
Stringing together this study is the most mysterious wildcat on earth, the desert cat.
They look like elves. The black pupils are embedded in the blue eyes, and a tuft of hair protrudes from the tip of the cat's ear, as if growing a pair of horns, glowing orange-red in the sun. It has gray-brown to brownish-red fur and has 3-5 black rings at the end of its soft tail. It lives only in a relatively small area of the Tibetan Plateau.
Desert cats. (Xiong Jiji/Photo)
Little is known about it. Of the approximately 40 species of cats in the world, desert cats are found only in China. The 2009 Handbook of Chinese Mammals in the Wild described it as "one of the least known cats."
In the "two sessions" in 2021, the desert cat briefly "went out of the circle" once, was shown photos by the Qinghai delegation, and was widely reported. Although it is a national key protected animal, the current research on desert cats is far from enough, and there are still many mysteries to be solved.
<h3>The most mysterious cat on earth</h3>
The technical term "wild cat" lives independently in the wild and is not a stray domestic cat. Similar to tigers, leopards, and lions, feral cats are independent cat species. Tigers are divided into subspecies such as Siberian tiger and South China tiger, and wildcats also include subspecies such as African wildcats, Asian wildcats, and European wildcats.
From the outside, desert cats are far from them. Song Dazhao, founder and chairman of china's wild cat protection agency "Cat Alliance CFCA", sucks countless cats, and he describes the difference between the two: African wildcats are thin and thin, with shallow stripes, and the main habitat is open grassland and bushland; European wildcats have long hair, strong posture, and stripes on their bodies, mainly living in the forest areas of Europe; Asian wildcats are light yellow background, dotted with small black spots, preferring the flat and dry desert Gobi.
Source: Cat Alliance (Leung Shu-yee/Photo)
Desert cats are also wild cats, and what is the relationship with these three types of wild cats, once there was no answer. Desert cats are so mysterious, how ignorant do humans have about desert cats? Even the origin of its name is a misunderstanding.
In 1892, the French taxonomist Mirne Edwards saw two desert cat furs at the Natural History Museum in Paris, which they had acquired from western Sichuan three years earlier, and the gray-brown fur mistook him for a feline living in the desert, and then he published an article describing and naming it, and the name "Desert Cat" (Felisbieti) was passed down.
The desert cat does not exist in the desert. In the eastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the northwestern plateau of Sichuan, the western part of Gansu, and in the Sanjiangyuan, Hengduan Mountains, and Qilian Mountains, there are continuous sighting records of desert cats. It prefers to be active in shallow mountainous areas with alpine meadows, shrublands and human-reclaimed farmland.
The Desert Cat's current English name (theChinesemountaincat) literally translates to "Chinese Bobcat", while herders on the Tibetan Plateau call it "Grass Cat". Both names seem more appropriate than "desert cats."
Although the fur of the desert cat entered the museum more than a hundred years ago, the true appearance of the wild desert cat was not photographed by humans until 2007. In that year, Yin Yufeng, a student at Peking University, prepared his master's thesis to explore the distribution of desert cats. In Hongyuan County, Aba Prefecture, he used a rare infrared camera to take the world's first photo of a wild desert cat: a nocturnal desert cat passing through the cave entrance, revealing a pointed side face and a thin half-cut body, the rest of which was covered by weeds taller than it.
Today, more than a decade later, the popularity of desert cats has increased significantly, also stemming from the popularity of infrared cameras. At the end of 2019, commissioned by the Qilian Mountain National Park Qinghai Provincial Administration and Peking University, Liu Yanlin, director of scientific research and protection of Maomeng, led a team to start a desert cat survey in Qilian Mountain. The photo that was widely circulated in the "two sessions" was written by Liu Yanlin's team.
In August 2020, infrared cameras deployed in the Qinghai area of Qilian Mountain National Park captured the same frame of desert cats. (Xinhua News Agency, Qilian Mountain National Park, Qinghai Provincial Administration)
<h3>Mysterious but not cold</h3>
There are more video data, the desert cat has unloaded its mysteriousness, and the temperament has been found to be similar to that of domestic cats. "There was no sense of wildlife at all. Even replacing the scene in the wild with a living room with a retouching software will think that this is a few pet cats. Han Xuesong laughed. In 2018, Han Xuesong, then coordinator of the Sanjiangyuan Wetland Project of the Shanshui Nature Conservation Center, accidentally found the figure of a desert cat in Qinghai Province, but the herders in Sanjiangyuan were not impressed, "They feel that it is not unusual, there is nothing to talk about, it is better to talk about Tibetan foxes, red foxes, wolves and other animals." ”
Even desert cats like toys that are similar to domestic cats. Han Xuesong once pondered how to collect a genetic sample of a desert cat, so he found a long cotton swab with a sponge at the top, "Domestic cats like to play with this stick-shaped, hairy thing when they see it." He put a few sticks in the hole with the mentality of trying, but he did not expect that when he went again the next day, several cotton swabs had already been bitten.
After dealing with the desert cat, Liu Yanlin no longer felt that it was cold. He observed that they not only ate their own prey, but also ate some dead cattle and sheep, and also ate grass like domestic cats. Desert cats like to eat highland mole rats that move underground and specialize in plants. At the beginning of June, the field has just been planted with green barley and rapeseed, the soil that has just been turned over is very soft, and the desert cat crawls on the field ridge, up its ears to listen carefully to the footsteps of the weasel rustling under its feet.
Han Cedar spent 4 months with an infrared camera to follow a desert cat family, obtained more than 7,000 photos and nearly 3,000 videos, and systematically recorded the breeding process of desert cats for the first time.
The family consists of a big cat and two kittens. They take the burrow on the grassland as their home, the kitten hides in the cave, returns from hunting, and the mother of the plateau pika returns to the mouth of the cave, making a "grunting" sound similar to that of the domestic cat when it steps on the milk, and the kitten hears the call, runs out to play with the food, and plays enough to return to the cave to enjoy the food. On a clear afternoon, kittens sometimes lie lazily at the mouth of the cave to bask in the sun, sometimes curiously exploring the world, while their mothers are on guard.
The cave where the desert cat lives is actually a wild animal "apartment". Liu Yanlin observed that the cave has different inhabitants in different seasons. "In the winter it's a desert cat, in the spring foxes are used to breed their cubs, and in the summer the marmots live there."
<h3>The desert cat is not the ancestor of the Chinese cat</h3>
Where did the Chinese cat come from? Researchers' research on desert cats found some answers.
There are two hypotheses about the origin of the Chinese cat – single origin and multiple origin. The single origin hypothesis holds that domestic cats all over the world are domesticated from African wildcats. Previous genetic studies have shown that about 10,000 years ago, in the fertile crescent zone from West Asia to North Africa, African wildcats first entered the homes of ancients, and were gradually domesticated to become human companions - domestic cats, and then spread to all parts of the world. However, previous studies have not covered samples of domestic cats in East Asia, making the origin of Chinese cats questionable.
The multi-origin hypothesis holds that Chinese cats are not descendants of African wildcats, and that native Chinese wildcats, such as desert cats, have participated in the domestication of local domestic cats. "As an ancient civilization with a long history, China is the origin center of many animal and plant domestications." Luo Shujin, a professor at Peking University's School of Life Sciences, said.
Under the multi-origin hypothesis, desert cats are considered to be of different origins from African wildcats because of their different appearances. Humans don't know whether the desert cat should be a separate cat species like the snow leopard, or a subspecies of the wild cat. Morphologically, the desert cat's unique appearance and habitat can support its status as an independent species, but the most convincing research from the genetic level has been blank.
In 2014, an animal archaeological study found that cat bones had been excavated from the Yangshao Cultural Site in Hua County, Shaanxi Province (about 7,000 to 5,000 years ago), and isotopic analysis showed that cats and humans also used millet as food, reflecting that cats and humans have a relatively stable habitat relationship, but it is not yet certain whether cats have been completely domesticated. This further aroused the curiosity of Luo Shujin and others.
In June 2021, a scientific study awarded the desert cat an "identity card" in its evolutionary taxonomic status: the desert cat is "relative" with the African wildcat, the Asian wild cat, and the European wild cat, and should be regarded as the fourth subspecies of the wild cat.
The paper was published by The Luo Shujin Research Group and collaborators of the School of Life Sciences of Peking University, the State Key Laboratory of Protein and Plant Gene Research, and the Peking University-Tsinghua Joint Center for Life Sciences.
Luo Shujin's doctoral student Yu He is the first author of the paper, and from late 2014 to early 2017, she and her classmates traveled almost all over China to collect blood, tissue, hair, feces or specimens from 27 desert cats, 4 Asian wild cats and 239 domestic cats, and extracted DNA from them.
Most domestic cats take saliva samples, which is the most convenient, "just put a cotton swab in your mouth and stir it." Yu He told the Southern Weekend reporter that for wild cats with unpredictable whereabouts, they can only try to collect feces in zoos, specimens from museums, samples stored in laboratories, skins in the market, and even corpses that unfortunately suffered car accidents.
Yu He analyzed the evolutionary trees of desert cats, Asian wild cats and domestic cats, and found that the three diverged for a similar time, all about 1.5 million years old. "Since the Asian wildcat is considered a subspecies of the wildcat, the desert cat should have the same taxonomic status."
Another piece of evidence is that the researchers found genetic exchanges between desert cats, Asian feral cats, and domestic cats at different times. In the definition of species, it is generally believed that the same species should be naturally hybridized.
"In simple terms, the desert cat can cross with other wild cats, and it also differentiates at about the same time as other wild cat subspecies, so it should be a species." Yu He said.
DNA sequencing and analysis of native chinese domestic cats and world domestic cat populations also found that the two have the same genetic background, which supports the single-origin hypothesis of domestic cat domestication. However, when and how domestic cats entered China is still a mystery. This is also the next research direction of Luo Shujin's research group. To figure this out, DNA is extracted from archaeological excavations, which can solve the code of evolution thousands or even tens of thousands of years ago. Yu He introduced that with the rapid progress of ancient DNA technology in recent years, this is not a difficult task, "if the preservation conditions are good, even bones from more than 100,000 years ago can extract DNA."
<h3>The potential threat of genetic contamination</h3>
Although native Chinese wildcats were not involved in the domestication of Chinese cats, the researchers found that there was a recent, widespread genetic penetration between desert cats and domestic cats in the same domain.
In fact, until the genetic evidence is confirmed, people can often see the offspring of desert cats and domestic cats hybridizing. As early as 2007, Yin Yufeng saw some "kittens that were obviously born of hybrids" at the homes of herders in Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province. These kittens do not have the desert cat's signature blue eyes, but the tail has a black ring unique to the desert cat, and some ear tips can faintly see tufts of hair.
Luo Shujin once adopted a desert cat in the laboratory and the offspring of domestic cats, "Desert". After many generations of hybridization, the desert cat genes on the desert body are less than 5%, the pure black fur is completely different from the color of the desert cat, the appearance can hardly see the shadow of the desert cat, although it is very close to people, but a pair of "special thief" eyes still reveal wildness.
Luo Shujin, who has dealt with many cats, "has never seen such a wild cat." When "indifference" is not in heat, it will also spray urine everywhere at home, and even its own food basin and water basin will not be spared, in order to mark the territory and declare sovereignty. The lab owners were helpless to arrange it in a single-room cat house. After two years of doing this, Luo Shujin sent it back to Aba. After regaining his freedom, the state of "indifference" was also significantly more relaxed.
The "free love" of desert cats and domestic cats, breeding offspring is a trivial matter, and it is necessary to be vigilant that this is likely to bring disaster to desert cats.
Genetic invasion is a very common threat in species conservation. As has been learned, the Scottish wildcat is a native cat in the United Kingdom, known as the "Highland Tiger" by the British. The Scottish wildcat was once widely distributed in The United Kingdom, but after the Middle Ages, its population declined sharply due to habitat loss and human hunting, and it is now critically endangered. To make matters worse, pure Scottish wildcat pedigree is becoming increasingly rare due to mating with domestic cats, and scientists fear it is "functionally extinct".
"The desert cat's genes say adaptability to the highland environment for more than a million years." Luo Shujin said that the domestic cat may have followed the herders to the Tibetan Plateau in the middle of the last century, and the domestic cats that eat and drink and have shelters cannot gain a foothold in the harsh wilderness. "Blind love" will interfere with the unique genetic diversity of desert cats, and this is also a kind of human intervention in nature, "after all, there were no domestic cats on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau before, and people brought them from the plains."
Yu He only found one-way infiltration from desert cats to domestic cats in his research. In other words, only the male desert cat and the female cat produce "the crystallization of love". At the Qinghai-Sichuan junction, the core area of desert cat distribution, the genetic composition of desert cats carried by domestic cats reaches 5%-10%, while in the marginal areas of desert cat distribution, such as the Gansu-Qinghai junction, this infiltration is 1%-5%.
Interestingly, YuHe did not find that public cats had a combination with female desert cats, which means that the domestic cat gene has not yet polluted the desert cat population. However, she analyzed that this may be due to insufficient samples (only 27 desert cats) and require larger sampling. Another possible reason is that the desert cat weighs twice as much as the domestic cat, and in the wild animal, only the stronger male will gain the favor of the female, perhaps the female desert cat does not look up to the "little brother" domestic cat.
<h3>Small animals that are not favored</h3>
"In China's wildlife conservation, the desert cat is supposed to be a high-status animal, not only because it exists only in China, but also because its genetic adaptability to the plateau is also worth studying." Luo Shujin thinks. But there are still many mysteries to be solved on the desert cat.
In Han Cedar's view, the desert cat is suitable as a flagship species, attracting attention to the ecosystem it inhabits and the animals that live here. The desert cat lives in the northern part of the Hengduan Mountains to the eastern part of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and is also the transition area from the first to the second ladder in China. "When people think of this area, in the east, people think of giant pandas in the bamboo forest; in the west, people think of snow leopards in the snowy mountains and Tibetan antelopes on the grasslands, but there is a representative animal missing in the middle of the two landscapes." In the context of the current hot cat culture, the desert cat is suitable for filling this ecological niche.
But desert cats have been studied very little. "Every investigation and study needs financial support." Liu Yanlin said that the desert cat was rarely seen before, and the risk of "emptying" was very high, and it was naturally not easy to obtain financial support. In 2017 and 2018, the Qinghai Administration of Qilian Mountain National Park used an infrared camera to photograph a desert cat in a local survey of snow leopards, "thinking that this was more reliable, and decided to set up a desert cat."
Moreover, research funding is generally more skewed towards large animals. "Large species are generally prettier and more noticeable, while small animals are often not valued." Yin Said that before he published his graduation thesis in 2007, research on wild desert cats was almost blank. Even this research project was originally initiated by Jim Sanderson, an American small cat expert, who took the initiative to contact Peking University to cooperate in the investigation of desert cats.
"There are many small cats that are more endangered than desert cats, such as civet cats, golden cats, and lynxes, which are rare, let alone studied." Yin Yufeng said.
A paper published in 2021 by Zhang Lu's team, an associate researcher at the School of Life Sciences at Sun Yat-sen University, also showed that there is a species bias in the study of carnivores, with bears and big cats receiving the most research attention, while most small and medium-sized carnivores receive little attention.
Luo Shujin's research on desert cats is not a key topic of the national project, when the group went to Xining Wildlife Park in 2016 to collect desert cat genetic samples, they still bought tickets at their own expense, they waited hard to see the desert cat appear, and finally the kind breeder took a little fresh feces from the cage.
In May 2021, Xining Wildlife Park (Qinghai Wildlife Rescue and Breeding Center) artificially rescued the desert cat "Desert Desert". (Xinhua News Agency reporter Zhang Long/photo)
In 2020, Xining Wildlife Park rescued a skinny wild desert cat with a crushing fracture of the left forelimb in Menyuan County, called "Desert Desert", and initially people worried that a series of interventions such as anesthesia, amputation and post-nursing would provoke its stress response. But the desert survived and was very cooperative with the treatment. Qi Xinzhang, deputy director of the park, felt that in addition to its original strength, it also reflected the self-confidence of an adult male desert cat, which allowed it to gain a foothold in the harsh environment of the plateau.
When Qi Xinzhang leads tourists to visit, the first stop will always be to a sign at the door, on which is written a sentence from the zoologist Jenny Goodall: "Only understanding will care; only care will act; only action can have hope." This sentence can explain the meaning of the existence of zoos, and it also applies to desert cats.
Southern Weekend reporter Lin Fangzhou