looking at wiki page i see that bass rock is the AC of the east, and AC the BR of the west…don’t expect anything novel from me ig…

if you’ve seen curling you’ve seen bits of it, even somewhat shaped like the parent

i always think it’s balanced by ailsa craig on the other side

Was going to say that explains it all very tidily but on second thought am left wondering which of them the rizzed up brother actually mogged, to use the lingo

this brings a best of all possible worlds vibe that fable interpreting moralists can’t handle

Yes, sorry, I just tagged my ‘2 degrees plus a bunch of generations of separation’ from them microanecdote onto your last reply without meaning to imply that the foxes were the smart ones

I met a person who had met ones of these foxes. She kind of described the event as though holding a goblet of fine wine up in front of us all tho i don’t remember that she said they were tame or otherwise. we asked how this happened and it seems that wealthy russians have descendants of them

Ah, they spent time in canada and got epigenetically tamed there…

I have little museum experience and suggested that the natural history museum in paris might be something, cuvier and all, but they poo poohed that

Tameness is kind of a tricky phenotype for a human scorer anyway since your perception, and approach to the animal, will likely be colored by their appearance (paedomorphic, floppy ears etc)

Was surprised when euro types (belgian and greek) told me how inexpressibly better anglo countries do museums over continental european ones. they would have focussed on nat his and the like, but this was a big thing to them

I can’t recall now but think that the selection wasn’t as strictly on an objective ’tameness’ as it should have been

genes underlying the different phenotypes (color pattern versus muzzle or ear shape, say), which would suggest that each of these traits is controlled independently of the others and, presumably, was selected independently some time in the past

the neural crest in early embryo was the key thing under selection and had all of these coordinate effects on disparate structures in the animal. Thing is, when people actually started mapping these traits in domestic animals (far from completely understood i should say) they always found different

then, supposedly, selection *for tameness alone* in russian foxes was meant to have led to simultaneous emergence of pigmentation and face/ear phenotypes over generations, even though these were not directly selected. This all suggested the simple idea that some early event, line a reduction say, of

the idea is that a collection of traits shared by different domestic animals that distinguish them from their wild ancestors are in structures populated by neural crest cels. This would cover pigmentation differences, floppy ears and face shape, behaviour (adrenal gland contribution, glial cells)

and he suggested, idk if based on anything much, that the occasionally-seen red/blond beard with dark scalp hair phenotype in men might be an outcome of this belly (or more precisely, ventral) activity of agouti in human

to be clear, this doesn’t happen in human and i *think* it’s know that the regulatory bit that would do this in mice is not present in human. Maybe we could engineer back in and get the segmented hair pattern back…

i did talk to someone about the belly-active agouti and how it’s gone in human too

Afaik it’s unknown. As the hair 1st grows the gene is off and so the tip of the hair is black, then gene comes on and you get a yellow bit, then it switches off and th rest of the hair is black. In some animals with long hair i think you might get two yellow bands, so some periodic ‘timer’ at play

Idk any but there must be some (and, yes, visuals better than any text effort, never mind social media effort, never mind my social media effort)

i’d like to have my nerve chord where it can see it tbh

have the same basic job of softening the outline/hiding the animal

It’s a cool gene cause (again,iirc) it makes yellow what would be brown/black areas. it’s on on the belly for countershading due to one set of regulatory stuff and periodically on/off in individual hairs to make yellow bands from different regulatory stuff but these different scales of yellowization

melanocytes but ig this is not favored evolutionarily in the wild, easy tho it is to achieve developmentally…and this is part of the basis of the argument for the neural crest theory of domestication (which i, weakly, do not believe)

lot more about pigmentation and might chime in if tagged) in ‘natural evolution’ differences in coloration much more come from this genetic regulation than from altering the movement of neural crest/melanocytes. In domestic animals and their selection by humans you see these areas that lack melanocy

ehh, the other thing going on is expression of genes like agouti and tbx15 on the belly in a “programmed” way and they are used for making belly/back differences in color - so actually you could ‘flip’ color as you suggest by flipping the sign of those regulators. Afaik (but i think sweaty knows a

appearance (iirc)

Idk about cats specifically but countershading widespread in vertebrates (esp aquatic like you mention, to be hidden from above and below ig) and tied to agouti gene which ha ms a form that’s only on on the belly (and another that’s off/on/off in individual hairs in some species to give ‘agouti’

through the skin. If they are impaired in migrating or there are fewer of them then the farthest places from their origin will be most affected (ie lack pigment)

Yeah, it’s ‘easier’, developmentally, to lack pigment on the belly and extremities (eg paws) because all the melanin is made by melanocytes and all melanocytes come from the neural crest and the neural crest runs along the back (~above the spinal cord), from where those cells have to migrate all