What animal has black and white spots?

January 2013. When award winning photographer Paul Goldstein first saw this animal on Kenya's Masai Mara Reserve, he didn't have his camera with him, and no one quite believed him about the zebra with spots. Paul runs a camp on the Masai Mara, so has plenty of opportunity to keep an eye out for unusual sightings. 

Two years later, Paul saw the animal again, and this time he had his camera with him. Now all zebras have a different pattern (Who has checked that? How do they know?), but this one is more different than most. 

It appears his unusual coat does a great deal more than set him aside for photographers, he doesn't seem to mix with other zebras either. Zebras almost always travel as part of a herd, but this poor chap always seems to be alone.

Paul runs photographic safaris based at Kicheche Mara, and will be presenting at Destinations Travel Show in London on February 1st - 3rd.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF PAUL GOLDSTEIN 

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/zebra-spots.html

Spotting a Trend in the Genes: Three Genes That Cause Cancer and Disease in Humans Also 'Paint' Spots On Butts of Fruit Flies

ScienceDaily (Oct. 12, 2012) — Spots on the butts of fruit flies are really, really small. But what a researcher and his graduate student are discovering about them could be gigantic.

Thomas Werner, assistant professor of biological sciences at Michigan Technological University, and his PhD student, Komal Kumar Bollepogu Raja, have discovered that three genes that cause cancer and disease in humans also "paint" the spots on the fly's body. This discovery could enable researchers to study how those genes work in fruit flies and apply that knowledge to treating cancer in people.

"The last common ancestor of man and fruit flies lived about 600 million years ago," says Werner. "All the genes needed to build a body were already present in that ancestor, and today we still share virtually all of our body-building genes with fruit flies. This is why we are able to study human diseases like cancer in fruit flies."

Werner and Raja are interested in how DNA encodes body forms and patterns in animals. They use color patterns as a model.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121012143746.htm

Leopards can’t change their spots? Cheetahs can

How the cat got his blotches
September 2012. As any cat lover knows, distinct patterns of dark and light hair colour are apparent not only in housecats but also in their wild relatives, from cheetahs to tigers to snow leopards. Researchers at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology and Stanford University, along with colleagues around the world, have reported new genetic findings that help to understand the molecular basis of these patterns in all felines.
A so-called "mackerel tabby" cat has dark tiger stripes, which coalesce into swirls and blotches in a "classic tabby" cat. Like other periodic natural patterns such as stripes on a zebra or spinal bones and vertebra, the origin of these repetitive structures is an unsolved mystery. "Until now, there's been no obvious biological explanation for cheetah spots or the stripes on tigers, zebras or even the ordinary house cat," said Gregory Barsh, M.D., Ph.D., faculty investigator at HudsonAlpha and emeritus professor of genetics at Stanford University, one of the senior authors of the study.

King cheetah
When comparing sequence differences between striped and blotched domestic cats, the researchers saw the evidence pointed to a gene that they named Taqpep. Blotched cats had specific mutations in both copies of this gene, while striped cats did not. Remarkably, the rare "king cheetah," once thought to be a unique species because of an unusual striped pattern rather than regular spots, also carried a mutation in Taqpep.
Continued: http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/cheetah-spots.html