Why do cats have bald spots in front of their ears: the answers of scientists

Scientists believe that baldness near the ears in cats may be necessary for them / photo Christelle, PixabayCats are known for their fastidious care: their soft, thick fur seems to need constant attention. But their fur around the ears is much thinner.

Life Science found out if it is normal for cats to have bald patches around their ears.

According to experts, this is not just normal, but perhaps even necessary for the evolution of cats. Before examining lightly balding areas, it’s important to understand that a cat’s coat has a number of important functions.

“It protects their skin from scratches,” Judith Stella, an animal welfare specialist at Purdue University, told Live Science. “It also serves for warmth … and social signals … and probably has some kind of defense mechanism. However, the fur is not uniform all over the body.”

Most of a cat’s coat consists of two layers: a thinner undercoat that provides warmth and thins in the summer, and a coarser covering of guard hairs that provides basic protection. This double coat covers almost the entire body, with a few exceptions.

“There’s no fur on the paw pads - the hair between the toes collects dirt and moisture, so it’s not in their best interest,” says Stella. “The fur in the perianal area is also a little thinner, and that helps keep it clean.”

The area around the ears is another special case. According to Stella, thinner fur on a cat’s face is absolutely normal. But scientists do not quite understand why this happens.

“There has to be some evolutionary, adaptive reason why they are like that,” Stella says. “And my theory is that it has to do with the sound.”

This quirk of appearance is not only characteristic of domestic cats, it is common among small species of cats, such as African wild cats, ocelots and lynxes - all of which belong to the subfamily Felinae. Big cats, such as tigers, lions and jaguars belonging to the subfamily Pantherinae, have not developed such baldness.

Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis and author of The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savannah to Your Couch, is a classic question in evolutionary biology.

“How to explain the distribution of traits among species? The presence of bald spots in small cats suggests that this may be the result of natural selection, that bald spots are beneficial to small cats, but not large ones,” he said.

Stella suggested that the advantage might lie in the way these different species of cats hunted.

“Cats can hear ultrasonic sounds, and rodents vocalize in this auditory range,” she said. “Perhaps the absence of fur helps to focus sound waves in the ear or to orientate where the sound is coming from.”

Although small cat species are known to hunt a wide variety of prey, from birds to snakes, studies have shown that the majority of their diet consists of rodents, making any equipment to detect these animals a valuable asset. For big cats that hunt larger animals like antelope or wild boar, detecting ultrasonic frequencies is less important for survival - perhaps that’s why they haven’t developed the same distinctive fur pattern.

“The problem with studying these kinds of evolutionary adaptation hypotheses is that it’s easy to come up with a plausible explanation, but it’s much harder to test that hypothesis,” says Losos. “How would we test this hypothesis? Perhaps with a detailed acoustic analysis of feline hearing. Or find cats with varying degrees of baldness to compare their ability to detect rodents or hunting success. Or find a way to remove baldness and see if that affects hunting success . I don’t know how to do it, and I don’t know anyone who studies these bald spots.”

This is just a theory at this point, but the presence of this trait in the entire subfamily Felinae strongly suggests that such fur confers a specific adaptive advantage. However, Salmon cautions against jumping to conclusions without more concrete evidence.

“There’s always the possibility that a trait could evolve for one reason and just happen to be useful for another,” he said. “Maybe bald spots are better for mating selection in small species for some reason, but then when they evolved through sexual selection, they turned out to be useful for hunting.”

Earlier, UNIAN wrote that it is really necessary to sterilize cats and dogs.

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