this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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Science Memes

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Tigers 🐅 🐯 (mander.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] NarrativeBear@lemmy.world 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

This is probably an example of natural evolution/selection where tigers that had slowly evolved more orange in their fur naturally, were able to feed more. This in turn meant the orange triat in their genes was passed on more frequently and became more dominant in the population.

In a sense it was probably a "random" mutation, but when it became useful and effective it was passed down quicker.

[–] GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is how evolution works. People often imagine some sort of logical system to it, but it really is just random mutations all over, with the advantageous ones propagating. There were probably a bunch of tigers with various odd colors or patterns at some point due to random mutations, but those evidently were less useful for hunting and reproducing than how they look now, so they died out in competition with the known variants.

[–] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Ya so we wouldn’t expect everything to be optimized or all “features” (traits) to be useful right?

[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 year ago

But deer vision is immutable god creation. Checkmate.

[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 4 points 1 year ago

Maybe the orange color happened to coincide with the patterns that worked best. Had their prey been able to see the orange tint it would have worked against the tiger, but since they can't it was allowed to flourish with that pattern. If true at all, it's a bit of a dead end since a mutation for the prey to begin seeing orange means tigers have narrowed into that pattern dependent on the color.