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“But that’s just a consequence of the randomness of mutation, the roll of the genetic dice.” ( See pictures of albino and leucistic animals, from squirrels to crayfish.)Īfter the photos were taken, researchers had hoped to capture the Brazilian cat and analyze its genes, but they haven’t seen it again, according to Cecília Cronemberger de Faria, an environmental analyst for the national park where the cat was sighted. “My best guess is that the distant ancestor of pumas was uniformly colored, and that has been maintained in the species ever since,” he says. Hunter says no one knows why color-changing genes are so rare in the species. Not so black and whiteĬougars, also known as pumas or mountain lions, display very little variation in coat colors overall, which are mostly muted, earthy tones of tan and gray. “Another white cougar may not appear in my lifetime,” he says. And outside of the Brazilian cougar, there is only one other known example of a cougar with leucism: An online photo taken at an unknown zoo, Hunter says. As for albinism, in which animals are unable to produce any kind of pigment-hence their pink eyes-there are only two records of such cougars, Hunter says: one at a zoo and one wild animal treed by hunters in the western United States. For instance, melanism, a surplus of the black pigment melanin, occurs in 14 of the 40 known wild cat species, but no one has ever recorded a black cougar-either in captivity or in the wild.