Cats have fascinated and intrigued artists all through the ages, as evidenced by work on the within of pyramid partitions from historic Egypt, oil masterpieces from the Renaissance interval and, in fact, immediately’s cat movies and memes. During the last a number of a long time, scientists have additionally turned their gaze to cats, finding out Felis catus in a lot the identical method that they research lizards, birds, elephants and different animals.

Biologist Jonathan Losos, the William H. Danforth Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington College in St. Louis and director of the Residing Earth Collaborative, is educating a brand new course at WashU that takes benefit of this curiosity, encouraging biology majors to get to know one of the vital well-liked pets in America.

“I feel one of many appeals to folks of getting a cat is that it’s your personal little piece of the wild,” Losos mentioned. “You’ve received a mini-lion in your home. Cats aren’t that a lot modified from their wild ancestors.”

The house owners of the 58 million pet cats within the U.S. know precisely what he means.

Jonathan Losos, second from left, took undergraduate college students from his class “The Science of Cats” to the Illini Cat Membership and Grassroots Cat Fanciers March Insanity Present. (Photograph: Carol Inexperienced/Washington College)

Losos himself is a cat lover — he at present has 4 — and he fondly remembers his first pet cat from when he was 5 years outdated. However he didn’t take into account cats scientifically attention-grabbing till comparatively lately. About 10 years in the past, Losos watched a BBC documentary that adopted a city’s efforts to check the cats of their group, utilizing fashionable analysis instruments like GPS collars. At about the identical time, Losos learn a ebook by John Bradshaw referred to as “Cat Sense.”

“It clued me in that there’s truly a lot of attention-grabbing analysis about home cats, and that individuals are finding out them in the identical ways in which I and my colleagues research lizards and different species,” Losos mentioned. “Radio monitoring, genome research, group ecosystem research: the identical types of questions and the identical instruments! And that shocked me.”

WashU seniors in “The Science of Cats” course take what they’ve realized about evolutionary biology, ecology and habits and apply it to an organism that they care about. They take into account: The place did home cats come from? In what methods, if in any respect, are home cats domesticated? What impacts do cats have on the atmosphere?

A contestant on the Illini Cat Membership and Grassroots Cat Fanciers March Insanity Present. (Photograph: Carol Inexperienced/Washington College)

“As an evolutionary biologist, an attention-grabbing query is the extent to which we have now been in a position to form cats by a means of choice — on this case, synthetic choice,” Losos mentioned. “Cats present us the ability of choice to result in fast evolutionary change.”

Many of the home cat breeds that we acknowledge immediately originated throughout the final 150 years. However they typically don’t appear very completely different from each other, particularly in comparison with canine breeds. Many breeds of cat are solely completely different of their “paint jobs” — that’s, the colour, sample, size and texture of their coats.

That is altering, although: Enter the munchkin cat, for instance, whose stubby legs put it on the identical degree as a form of feline dachshund. Or the lykoi or “werewolf cat,” which will get its curious and shaggy look as the results of a single genetic mutation, as Losos famous.

“Some are fairly distinctive,” Losos mentioned. “The extraordinarily quick muzzle of Persian cats or the lengthy tapered one in every of fashionable Siamese are not like any species of feline that has advanced within the household’s 20-million-year historical past.”

To discover a few of this variety, Losos and his college students took a subject journey to the Illini Cat Membership and Grassroots Cat Fanciers present in Champaign, Sick.

A cat handler on the Illini Cat Membership and Grassroots Cat Fanciers March Insanity Present. (Photograph: Carol Inexperienced/Washington College)

Losos warned college students to put aside any expectations they may have about cat exhibits based mostly on televised canine exhibits like Westminster.

“You may’t run them round a hoop,” Losos mentioned.

“I used to be shocked by the seriousness of the cat house owners and the judges,” mentioned Logan Lacy, a senior biology main who attended the present. “With out realizing what’s happening, it seems like a random well-dressed particular person is simply taking part in with cats with a feather or a ball on a stick. However in actuality, these individuals are judging them on a really particular set of standards that every breed is meant to have, and many of the house owners spend hours grooming and taking good care of their cats.”

“I believed the cat present was very cool! It was a bit of smaller than I first anticipated, however being there actually allowed the category to immerse themselves in an enormous group of passionate cat folks,” mentioned Sam Cohen, one other senior biology main.

Logan Lacy (left) reaches out to pet a cat on the Illini Cat Membership and Grassroots Cat Fanciers March Insanity Present (Photograph: Carol Inexperienced/Washington College)

“Being on the cat present positively helped in that we had been in a position to see the completely different breeds of cats and the way synthetic choice affected them,” Cohen mentioned. “I work in a veterinary clinic and barely see a few of the breeds I noticed at that cat present. Loads of them are actually uncommon.”

“The Science of Cats” additionally doesn’t shrink back from extra contentious subjects associated to cats. College students additionally go to an area no-kill shelter and browse papers that doc the impacts of feral cats on fragile island ecosystems like these in Australia, the place there aren’t any native wild cats.

Along with main this new course, Losos has written a ebook for well-liked audiences, “The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Advanced from the Savanna to Your Couch.” Within the ebook, popping out in Could from Penguin Random Home, Losos describes how the home cat has, from its origins in Africa, been remodeled in comparatively little time into one of the vital profitable species on the planet.

A contestant on the Illini Cat Membership and Grassroots Cat Fanciers March Insanity Present. (Photograph: Carol Inexperienced/Washington College)

That means of domestication itself is a subject of nice debate.

“There’s loads of completely different definitions,” Losos mentioned. “However one key facet of domestication is how completely different an animal is from its wild ancestor.”

Canines, for instance, differ from their ancestors in look and habits. “They do issues that wolves don’t do,” Losos mentioned. However with cats, it’s not that easy.

“There are some variations, however not very many, they usually’re not very substantial,” Losos mentioned. “And — as we’re all conscious — home cats will readily revert to a wild state.”