I’ve described our “Walking the Cat Back” Leverhulme Trust-funded project with Dr. Anjali Goswami and colleagues before, but today we really got stuck into it. We’re dissecting a 46kg male Snow Leopard (Panthera uncia) as the first “data point” (actually several hundred data points, but anyway, first individual) in our study of how limb and back muscles change with size in felids. No April Fools’ pranks here; real science-as-it-happens.
Stomach-Churning Rating: 7/10 for skinned leopard and globs of fat. Much worse in person, hence the downgrading from what could be a higher score. Don’t click the photos to emkitten them if you don’t want to see the details.
This leopard is the same one that Veterinary Forensics blogged about. It died in a UK cat conservation/recovery centre. Today is simply a short post, but it is the first in what will surely be a continued series of posts on felid postcranial anatomy and musculoskeletal biomechanics by our felid research team, with bits of natural history and evolution thrown in when we can manage. As befits one of my curt “Anatomy Vignette” posts, pictures will tell the story.
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Skinned and mostly de-fatted snow leopard, with fat piled up on the lower left hand corner near the hind feet. Here we are identifying and then removing and measuring the individual muscles. Project postdoc Andrew Cuff is hard at work on the forelimb while I’m mucking around with the hindlimb. The fat here is about 3kg subcutaneous fat, so around 6.5% of body mass. And as the cat has been around for a while, that fat has gone a bit rancid and that is not nice. Not nice at all, no… Usually smells do not bother me, but this took some adjustment. Fortunately, the muscles are still OK, and work is coming along well.
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UCL PhD student Marcela Randau, carving up our cat’s limb muscles. As usual in comparative biomechanics, we measure the “architecture”- parameters of the muscle that relate in a somewhat straightforward fashion to function. This muscular architecture includes things like muscle mass, the lengths of the fibers (fascicles) that make up the muscles, and the angle of the fascicles to the muscle’s line of action. These parameters correlate reasonably well with the force and power that the muscle can develop, and its working range of length change. Other posts here have discussed this more, but by measuring the architecture of many muscles in many felids of different sizes, we can determine how felids large and small adapt their anatomy to support their bodies and move their limbs. This will help to solve some lingering mysteries about the odd ways that cats move and how their movement changes with body size.
This research is being driven forward mainly by Andrew and Marcela, shown above, so I wanted to introduce them and our odoriferous fat cat. Upcoming dissections: 1-2 more snow leopards, tiger, various lions, ocelot, black-footed cat, leopard, and a bunch of moggies, and whatever else comes our way. All were EU zoo/park mortalities (there are a LOT of big cats out there!).
EDIT: Had to add a photo of the CLAWS! Whoa dude.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
