Comments on: What Is A Panther?

By: XFiler

XFiler — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:56:12 +0000

Here in north-central Pennsylvania (Bradford County to be exact) the term “panther” seems to be used by the older population in reference to sightings of what most now call a “mountain lion”. Old-timers almost always refer to the “panther” as black, or at least a dark color.
I truly believe all the sightings over the years must account for some real creature being a part of our landscape, regardless of what color it is. Our largest roadblock to the proof of this big cat’s existence has been our own PA Game Commission. The patent explanation is that they “don’t exist” in Pennsylvania. Some people even go so far as to claim that the Game Commission is responsible for re-introducing the cats to help curb PA’s exploding deer populations. Maybe, maybe not…..but I myself have seen one, so I am convinced they are here.

By: kittenz

kittenz — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:42:16 +0000

“As I grew up I wondered if maybe some of those “black panthers” weren’t just dark, but still tawny colored ones seen at night or in the shadows and misidentified as black. I’m still not sure what the answer is.”

- Jeremy_Wells,

I believe that most of the true “panther sightings”, in which someone really saw a long-tailed big cat in the USA, are just that: a tawny puma, seen against tha light, made darker by the imagination and by the common phrase “black panther”.

I also think that although none are officially on the record, there are probably some melanistic pumas. Jaguarundis are the most closely related to pumas of modern cats, and they have a melanistic phase, so I think it’s plausible that black (or at least very dark pumas) occur. And I think that jaguars probably occur farther northward than is “officially” recognized. Black jaguars are not as common as spotted ones, but they are not too rare either. They could very well be the source of some panther sightings.

tx_leroy,

There are native legends of wild hybrids of jaguar & puma, in South America and parts of Mexico, but as far as I know, none have been confirmed. There has, however, been hybridization in captivity, of leopard/puma and ocelot/puma. Here are a couple of links with photos, here and here. These hybrids are some of the most beautiful cats I have ever seen. None of the hybrids were melanistic, but I think it’s possible that melanistic hybrids could occur.

Melanism in jaguars is thought to be a completely dominant trait, so in theory, if a puma and a black jaguar were to mate and produce offspring, there’s a good chance that the hybrid offspring would be black. I think that a mating between jaguar and puma is very unlikely, but possible. Jaguar/lion hybrids are known; here are some photos from Bear Creek Sanctuary. A puma/leopard cross, both species being so similar in size and habits, might be even more plausible. It’s known that pumas can mate with leopards. I can imagine a situation where, say, a female black leopard escapes from captivity just as she is going into estrus, and she encounters a male puma. The mating instinct in cats is powerful, and I don’t think that would be impossible. The kittens (or cubs ) would probably be spotted, since melanism in leopards is recessive. But those cubs would carry the recessive trait for melanism, and somewhere down the line, it’s possible that two distantly related individuals, both carrying the recessive, could mate and produce black offspring. Unlikely? Of course. But impossible? No.

By: tx_leroy

tx_leroy — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 04:09:46 +0000

Maybe there was some cross breeding between cougars and jaguars and the melanistic trait was carried on by this hybrid.

By: Jeremy_Wells

Jeremy_Wells — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:35:14 +0000

Kittenz,
Having grown up “up a holler” in eastern Kentucky, I understand exactly what you are saying. I grew up with those stories too. My dad told me a story of having a panther come down off the hill and stare at him through the screen of the kid’s bedroom window at his grandma’s house when he was young. He knew it was a big cat because of the distance of the window from the ground, and the way he described it, it was on its back feet, propped up with its front paws on the window pane, to look in. His panther, though, was the tawny colored variety. However we knew plenty of individuals who claimed to see “black panthers”. I just accepted them as one of those critters like foxes and bobcats that were there, but not often seen. As I grew up I wondered if maybe some of those “black panthers” weren’t just dark, but still tawny colored ones seen at night or in the shadows and misidentified as black. I’m still not sure what the answer is.
As far as more southern black cats, its interesting that the “black cougars” that Loren notes above were all killed in Latin American areas where they share a range with jaguars, something I’m sure critics would latch on to.
Personally, with the number of camera trap photos of jaguars coming out of the southwest, suggesting that the southwest isn’t just the “fringe” of territory they roam into occasionally , but part of their regular stomping grounds, I’m convinced that some of the more southern black panther reports might be the result of melanistic jaguars. In fact, I’ve often wondered if perhaps the image of the “black panther” entered the popular American conscious at a time when the jaguar range might have been larger and taxonomist a little more cavalier (ah, the wonders of modern DNA testing!). If this were the case then it would be easy for the startled holler dweller, raised on stories of black panthers, to see a “black” cat in the shadows when in fact it was really a more mundane (but no less scary to the witness) tawny puma.
Chester Moore has posited that southern black cat sighting are based on jaguarundi at the extreme limits of their range. While this may be true in some cases, the jaguarundi, with its sleek build and small head, just doesn’t fit the profile of the typical North American “black panther” in my opinion. However black jaguars, presently or historically, do fit the bill.
Of course, I’m looking at this more from a folkloric p.o.v. because of my background as a social sciences geek. From my perspective witnesses truly believe they have seen these creatures. If the creatures they claim to have seen truly are “impossible” I want to know a) what it was they did see and b) why they interpreted it in the way they did. That said, I will not be a bit surprised when an OOP black jaguar is killed in Mississippi, or the ever elusive melanistic cougar is finally produced.
Either tradition is causing hundreds of folks to incorrectly attribute a color phase to a critter that is real but that wildlife officials don’t want to acknowledge lives in that area, or we are dealing with an OOP cat that does express melanism, or people with no knowledge of wildlife are mistakenly identifying mundane animals and confabulating their size and color, or they are making it up. Personally, I lean more toward the first two explanations for the majority of solid reports that can’t be explained away, and for the latter two, I’ve found that the vigilant cryptid community usually clears it up before it gets too far out of hand (although their are exceptions).
But this many dead cat bodies… well, this is going to get kind of hard for wildlife officials to ignore if they keep turning up.

By: kittenz

kittenz — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 14:49:25 +0000

The thing that intrigues me, is how on earth did the puma come to be thought of as a “black panther”? It’s not a recent phenomenon, and it’s widely ingrained, at least here in the southeastern and midwestern USA. Ask almost anyone, and they will have some family anecdote of a relative or great-relative’s encounter with a “black panther”. And here, where nearly everyone lives “up a holler” (for those of you who aren’t familiar with Appalachian terminology, “up a holler” means “alongside a winding stream in a valley between steep mountaiins”)(“up a holler” is a lot quicker off the tongue ) – anyhow, at the head of every holler, back in the hills, is at least one panther, jet black and usually huge.

I’ve tried to determine just when the term “black panther” became commonly used in the US, but I haven’t found anything yet that satisfies my curiousity. Surely though, it must have been at least 100 years ago, or more, because my grandmother thinks of panthers as invariably black, and so do all the old people. She has never seen one, but her father fought one with an axe when it jumped at her older sister in the woods, probably a hundred years ago. She does not remember him saying that it was black, she just assumes it was because “panthers are black”.

By: dogu4

dogu4 — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 11:46:16 +0000

Interesting article. It illuminates the disparity between common usage names and the long history of naming animal species and the relatively recent historical system for scientific identification. The interest I have in things cryptic bleeds over into etymology, and so I’m looking forward to finding out more about this naming conundrum.