Win-win interactions are found throughout nature. Such relationships, known as mutualism, involve members of different species working together for mutual benefit.
But the relationship between two species can change over time, and species that start out as mutualistic can potentially develop into a parasite-host relationship, Rob Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, previously told Live Science.
Article continues below
you may like
When we think about how we measure mutualism, it’s worth considering cats. Cats are commonplace, whether it be domestic cats, pets, under the table, on the table, or anywhere else, but what exactly can we gain from a partnership with a cat?
As far as I know, cats are no longer worshiped as gods. But they are not our mutualists either. On the surface they appear to be parasites of human society, at least from a Darwinian perspective. They profit from us at the expense of the food we provide them. The total weight of a domestic cat exceeds the weight of an African savanna elephant. And Americans alone feed their cats the equivalent of 15 billion calories each day, much of it meat, which is about the same amount of calories consumed by a human in New York City in a day.
We feed them tuna. Like royalty, they feed on the ocean’s top predators. What can I get in return?
I’ll admit up front that I’m trying to answer this question gingerly. The conclusion I have reached may require us to broaden our conception of what the conditions for symbiosis are. They are definitely asking us to rethink what a cat is.
Today, hundreds of millions of domestic cats live with humans around the world. There are over 70 million domestic cats in the United States alone. 70 million of them chirp, purr and claw. That’s one cat for every four adults.
Never before have there been so many felines [members of the cat family] on earth. There are probably about 500 million cats in the world, but no one really counts that many. We have replaced nearly all the world’s wild carnivorous felines (tigers, lions, jaguars, leopards) with domestic cats. Once we feared jaguars, now we face beings with deliberate names like Edgar Allen Poe, Coprnicus, and often Mr. Whiskers.
These domestic cats are all descendants of the African or Libyan wildcat, Felis silvestris lybica. The African wildcat is an ancient native of both North Africa and the Levant. Its range is comparable to that of the European wildcat Felis silvestris silvestris in Türkiye. As humans began growing and storing grain, African wildcats began moving into small settlements for human agriculture. Once there, they ate mice and rats. They may also have fed on snakes that ate those rodents (as highlighted in Egyptian art and later writings).
What to read next
A study led by Italian cat geneticist Claudio Ottoni examining DNA in cat bones found at archaeological sites has so far found no evidence that the earliest African wildcats that coexisted with humans were genetically different from their wild ancestors or relatives. It appears that their genes were nearly identical, or perhaps just the same.
At least in the early stages of the cat-human relationship, their bones were the same. Early village and city cats were African wildcats, and they likely simply lived near humans. Species with this behavior are sometimes called “symbiotics,” but this simply means that they coexist (coexist) with humans (humankind). These cats who live with humans have, for the most part, learned to act docile around humans, just as humans have learned to behave docile around humans.
“Quiet” is an ambiguous word. Biologists use it to express a kind of mutual tolerance between non-human animal species and humans. It comes from an ancient Indo-European word meaning “to conquer.” However, this route is deceptive. Most domesticated species have traits that make them behave docilely, as is the case with many island species that have long been immune to large predators, or they choose to be domesticated in order to enter our world without posing a threat. To be tamed means to come in peace.
After setting foot in human cities, ocelots, partially or fully domesticated by humans, spread into agricultural societies. By 9,500 years ago, wildcats had reached places they couldn’t reach without human help. Wildcats are not native to Cyprus. Still, they arrived. A 9,500-year-old burial on the island of Cyprus contains an eight-month-old cat who was carefully prepared for the afterlife alongside its human. how? It’s unlikely that ancient cats took long swims on their own (if you doubt this claim, try giving a stray cat a bath). Wild but domesticated, cats were guided, carried, and transported from place to place by humans. The human driver was likely injured in the process.
In early settlements, cats and humans were mutually beneficial friends, regardless of whether one controlled the other and whether either partner was evolutionarily changed compared to the other. It was a mutualism in leg length. Cats benefited from human clutter and the effects of that clutter on rodents. Humans benefited from the control that cats exerted over rodent populations.
Currently, most domestic cats do not prey on mice. However, reports of early Egyptian cats suggest that they may have been larger than modern domestic cats. At least one Roman site in Egypt records a voracious cat with the bones of six rats in its stomach. In good years, cats eating rodents large and small may have been some kind of pleasure for humans (“Oh, there are fewer mice”). In years when food was scarce, it may have saved lives. It may also have saved lives when humans were killed by rodent-borne diseases such as the plague, or by fleas that parasitize rodents. Cats then took on an increased role on ships, where rats and mice were surprisingly abundant and grain was a valuable and relatively rare commodity.
What cat domestication researchers (of course there are enough to fit a long dinner table) are beginning to disagree is whether cat predation on mice, rats, and snakes will continue to be a problem as human settlements grow larger and larger. This is a topic that can be partially addressed through mathematical models.
My hypothesis is that in small settlements in the ancient Levant, or later in Mesopotamia, cats were probably successful in reducing the number of rats and other negative influences such as rats and perhaps mice. However, large amounts of grain were stored in large urban centers, such as those that emerged with the New Kingdom of Egypt (1600 BC). In places where entire buildings were full of grain, or in cities where grain is virtually spilled out, it is unlikely that you can have enough cats around the grain for them not to be a problem.
Hundreds or even thousands of cats would have had to roam around the granary, meowing and acting grumpy. It is therefore quite possible that the functional role of cats in rodent and snake control diminished as early grain-based settlements grew.
It was during this period that cats began to appear in Egyptian art in new forms. By 3,500 years ago, cats were no longer seen hunting. Instead, they hid under tables and chairs, often in the company of powerful Egyptian women. As Claudio Ottoni pointed out to me, these “under the chair” cats are commonly leashed, which may perhaps indicate that the cat, while docile, is not yet docile enough to pose freely for the artist. The cats under the chair seem to indicate that as the human-cat relationship continues, new types of bonds are formed, bonds that are no longer simply related to the cat’s role in pest control. but why?
Honey Guide’s Call
How rethinking our relationships with other species can help us rethink our future.
Source link
