Your Cat Questions Answered! | Compilation

a little while ago we made a compilation video where we answered your most pressing dog questions but we here at scishow our pet non-partisans so naturally we needed to make a compilation dedicated to our feline friends as well let's start with the oldest question first it's often said that we humans didn't domesticate cats instead they domesticated themselves and there's some truth to that what's less often repeated however is the hypothesis that it happened more than once here's Hank to explain how that's even possible cats we know what they like to chase lasers and lick their own butts that there's a lot that we don't know about cute little whiskers like we're her cuddly domestic ancestors came from and when she evolved from wild animals we used to think that the earliest historical evidence for domestic cats was from ancient Egypt like art and mummified remains from around 4000 years ago but now some glues are pointing to domestic kitties older than that from separate places across the globe the oldest probably domestic cat skeleton we've found was in 2001 on the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea scientists guessed that this cat lived around 9,500 years ago which makes sense historically that's after people started farming in the Fertile Crescent that not totally desert region in parts of Western Asia and northern Africa farming means you have to store extra crops somewhere and piles of tasty grain attract rodents and for hungry cats that's an all-you-can-eat buffet so one hypothesis is that feral cats might have started snagging some meals in getting cozy with humans humans were happy to have them too because they took care of the pests and were fluffy and cute by this time we think humans had domesticated other animals like dogs cattle and sheep so adding another furry friend wouldn't seem all that unusual and we think this cat from Cyprus was a pet for a couple of reasons first of all Cyprus is an island with no native cats so someone must have brought them over on a boat and if they weren't a little tame that would have been a scratchy panicky animal mess like you might know how hard it can be to get an uncontrollable Kitty just to the vet back plus the cat was buried with a person presumably its owner and surrounded with carved seashells wild animals wouldn't get this special treatment and if the cat was a meal its bones would have been separate and probably scattered all of this evidence lines up with a study published in the journal Science in 2007 which looked at the genetic origins of domestic cats those researchers found that our feline friends are most closely related to the wild cat felis Silvestri's specifically the Near Eastern subspecies your eyes also if you look at this cat will back this evidence up cuz they look a lot like domestic cats so lots of signs point to domestic cats splitting off from their wild cat cousins in the Fertile Crescent but hold on some other scientists discovered probably domestic cat bones in 2001 and an ancient millet for mning village in central China a clue computer analysis of jawbone shapes showed that these cats weren't related to the wild cat at all instead they were a kind of leopard cat which is in an entirely different genus some small animal tunnels throughout the excavation site and ceramic containers that looked like they stored grain the researchers were pretty sure that this village had a rodent problem and by looking at the carbon isotopes in cats bones it was clear that they ate lots of small animals that ate lots of human grown millet this was the first convincing evidence to support the domestic cats eat pests that eat grain hypothesis but this domestication happened in different kinds of cats around fifty three hundred years ago on the other side of this huge landmass so what's the real story the middle eastern or the Chinese domestication of cats well there's no reason to think that domestication couldn't have happened twice in two separate places with two separate cat species when people started farming grain but remember genetically all of our modern cats seemed to be descended from the wild cat not the leopard cat maybe the domestic wild cats were just snugly ER and had a leg up to win our favor see domestication leaves its fingerprints in an animal's genome so even though any cat person will joke that their cats are too independent to really be considered domesticated we can look at these genetic fingerprints 2014 collaboration between a bunch of American universities took a close look at the domestic cat genome using 22 different breeds from different places the study found recent changes in genes that control the development of the cat's nervous system these genes could play a role in how domestic cats for example behave less defensively in new situations and can change their behavior in response to rewards in other words compared to a wild cat fluffy is genetically more likely to walk up to you with a friendly headbutt and beg for treats this could explain why our cats are extra snuggly the ones that got along best with humans could take advantage of our rodent pests and table scraps and survived to pass on their genes so in a way cats did domesticate themselves and it seems like they did it more than one time which kind of means that the rise of cat videos was practically inevitable we like to think that we've contributed to the vast library of cat videos and maybe even added some science to the mix - next up cats have lived with us for thousands of years but they still share plenty of features with their wild counterparts like the keen senses of a nighttime hunter that's why they do that faintly alarming laser eye thing when you get up to go to the bathroom at 3:00 a.m. as Michael vividly explains it can be terrifying to wake up in the middle of the night to a pair of glowing eyes staring at you from the darkness only to realize that it's just your cat or is it lots of animals including alligators fruit bats and dogs all have a shiny structure in their eyes that gives them better night vision which also causes this creepy glow the layer of tissue at the back of your eyes is called the retina and it's made up of special light-sensitive cells light that hits those cells gets turned into an electrical signal that sent along the optic nerve which sits behind the retina that signal travels all the way to the brain and light that misses those cells isn't turned into a signal so your brain can't detect it many species across the animal kingdom have this same basic eye structure from reptiles to birds to other mammals like cats one way animals have evolved to see better is to have more of these light-sensitive cells in each eye humans for example have over 95 million of them per retina but a lot of animals especially nocturnal animals whose eyes have to work well at night have another way of detecting more light they have a structure called the tepee dome lucidum which is Latin for bright tapestry it's a layer of tissue that sits behind the retina and acts like a mirror to be dim lucidum reflects light that goes through the retina back at those light-sensitive cells giving them another chance to detect it but some of that reflected light flies back out of the animals pupils which is what makes it seem like their eyes are glowing the color of that glow also called eyes shine depends on what the tepee dome lucidum is made of and different critters have different highly ordered molecules or fibers that create a reflective surface some fish use guanine one of the chemical building blocks in DNA and have white eye shine sheep have collagen which also provides structure to muscles and skin in lots of animals which leads to a blue or green glow and cats use riboflavin and zinc among other molecules and the amount of zinc does a lot to determine how yellow or green or even blue their eye shine is so your Kitty's eyes aren't actually like little flashlights they're just reflecting some of the ambient light in your room but if they start glowing red and shooting laser beams you should probably run we ought to note that none of our cats have displayed this behavior to date there's still time though but while your cat may think they're a fierce majestic predator patrolling the savannas of your living room they have more in common with smaller wild cats than lions and tigers they can't war like big cats can for example they can purr though and that seems like more than a fair trade here's Hank to explain why it's usually one or the other I have a cat her name is cameo she is adorable and recently she peed inside of a potted plant but can you imagine how amazing it would be if she could roar while peeing inside of a potted plant she'd be like give me some treats and then like ferocious roar it would be so cute but domestic cats cannot roar only four species in the cat family can lions tigers leopards and jaguars here's the weird thing though zoologists are pretty sure that those four species of cats can't purr so even though my cat can't roar the reason probably has a lot to do with the things in her throat that let her purse now we still aren't this is amazing totally sure how cats purr there is no like per box that we can locate in a cat and no one's ever stuck a purring cat into an MRI to find out exactly what's happened but we've known for a while that it probably involves the larynx aka the voice box back in 1834 a British zoologist named Richard Owen noticed that there was an anatomical difference between the cat species that purred and the ones that roared roaring cats had a more flexible hyoid the hyoid is a structure that supports the tongue and larynx in humans its horseshoe shaped it's basically the first bone under your chin and the front of your neck although you shouldn't be able to feel it from the outside so maybe don't go squeezing up around in there on the murder shows it's how they know people got strangled and when they got killed they're always like the hyoid is broken that's how we know that the murder was the squeezing that kind in cats the hyoid is more of a hook that hangs down and connects the back of the skull to the front of the larynx and the base of the tongue most species of cat including the domestic cat the hyoid bone is very bony it's said to be completely ossified meaning that it's fully hardened bone and all the cats that have it completely ossified hyoid can purr but don't roar the cats the do roar don't have a fully ossified hyoid meaning that it hasn't fully hardened into bone so it's a lot more flexible the tissue is more like the ligaments that normally connect bones to each other Owen thought that that flexibility was the key to roaring roaring is a low deep resonant sound so cats need long vocal folds to do it just like people with longer vocal folds have deeper voices and own figured a more flexible hyoid was what let cats vocal cords stretch enough for them to roar for a long time pretty much everybody agreed with this idea they also assumed that hardened bony hoids were the reason that all of the species of cats that couldn't roar could purr but there is one exception the snow leopard snow leopards don't have a fully hardened hyoid they have the more flexible kind that Lions do but they cannot roar and even though we've known about the snow leopard exception since at least in 1916 scientists didn't really question the hyoid idea until the late 1980s that was when researchers realized that there is another difference between cats that can roar in cats that can't roaring cats have thick pads of tissue in their vocal folds the pads make their vocal folds longer and heavier which allows them to vibrate slowly and make a lower pitched sound only lions tigers leopards and jaguars have these pads with no exceptions not even snow leopards so roaring isn't entirely about the hyoid bone sure the extra flexibility might help but they also need that extra tissue that our domestic cat friends don't have these pads also help explain why cats that roar can't / cats purr they vibrate their vocal folds at about 26 times per second there seems to be some mechanism in their brains that controls the vibrations as they inhale and exhale the vocal folds open and close which is what makes the purring sound it's like how you can make that motorboat sound by vibrating your lips except they do it inside of them with their vocal folds so the extra padding that allows lions tigers leopards and jaguars to roar would dampen the constant vibrations that they would need to purr the females of those species do make purring like noises when they're in heat but those noises don't seem to be quite the same as true purring they're closer to a growl so my cat can't roar because her vocal folds just aren't shaped for it but she can purr and that's pretty dang cute I like it me too Hank me too slightly less majestic is the habit cats have of being completely blind to a tree that's right in front of them like you shake it treat bag and they'll come running but once they get there they sometimes just search around and give you this really disappointed look like they can't find their snack you know it's right there it's right there okay this happens because cat's eyes work differently than ours and they actually are literally blind to that piece of freeze-dried chicken and inch away from their nose cats are masterful predators capable of spotting prey from meters away in the dead of night but place a Treat in front of them and they're basically blind but why how can such good hunters be so lousy at seeing what's right in front of them it turns out that their vision isn't always amazing since being able to see so well at night comes with some drawbacks cats are crepuscular that means they're most active at dawn and dusk as a result their eyes have evolved to see best when the light is low for one thing their eyes are huge they're nearly as large as human eyes even though their heads are less than half the size of ours they're slit shaped pupils also have a greater range of size human pupils can dilate to 15 times their smallest size cats pupils can dilate by 135 fold and get even wider than human pupils to let in a lot more light the parts of their eyes that let in and focus light their corneas and lenses are also proportionally larger which ultimately means more light reaches the light sensing tissue in the back called the retina and they have an extra reflective layer behind the retina called the tepee 'tom lucidum which reflects back any light that reaches it giving the retina a second chance to catch what it missed special cells in the retina called photoreceptors are what actually sense light and like us cats have two types of photoreceptors rods and cones rods work best in low light but don't sense color very well cones are used in color vision but they only really work if there's a good amount of light cats have almost three times as many rods as we do but only 10% as many cones that makes for killer night vision but in bright light those rods become overloaded and can switch off completely that leaves the handful of cones to do the heavy lifting which makes for some pretty paltry daytime vision and those huge eyes they're really hard to focus to zero in on a nearby object you need to bend that hard part of your eyeball called the lens enough to reshape how light enters your eye you have muscles in your eyes that can do that quickly when you need to focus on something close up but the massive lenses in cat eyes just aren't as flexible so they don't Bend as well as yours do ultimately this means that cats simply can't focus on anything closer than about 25 centimeters to them so when you hold a treat in front of your kitties face all they see is a washed out blur luckily their sense of smell is twice as sharp as yours so if you hold that treat long enough they're bound to sniff it out eventually that doesn't explain the disapproving look but actually we can explain that too if you're a cat person like me you've probably seen your furry friend looking disgusted with you there's this face they make like with the wrinkled up nose the curled back lip and the open mouth that looks like they're just absolutely revolted good news your cat doesn't actually think you're gross or if they do that face isn't how they show it that smear is actually what's known as the flamin response and it gives cats and other animals like horses llamas dogs and giraffes a supercharged way to smell the environment around them while it might look like cats are expressing their distaste what they're actually doing with that face is sniffing using a specialized organ called the vomeronasal organ it's it's kind of underneath the nose in the roof of the mouth and it's actually connected to the mouth by the small fluid filled ducts called nazo Palatine canals if you look in your cat's mouth you can even see the ends of these they're behind the sharp incisor is so good luck getting a cat to sit still while you'd like take a look at the inside of its mouth anyway because of the fluid of these ducts since don't passively drift up there so to sniff airborne scents have to be taken in through the mouth dissolved in fluid and then pumped up until they come into contact with the organ sensory cells and that is where that funny face comes in when a cat or giraffe or horse pulls back their lips into the grimace of the flame and responds they're opening up those canals and starting the pumping action to take a deeper width they could just rely on their nose but the vomeronasal organ has its own set of chemical receptors so it can smell different smells this system is primarily used to detect scent signals from members of their own species though different animals and even different sexes of the same animal can use this secondary smelling system in different ways and that might explain why people tend to associate the flame and face with cats and horses more than with dogs even though all of them can sniff this way in case you're wondering though you cannot humans lost all of those nasal Palatine ducts a long time ago and while there are some remnant cavities where your vomer and nasal organs once were it's been a while since they could detect anything which is all to say don't worry your cats are making weird faces at you they don't hate you but they might think you smell I'm pretty sure they'll get over it and maybe you can make it up to them with some catnip not every kitty loves the stuff but those who do are just really cute when they smush their faces in it and throw their toys all over still many cat owners are puzzled by their response to this stuff I mean what's the big deal fortunately we do have some ideas about the chemistry of catnip and why it makes whiskers go bananas ever seen a cat dip into some recreational catnip it usually makes the cat act a little strange it rubs up against the catnip rolls in it and pause it it's clearly enjoying itself and all because of a compound that's a little too similar to its natural biological signals catnip aka nepeta cataria is a plant that's a member of the mint family when cats react to catnip they're really reacting to an organic molecule released by the plant known as nepeta lactone nepeta lactone is made up of two connected rings of mostly carbons and the plant uses it to repel insects like mosquitoes ticks and mites but most cats are attracted to the stuff they'll first start sniffing the catnip then lick and chew it sometimes rubbing their cheeks and chin or even their whole body against the leaves some cats will meow or even drool I mean they're obviously into it but the effects only lasts about 15 minutes after that catnip will have no effect on the cat for anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple of hours so what's going on well researchers think nepeta lactone is similar to a cat's natural pheromones the molecules it uses to communicate once the compound gets into the cat's nose it bonds with the same receptors pheromones do and the cat's brain gets a signal that basically says lots of pheromones over here a catnip stimulates three main areas of the cat's brain the olfactory bulb which processes scent the amygdala which is involved in emotions and decisions and the hypothalamus which is in charge of sexual response among other things the last one helps explain why cats exposed to catnip will often roll on the ground like a female cat in heat it's also probably why kittens don't usually respond to catnip until they're sexually mature when they're around six months old but not every cat does respond to catnip only about 50 to 70 percent of cats do it's genetic and scientists are still looking to identify the gene involved and learn more about what exactly is going on in the cat's brain when it's reacting to catnip some big cats like lions and jaguars also respond to catnip but other animals don't use the same pheromones or have the same receptors so catnip doesn't affect them and it's not just catnip other plants will also attract cats probably for similar reasons they produce pounds that act like cat pheromone silver vine for example produces a cat pheromone like molecule called act in Adeem in general these cat attracting plants seem to be perfectly safe for cats they aren't addictive but a cat that's often exposed to the stuff can become less sensitive to it so if your kitty likes catnip it's totally okay for them to indulge once in a while once your cat comes down from there catnip induced hi they might settle in for a nap in which case they might exhibit one of the most objectively adorable cat behaviors making biscuits not literal biscuits that would probably be a health code violation somehow I'm talking about meeting a cute boss mush thing they do when they're getting all cozy here's Hank to tell us why they do it so you know when your cat comes up to you and it starts to look at you and it seems happy its purring and then it tries to make biscuits out of your body it's so cute it's cute because kitty loves you but it's also painful because kitties love is made out of little tiny knives why does it do that why there are theories of course some animal behaviorist believe that it's another way for cats to mark their territory since paws have scent lands in them it was popular theory however is that meaning is a neo Tenakee havior a juvenile trait that is retained in adulthood because kittens need their mothers bellies to stimulate milk production this would explain why some adult cats also suckle whatever it is that they're needing however adult wild cats do not need so why have domestic cats retain this trait well neo tonic behaviors are most often found in domesticated animals like house cats partly because over the millennia humans have selected for traits that make animals more social less aggressive and generally nicer to be around but the animals have probably also held on to some of their more social baby-like behavior just because it serves them well when they're around people they got I don't know if you've heard this but wild cats are not super social they don't come up and cuddle so much as just try and eat your flesh felis Silvestri's the ancestor of all domestic cats is a solitary hunter that only socializes with members of his own species when it's time to breed so wild cats only develop social behaviors for two situations one is hey baby why don't you come back to my burrow and we could make a little something-something and the other is caretaking behaviors between mother cats and their kittens unlike wild cats though domesticated cats have a lot of social behaviors as adults because they're not wild loners anymore they have us to cuddle with con treats out of and demand food from so their innate tendencies for snuggling with mom and hitting on the lady cats are put to good use on us hence needing originally a behavior that kittens needed to survive is now a way for adult cats to show that they trust you and feel safe and if you had a soft pelt like mom you wouldn't feel so much of the little knives here's another way to help Kitty feel nice and safe its corrugated it's recyclable it's a cardboard box it turns out if I fits ice it's reflects some pretty ancient feline instincts here's Michael to tell us why cats love boxes so much if you have a cat or have ever spent much time on the Internet you know that cats like to sit in boxes or any other small container adorable no if it fits they six but have you ever wondered why they do this well for one it helps their anxiety I know considering they sleep 12 hours a day they don't really seem like anxious animals but cats experience stress like any other mammal and when they're sitting in a box cats feel like they're in a protected place where they can observe and hunt without worrying about being attacked this makes sense since cats are ambush predators meaning they're always looking to surprise their next target to better understand how boxes help cats calm down one study published in the journal applied animal behavior science observed a group of cats that had just arrived at a new animal shelter new environments can be difficult for cats so stress levels were pretty hot and scientists were able to rank the cat's anxiety by looking at factors like their activity levels and their ear and tail position this system is known as the Kessler and Turner cat stress score now when some of the cats were given boxes to hide in their stress levels went way down in only three days and the effect was observed in nearly all of the animals with boxes for comparison the cats who didn't get boxes eventually reached the same low level of stress but it took them two weeks so especially in high-stress situations it's important for cats to have an enclosed space to retreat to and feel protected this is also true of large cats like tigers and jaguars except instead of hiding in your latest Amazon box they'll hide in trees caves or other concealed spaces but there's another reason cats like boxes so much apparently our houses are too cold while you might enjoy a comfortable 24 degrees Celsius cats prefer much warmer temperatures between 30 and 36 degrees according to a study by the National Research Council by curling up in a cardboard box cats can trap some of their body heat to make up a few of those degrees that's also why cats like basking in sunlight or curling up on top of your heating vent so if you have a kitty at home and you want to keep cat stress at bay just make sure they have a nice cozy box to sits in thanks for watching this extra fluffy compilation please pet all your cats for me and tell them I love them and thanks to our patrons who help us make videos answering questions like these if you're interested in lending a hand-- check out patreon.com/scishow [Music] you [Music]

Channel: SciShow

Views: 1,037,307

Rating: 4.904067 out of 5

Keywords: SciShow, science, Hank, Green, education, learn, Cat, Compilation, Domestic, feline, Cat Eyes, eyes glow, Roar, meow, purr, catnip, box, knead

Id: 50feMMYsFWY

Length: 25min 12sec (1512 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 30 2019