Will a group of gray cats become white cats after residing in North Pole 100 Thousand years?

Answer 1

Definitely not. They will all be dead by then. If you are asking :Will their descendants become white haired? That depends on if one or more of them get a mutation for white fur, and that allows that group to out-compete their gray haired bretheren. I think it is fairly likely, since it obviously already happened with polar bears, polar foxes, and polar rabbits. But Yogi Berra once said"The trouble with predicting the future is that it is really hard." I agree with this.

Answer 2

Can they - yes. The descendents of a group of gray cats can become white cats after living in New York City for 7 years. It is not likely, but it is possible. Being at the north pole would make it less likely, since the cats would not survive to reproduce. The cold would kill them. Once you assume that they do survive you eliminate natural selection which makes the basic theory of evolution pointless.

Answer 3

you WOULD NOT need a mutation. Coloration for cats is controlled by multiple chromosomes and so a population of gray cats contains all the genes necessary to produce a white offspringe already.

the only way the population will tend to be entirely white is if some selective condition exists which would make it disadvantagious to be gray or advantagious to be white. for example, a predator that can spot gray cats, allowing the lighter hued cats to survive more effectively. as such, the population drift would tend towards lighter colored fur and the population would become white fairly quickly. This would most likely (depending on the density of population and the threat from the predator/situation) occur MUCH more rapidly than in 100 thousand years as well.

the industrialization and subsequent environmental reaction showed a shift of moths coloration from white to dark and back to white again in a period of less than one hundred years. white moths could not longer hide on birch bark due to polution during industrialization, so the dark moths outbread. when the environmental concerns kicked in and factories had to clean up, the bark of the trees became clean white again, and the dark moths could easily be seen by predators. the population shifted back to light colored moths which could survive long enough to reproduce.

Answer 4

Maybe, depending upon the genetic coding of the cats. If mutations are common enough in that species of cats, and albino is a common mutation, then yes, after a few generations the white cats (the fittest to survive predators in a snowy environment) would mate the most and slowly the gray population would die off. If mutations didn't occur often or the gentetic variations didn't include color, then they may never become white. (Change within a species is actaully quite common; however, that is not evolution becuase the cats aren't changing species, the fittest are just surviving the longest)

Answer 5

Only if (1) the darker gray ones were killed off faster than the lighter gray ones assuming that a breeding population managed to survive, and (2) one of the surviving cats developed some mutation that gave it a white coat that gave it an even better survival advantage.

Changes in coat color can be selected (either by natural evolution or by selective breeding) in a short amount of time so I think 100K years is perfectly believable.

Answer 6

The conditions in the Arctic would kill off any group of cats. I am not sure if the predators or the cold would get them first. They wouldn't live past the first month, winter or what passes for summer. Most cats don't survive in the outer edges of a suburb let alone in the wilds of the south.Arctic conditions are something you can't begin to understand. Men who are well supplied and prepared die up there cats wouldn't have a chance to survive let alone evolve.

Answer 7

Yes, I think so. In general, 100,000 years is a short time in evolution, but since a mutation that removes a gene product (in this case pigment) is much more likely to occur than one that creates a new gene product, 100,000 years is probably not unlikely in this case.

Answer 8

Possible, if at least one of them has a mutation that causes white fur, and that mutation is not recessive, and it breeds before it dies, and it gives the offspring an advantage the grey cats do not have.

Answer 9

Probably. It took the brown bear from 100 to 250,000 to evolve into the white polar bear of today. http://www.geol.umd.edu/~candela/pbevol.html

Answer 10

No. They will all starve to death before they build a significant population.

If they are fed, camouflage will be of no value in hunting, and natural selection will not occur. (They are fast enough to run away from polar bears.)