Comparing Cats: A Discussion of Similarities & Differences

[tigerluver]

@Ngala , that is a very interesting and well thought hypothesis. Perhaps it could have some role. Have you read of this study on human nares? For humans, they came to this conclusion: "The positive slopes indicate that individuals from warm-humid climates, on average, tend to have wider nares whereas individuals from cool-dry climates tend to have narrower nares." The explanation was "Inhaled air reaches 90% of the required temperature and humidity levels before even reaching the nasopharynx, implicating the nasal cavity, especially the turbinates, as the major conditioning apparatus in the respiratory tract [4,5]. We also know that the geometry of the nasal airways influences the velocity of inspired air [4,7,45]. Narrow airways in cold-dry climates might allow better conditioning by increasing the turbulence in inspired air as it reaches the turbinates, thereby facilitating contact with the nasal mucosa [5]. However, we note that nostril area does not show unusually high differentiation across populations, which suggests that it is not the size of the nostrils but the shape that might be functionally important."

This pattern may hold up in cats to some degree, as some of the smaller cooler area cats have smaller nares. We'd need to find the localities of all individuals due to the broad range of some these very adaptable species. Reply