A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
melanistic
A melanistic animal has an excess of dark pigment, so it appears black or nearly so, while retaining the normal pattern underneath. In strong light a melanistic leopard or jaguar shows its rosettes as slightly darker black on black. It is the opposite of leucism and is common enough in some species to be one of two regular color forms rather than an anomaly.
Etymology
The word is built on the Greek for black, the same root behind melanin, melancholy, which was named for the black bile of the old four-humor scheme, and Melanesia. It came into biological use in the nineteenth century alongside albinism and the other terms for pigment variation.
Notes
In some species melanism, is under simple genetic control and can be tracked. Around eleven percent of wild cat species have melanistic forms, and in several the trait appears to be favored in dense wet forest, where a dark animal is harder to see. Melanistic jaguars and leopards are both called panthers in ordinary speech, which is why the word means two different animals depending on which continent you are on.