Why doesn’t there seem to be any green mammals? Most mammals try to blend into their surroundings. Why then do we not have mammals to match the colours of leaves and grass? Not all predators are colour-blind. There’s the current thread about cats and dogs possibly seeing in colour, humans of course, and big predatory birds like eagles. So why are the only furry green creatures Grinches?
Well-It’s not always green outside everywhere. That might be one reason. I find that animals that are colored gray are hard to see all the time.
IIRC, sloths are a literally moldy green.
What do you mean no green mammals? I’m a mammal and I’m green!
Seriously, now. There’s a spanish farm rat that has a dark blue-greenish fur.
Here’s a person who’s working the problem: Green Mammals
Wouldn’ it have something to do with the pigments that it takes to make something green? There’s Chlorophyll in plants and there’s melanin and other things in animals, maybe mammals don’t produce that pigment? shrug
Kitty
Different amounts of melanin produce different pigments in the skin, hair or feathers.
- Cinnamomeous - cinnamon-colored
- Erythrism - having high levels of rufous (phaeomelanin) present, sometimes replacing the darker eumelanins - ‘reddish-morph’
- Eumelanins - blackish-brown pigments found in the skin, hair or plumage of an individual.
- Ferruginous - Rusty brown
- Fuscous - Brownish-black
- Isabelline - Brown, tinged with reddish-yellow
- Melanism - Unusually high levels of blackish-brown pigments ‘dark-morph’
- Ochraceous - Ochre-colored, or yellowish-brown
- Plumbeous - Lead-colored or greyish-blue
- Rufescent - tinged with rufous-brown
- Sepia - Dark reddish-brown, like the color of ink from Sepia cuttlefish
Greens are produced by something else, and as soon as I fing my bird biology book, I can tell you. IIRC, it is not normally found in mammals. Let me check my facts and I’ll get back to this.
IIRC, most of the vivid colour in birds isn’t from pigment at all, but from light interference in layers of tissue in their feathers. Oil slicks work the same way.
Green mammals could conceivably show up if they had a mutation in their melanin genes to make a green pigment instead, but it might not be all that much of an advantage. Brown or grey make pretty good camouflage by themselves, and get even better if they’re blotchy (to break up the outline) or arranged to mimic the animal’s usual surroundings.
A biochemist might be able to say whether melanin synthesis could be diverted to green.
Sloths have stuff growing on them. The sloth itself is not green.
I think to answer this, you have to ask, “Under what circumstances would being green be advantageous?” Grassland mammals, for example, would not last long if they were green, simply because as the seasons change, so does the color of the grass. They would need to be able to change color with the seasons, much as the snowshoe hare does.
In general, being green isn’t useful for large mammals (say, wolf-sized or larger), since they would rarely be seen against an all-green background. Being green would also not be terribly useful in any area where changing seasons result in the foliage changing color, unless as I mentioned above, the animal could change color as well (something that is, as one might imagine, more difficult to do with hair than scales). Even in equatorial rainforests, where green is certainly prevalent, there doesn’t tend to be a great deal of green ground cover about. Even if there is a lot of undergrowth about, the undergrowth itself would provide cover, so a typically-mammalian color would not be a problem.
I would think one is most likely to find green mammals among arboreal populations. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that three of the mammals mentioned in beatle’s link are monkeys, and one is a bat (although, admittedly, I do not know if the monkeys mentioned are truly arboreal or not - I’m guessing :D). Even among arboreal creatures, however, it probably makes more sense to simply be able to flee from predators than to evolve green fur.
Of course, we can always manufacture green animals.