A couple of Caturdays ago, I made a post about how cool it would be to splice flamingo genes into a Siamese cat to get a cat with pink extremities (but I was kidding! I'm actually against messing with animals like that...I'm convinced it'll accidentally create a disease that wipes humankind off the face of the planet).
My scientist friend Vikram commented on the Siamese cat post with: "Are you aware of the GFP and RFP cats? Scientists successfully took a gene from jellyfish which encodes a green fluorescent protein (GFP) that causes the jellyfish to glow green, and inserted it into the cat genome. The result was cats that glow green (or red with the RFP variant) under UV or blue light."
What an abomination! What a creepy, creepy thing to do! But also? REALLY COOL-LOOKING:
You'll notice it's the cat's skin that glows red, not the fur - which is why the glow is only visible in places where the cat has little or no hair. When you think about it, then, the rear view of one of these cats would be like a single, searing halogen spotlight: "Argh, Fluffy, high beams! Can't you put your tail down? I'm trying to sleep!"
Oh, wait, the cats don't glow in the dark, they glow in black light. So cat-anus likely won't be keeping you awake unless you and your glowing cat are at a dance club and you've picked the dumbest time ever to try to take a nap. Or unless the cat just likes to shove his asshole randomly in your face (which most of them do, it seems). There's no dozing off when a cat backs his poop chute up into your eye socket, glow or no glow.
Tangent: can you imagine if someone let some glowing cats loose in a blacklit room with some glowing mice and filmed the resulting shenanigans? It'd be like Animal Kingdom meets Tron. Awesome.
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| "You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic." |
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