Cats revealed in all their glory in stunning new photographs

Cats are distinctive animals: domesticated for centuries, revered and reviled in equal measure throughout history, and bred to suit our own tastes and aesthetic whims. From an internet sensation to his own long-haired Loki, renowned wildlife photographer Tim Flach explores the world of cats in his new book. Felineshowing how intertwined our lives have become.

“At the heart of this project was to unmask the essence of the feline,” explains Flach. Including over 170 images of Flach’s cats, Feline also sees neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach explore why we find big cats so fascinating, and evolutionary biologist Jonathan Losos looks at the species and its evolution.

Pictured above is Stella, a Cornish Rex from Montreal, Canada, whose striking appearance is the result of genetic quirks during her embryonic development. Cats with different colored eyes almost always have a blue eye, Losos writes. The phenomenon is particularly common in completely white cats.

Flach also includes photos of feline Internet sensations such as Sneezy, below, a long-haired Persian with a rare condition called hypertrichosis, which causes his hair to grow profusely. Currently, Atchoum has more than 900,000 followers on Instagram.

Elsewhere, Zuu, an exotic shorthair, takes cuteness to the extreme – a perfectly round ball of fur that’s impossible to resist (below).

Kindness, writes Kringelbach in Felinethis is how baby mammals and avians elicit the care of their elders, thus compensating for their helplessness. Big eyes, rounded features, and big heads are typical baby features that humans (and many other species) find irresistible, and have been shown to trigger activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, a region of the brain responsible for processing emotions. The idea is that if our brains reward us for watching and providing for babies, it makes it easier for our species to survive. But this answer is not limited to our own species. Cats also trigger this same reward zone in humans.

By scanning his own brain as it reacts to Loki, his pet longhair, Flach highlights the cuteness effect and how his orbitofrontal cortex lights up in 130 milliseconds, much faster than conscious thought. “Somehow, on some fundamental level, you can see how kindness comes through,” he says.

But kindness is just one of cats’ evolutionary advantages. They are perfectly adapted to a life of hunting – as demonstrated below by this 8-week-old Sphynx cat, Valentine, who jumps on a cat toy just out of sight.

A cat’s nose has up to 40 times more odor-detecting cells than a human’s. Cats’ whiskers are finely tuned to detect subtle vibrations, useful for moving in the dark and hunting at close range. Their languages ​​are also uniquely shaped. The organ is covered in small papillae, or spikes, made of keratin – the same material that makes our nails and hair. This roughness is useful for grooming, eating and drinking. But the tongue also plays a role in cats’ sense of smell, transferring scents from pheromones to the vomeronasal, or Jacobson’s, organ, located on the roof of the mouth.

But perhaps it’s a cat’s eyes that are their most attractive feature. In the past, superstition suggested that a cat’s glowing eyes indicated the reflection of a devil. In reality, the glowing orbs that reflect light back to you if you point a light at a cat in the dark are the result of special reflective cells called tapetum lucidum, which reflect unabsorbed light back to photoreceptors (rods and cones) in the retina. Cats have a much greater rod density than humans and are also capable of greatly dilating their pupils, allowing them to see at light levels six times lower than humans, Losos writes in his book.

To capture the eyes of cats FelineFlach and his team used special lenses and high-speed flash to show them in a way never seen before, to “show them almost like the light of a lighthouse, like a mirror,” Flach says.