page_title: Piebald
section_title: Other animals
hierarchical_section_title: Piebald / Other animals
caption_attribution_description: Pica pica English: European Magpie or Common Magpie in Poland. Polski: Sroka
context_page_description: A piebald or pied animal is one that has a pattern of unpigmented spots on a pigmented background of hair, feathers or scales. Thus a piebald black and white dog is a black dog with white spots. The animal's skin under the white background is not pigmented.
  Location of the unpigmented spots is dependent on the migration of melanoblasts from the neural crest to paired bilateral locations in the skin of the early embryo. The resulting pattern appears symmetrical only if melanoblasts migrate to both locations of a pair and proliferate to the same degree in both locations. The appearance of symmetry can be obliterated if the proliferation of the melanocytes within the developing spots is so great that the sizes of the spots increase to the point that some of the spots merge, leaving only small areas of the white background among the spots and at the tips of the extremities.
  Animals with this pattern may include birds, cats, cattle, dogs, foxes, horses, cetaceans, pigs, and snakes. Some animals also exhibit colouration of the irises of the eye that match the surrounding skin. The underlying genetic cause is related to a condition known as leucism.
context_section_description: The various types of magpie gave their name to pied coloration.  The bald eagle derives its name from the word "piebald" in reference to the contrast of its white head and tail with dark body. Nadine Gordimer used the term in The Conservationist when referring to kingfishers.
  Many other animal species may also be "pied" or piebald including, but not limited to, birds and squirrels. Snakes, especially ball pythons and corn snakes, may also exhibit seemingly varying patches of completely pigmentless scales along with patches of pigmented scales. In 2013, a piebald blood python was discovered in Sumatra.  Some domesticated foxes born from the Russian Institute of Cytology and Genetics also carry this coloring.
  Bicolor cats carry the white spotting gene (incorrectly called the piebald gene). The same pattern that applies to cats also applies to dogs when the white spotting gene involved is indeed piebald and not another white-causing gene found in dogs. The piebald gene is also found in cows, ferrets, domestic goats, goldfish, guinea pigs, hamsters, rabbits, and fancy rats.
  Holstein and Simmental breeds of cattle typically exhibit piebaldism.
caption: Eurasian magpie (P. pica)
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