If you see spots before your eyes when you look at your Appaloosa, chances are your horse's night vision is as strong as any other horse. But if your Appaloosa is lacking spots on his blanket area, he might not be seeing much at all in the dark.

That's because of the connection between certain homozygous forms of "leopard complex" spotting and congenital stationary night blindness (CSNB) in Appaloosa-patterned horses, recently discovered by researchers at the University of Tampa and the University of Saskatchewan. A single gene, named TRPM1, was determined to be the likely cause of both phenomena in the Appaloosa breed