Cat Genetics - Tumblr Posts

Good evening I’m fucking losing my mind over Jellie’s coat color and genetics what do you fucking mean she has red patches I’ve never noticed that have been diluted to cream and that means she’s a tortoiseshell

Look!!! Look at that!!!!! That is red and if you look closer you can see it behind her legs and dispersed throughout her coat. TRICKY LITTLE GIRL!!!!

I’ve been thinking this whole time she’s a black silver classic tabby but NO she’s a black tortoiseshell silver classic tabby with white.

girl your genes need to CALM DOWN

Anyways I think that Scar has all the rights to make an entire theme park based off of her or something because she’s so pretty and cool.

And the reason I did all this research is because I’m making a fic where she has kittens that are called the Jamlets and I just need you guys to know how much work I’m putting into it and also that her kittens are adorable. Thank you that’s all.

Cat color chart!

OPEN IN A NEW TAB TO ZOOM IN

This doesn’t contain eeeeevery single possible color mutation but it should cover the most common/interesting ones! 

I’m not saying everything on this chart is 100% anatomically/genetically correct, but I tried to simplify it as much as I could! 

Feel free to use this for your own designs!

HELL YEAH!!!!!

I made Tigerstars family in it

Tigerstar, Sasha, Goldenflower

Sashas kits

Tadpole (why are you black), Hawkfroat and Mothwing

Goldenflowers kits

Brambleclaw and Tawnypelt

+ Lynxkit and Swiftpaw

HI... I've made another extremely self indulgent picrew

I made the majority of this in one night and polished it for another two days, this thing was built purely in a cat genetics autism fueled need to see if it was possible to make

it's not a perfect visual representation of all possible cat colours, there's only so much I can do within picrew's simple image layering, but I've done my best to make most colours look close to real life or at least nice looking

there's instructions included if you want to use it the way I built it to be used, but they're completely optional and you're welcome to just mess around with it with no rules if you prefer!

-> https://picrew.me/image_maker/2446358

the orange one has to be male if that's the mother. an orange female kitten can only be born to two totally orange parents, and all the kittens of those two parents would be orange

i heard they invented a new kind of cat, 'salt licorice'. what do u think?

yes the salmiak/salt licorice/finnish mutation!! they actually discovered it in the 2000s in a feral population but just recently identified the genetic mutation that causes it :)

not a geneticist, but from what i understand it’s caused by a large deletion downstream from the KIT gene. the KIT gene does a lot of things, but it’s associated with white spotting in cats! mutations of the KIT gene are also associated with white spotting in other animals :)

my favorite actual chimera moonpaw designs are the ones where one part is black and one part is orange.

because of the way inheritance of the orange gene works, a 100% biologically female chimera can’t be orange and black.

with an orange mother and an orange father, all kittens in the litter would be orange.

with an orange mother and a black father, all male kittens would be orange and all female kittens would be tortoiseshell.

with a tortoiseshell mother and an orange father, a female kitten could be (with a 1 in 4 chance) orange or, more likely, tortoiseshell. half of all female kittens will be orange and half of all female kittens will be tortoiseshell, meaning 1 in 4 kittens will be orange mollies. male kittens could be black or orange.

with a black mother and an orange father, female kittens would be tortoiseshell and male kittens would be black.

(with a black mother and a black father, no kittens would be orange, obviously.)

the black/orange chimera moonpaw designs are intersex, trans, or both!

as someone who's special interest in cats, that's fucking insane because orange female cats aren't even that rare? something like 60-75% of orange cats are male but that's. there's so many orange female cats, those vets genuinely know nothing about cat genetics huh

I need humane societies and shelters and articles talking about intersex cats to be less weird about being intersex immediately.

hey! it looks really good genetics wise except for the paws!

the colorpoint gene is a heat map of the cat’s body; all extremities (face, ears, paws, and tail) end up darkening because those areas get colder than the rest of the body! in order to have paws like that they’d need to also have white on them, which is possible (since white spotting is a separate gene) but that doesn’t seem to be what you’ve represented here!

this is my idea for a Moonpaw design, a pointed tortoiseshell where some of her tortie patches are dilute and some are not. i gave her blue eyes bc of the colorpointing. not sure if a chimera like this is technically possible or exactly how colorpoint genes work as i am still learning — if it’s not please correct me and *explain why*

base by: PaperTiger-63

you're right, but there'd be no way to tell without genetic testing unless the tabby patches were non-mackerel. the more damning piece of "actually chimera" evidence would be if moonpaw was intersex and/or amab transgender, because there's no combination of parents that could produce an orange female kitten and a black female kitten in the same litter.

idk if i'll get burned at the stake for this but in defense of moonpaw's canon design being a chimera [unrelated to the split face; that is notably not a sign of chimerism]

i don't think a regular cat can be solid and tabby at the same time [considering how the agouti gene works, they are one or the other], so if moonpaw's orange is just straight tabby and not solid presenting as tabby due to the red gene, this design could absolutely be a chimera!

take all of this w a grain of salt tho [and correct me if i'm wrong on anything] i am just a guy on the internet who's interested in cat genetics

hi there! idk how much you know/care about cat genetics, but i know enough to make an educated guess about their likelihood of having different fathers--

it looks like one kitten is a black shorthair and one kitten is a tortoiseshell shorthair with low white spotting, and they're both solid (although philomena has some beautiful ghost striping!). this means that, at least with the three or four "major" genes that are observable, they actually are extremely similar!

assuming both kittens are female (which i'm fairly certain they are, but i wouldn't know): if their mother is tortoiseshell, they probably have the same father. if their mother is black (or otherwise not partially orange/cream), they actually *must* have different fathers!

as an additional fun fact, their growth rate is probably related to their birth weight! heavier kittens tend to grow up a little faster than their siblings :)

I still think it’s crazy how Philomena and Odette are littermates and grew up in the same environment but have completely different personalities, different appearances down to coat length/texture and slightly different growth rates. Cat genetics are wild. Also cats born in the same litter can have different fathers due to superfecundation. Not sure that’s what happened with them but it’s so interesting.

Holy shiiittt???? (Not me researching this for my characters)

made these studying cat genetics over the past 2 weeks!

i felt like there weren't enough visual guides of cat genetics so i went ahead and made some simple ones, my main references were Sparrow's Garden the website, Sparrow's Garden the blog, Messybeast, and The Little Carnivore.

Please only use these for general reference and not for tracing, using as a base, or reposting!! You can trace the poses for practice, but please don't post them if you do so. Please don't use them as a free Base, either.