Is calico a possible Creasia coat color?

Ah, such a simple question, but so complicated to answer! Is it possible? Maybe. Likely to be expressed? No. You probably know how calicos are produced and anyone who doesn't can google that. Short review: you need at least one of the color alleles (in the case of the domestic cat, the black/red) located on the X chromosome. So males are always homozygous, but females can be heterozygous. Then you need the thing where neither color is dominant. Instead, females express both colors. This event alone will produce a tortie, not a calico. To get calico, you need one more thing: the piebald gene, which is present in many animals. It produces random colorless white patches, interspersed with the underlying color(s). Finally, in order to get a classic calico, you need the female zygote to have discarded her extra Xs (turned them into bar bodies) early enough to produce solid patches instead of a more blended coat. NOW you have a classic mi-ke calico. She will almost always be female, but can be male XXY or male chimera (having absorbed his twin!) or possibly an even rarer genetic event. On the flip side, solid red or black cats are male something like 75% of the time. Female solids would be homozygous for the trait, which is rarer. There are other genes that effect cat coat color and pattern, and of course there can always be new mutations, but those are the basics. Question: is color a sex-linked gene in other species of cats? Big cats have many things in common with domestic cats. Is this one of them? I could not find an answer to this. Probably no. But... I did have Caraca say at one point when she and Halvery were trying to reproduce Roup's color, "Solids are more likely to be male." This strongly suggests that some aspect of creasia color is on the X. So even if this is unlikely for big cats in our world, I have sort of committed to it on Lidian. But... Is the piebald gene present in other cats besides domestic cats? Again, no answer. The closest I could find was the white band gene that produces golden tabby tigers. It is not actually piebald, though. It's a completely different gene. If you read the wikipedia article about golden tabby tigers, you will notice a lot of inbreeding. This is how most usual colors in domestic (and semi-domestic) animals get a foothold. People notice a single unique mutation, decide they love it, and do some aggressive inbreeding to produce homozygous individuals. Many domestic animals have very shallow gene pools. Obviously, most of them handle it just fine. Wild animals avoid inbreeding. Nature tends towards outbreeding. Maximizing genetic diversity is a survival strategy, so animals evolve various barriers to inbreeding. There ARE more color variations in big cats that live in jungles/forests vs open plains. Tigers and leopards have more color variations than African lions. It doesn't seem to affect their odds of survival as much. Creasia live in dense forest, so it makes sense that they have some color variation. Rare mutations would pop up, but they would quickly disappear unless the creasia started selecting for them. So if they decided that piebald was fabulously beautiful and everyone wanted to have babies with those cats, they might quickly develop a piebald trait that is regularly expressed. But they tend to like colors that are "good for hunting," and those are browns/grays/black. They are starting to value other traits and expand their tastes, though. Anyway - the potential for something like a calico is probably in there somewhere. To specifically get calico, I think you'd see piebald popping up first.

if you vote yes, please tell me which color(s)!

um. can i be honest. with you. i think it's dumb as fuck when people talk about great house genetics in asoiaf as if they're a plot hole or a world building flaw and not like. a very cute and fun and purposeful feature of the world. you fr have no sense of whimsy.

kitty colony au anybody?

Saw a very weird little fella at the shelter today! Looks like maybe smoke? But with weird silver patches, very odd (the lighter parts also look like they're shaved/shorter in the video but they aren't, the fur felt just the same irl)

@pangur-and-grim and @talesfromtreatment are my two "what color cat is that" people so sorry for the pings

(little edit with the pictures from my previous rb since this blew up. nakey legs!)

Genuine question, is the two-faced kitten phenomenon not related to chimerism?

Not always! Sometimes it is!

Like I explained, a chimera is a fusion of two fully fertilized zygotes in one body. The chimeras we're talking about are Natural Fusion Chimeras: the result of two fully fertilized zygotes which fused together in utero.

Though the "split face" is the most dramatic example of it, many chimeras are actually fused in patches all over the body. This can resemble a mosaic, which is where that other term "mosaicism" comes from!

But like I explained, it's important to understand that chimerism and mosaicism are actually two VERY different things under the hood, which can be confused for each other if you don't actually know what the terms mean.

(Chimera = Two full sets of zygotes. Mosaic = one zygote with extra info.)

This is a chimera dog, his name is Tiger!

Tiger's face is not split. He has black patches! This is one type of chimera!

Here is another example of a chimera, this time a cat with the split face in question. His name is Narnia.

Chimeras are a fusion of two sets of genes, and that expression doesn't have to "meet in the middle." It just happens to occur sometimes, because the majority of multi-cellular life on earth is bilaterally symmetrical.

That's fancy talk for most animals being mirrored on both sides. It's a pattern in nature. A cleft palette is most common in the middle of the lip, having two faces splits a skull down the middle, having a divided tail happens at the tip, etc.

There's evolutionary theories about it, but bottom line is that it's just an observable fact of the natural world. Animals are usually bilaterally symmetrical, so if it's going to NOT be symmetrical, it will happen split down the center.

So, torties can just have the split face and it's nothing peculiar.

Like this one! Probably not a chimera, just a cute tortie with a split face pattern! Tortoishells are known best for it because they're common and beautiful, but they can be any two colors.

Here's one who's gold, gray, and white. Also genetically a tortie but I'm actually not a cat genetics enthusiast, you'll have to ask someone else for that info

Here's the pattern in black and white.

So, in a nutshell, the canon design for Moonpaw is actually not uncommon in nature, nor is it a dead ringer for being a TRUE chimera. Not even with the heterochromia, though it does help.

It is your mission and moral imperative to make your Moonpaw design as BONKERS as possible. NO RULES. SMASH TWO CATS TOGETHER. GO NUTS!

What decides how a black tabby will look? Because these are all black tabbies (as far as I'm aware )and yet they all look different.

And I don't mean the tabby patterns (Mackerel, Classic, Ticked, etc.) I mean their colors

can anybody tell me what color my boy Pudge is? We took him in about a year ago. Vet says he's about 5 years old. I assume he's some British Shorthair mix

@pangur-and-grim @amber-tortoiseshell any thoughts?

reaching out to cat genetics loving tumblr to see everyone’s opinion on my little guy’s color :]

none of us can tell if he’s seal or chocolate, as his color has been changing so much as he’s aged. here’s some pictures spanning from when we first got him (~8 weeks) to the present (~5 months)

it’s something i’ve been curious about lately, especially since he’s just a little accident randombred dude we got from a buddy for free. i’ll be thrilled to see what anyone thinks :]

A new update to the cat breed masterlist containing more unique patterns such as Point, Ghost Tabby and Smoke cats!

i love your designs! can i request my silly little lad foxleap?

Foxleap

I made a basic cat coat color sheet to help me with my designs! hopefully I wont make as many mistakes now heh. Still my designs are only vaguely genetically accurate so i take some artistic liberties

Temperature-sensitive colors

The temperature-sensitivity of certain cat colorations is a spectacular phenomenon. Different parts of the cat will show different shades, since the efficiency of pigment production now depends on the local temperature, so it works better on the extremities than on the body.

Here's a picture of the heat emmission pattern of a cat, and next to it a photo of a colorpoint kitty:

Source: this video

It really is similar, isn't it?

You can follow this effect on kittens: before they are born, they bath in the even warmth of the womb, so first they’re evenly white colored, then quickly start to gain their marks: first only on the nose, the ears and the tail, only later a full mask and darker legs.

The development of Best Angel's Fernando, a black point mitted ragdoll:

Mink and sepia cats also do this, but they are darker at every given point then their pointed equivalents.

Meowmar’s Hel, black sepia burmese:

This temperature sensitivity works on adult cats, too: if a cat loses some of its fur for some reason, and later it grows back, it’ll be noticeably darker then the surrounding area, because the naked skin means the temperature is lower there.

This cat from messybeast had a leg injury that needed surgery, so now he wears pants until the next molt.

An interesting question is whether the karpati pattern is temperature-based or not. It often called "reverse colorpoint", because the most whitish areas are suspiciusly the same as on colorpoints: limbs, face, ears. It also changes most in the first months - however the direction of the change is the same: they born light and darken with age.

The development of Pablo Grey Heart, a black karpati transylvanian cat (he's one of the lighter kittens I believe):

Fantasy Eyes N8 - Meow Collection

COMPLETE COLLECTION

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If you get this, answer w/ three random facts about yourself and send it to the last seven blogs in your notifs. anon or not, doesn’t matter, let’s get to know the person behind the blog!

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Genetic Mutation Underlying Finland’s ‘Salty Liquorice’ Cats Identified, out of University of Helsinki🇫🇮 + Wisdom Panel, published by Animal Genetics

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