Re:The First New Cat Species Discovered in 100 Years
by dotancohen on Saturday September 19, 2026 @05:15AM
(#49764757)
I very much appreciate the correction, thank you.
Re:The First New Cat Species Discovered in 100 Years
by skipkey on Saturday September 19, 2026 @11:03AM
(#49767142)
Female orange tabby cats are less common than males though, for much the same reason. They have to get the orange genes from both parents otherwise they are just calico.
Re:The First New Cat Species Discovered in 100 Years
by shagie on Saturday September 19, 2026 @11:24AM
(#49767306)
The same is true of black cats, the other way around. There are fewer orange (or black) female cats because female cats have another option of coloring - tortoise shell (no spots) or calico (with spots). Another way of phrasing it, half of the male cats are orange, the other half are black - female cats have a third option.
Side bit - the wiki page for X chromosome inactivation shows a picture of a tortoise shell cat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-inactivation
http://messybeast.com/tricolours.htm
And white spots gets into interesting questions of embryonic cell differentiation http://messybeast.com/bicolours.htm
The "why are there large splotches of color with a calico cat compared to the much more mottled color pattern of a tortoise shell cat?"
http://messybeast.com/genetics-index.htm has a deep rabbit hole to go down (and that's for domestic cats... http://messybeast.com/wildcats-index.htm for the other cats).
The trim-color house cats refers to all calicos... calicos are white spotted tortoiseshell cats. The "is orange or black" is a X linked gene, so you can have XoXb... and then the x chromosome inactivation kicks in and some groups of cells are activated orange and some are activated black.
But (not white) spots and variations of color get into things like the Agouti gene ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agouti_coloration_genetics ). A tabby cat (black and tan, or orange and darker orange) has no sex linked characteristics.
For a deep dive into the genetics of Agouti and how that influences cat fur colors, http://messybeast.com/genetics-agouti-and-corin.htm