#tabby patterns

[amber-tortoiseshell]

Question about orange and agouti inheritance; do the tabby pattern modifiers (Mc/mc, ticked gene, etc) affect the way an orange cat will look? I know Orange cats are all tabby (epistatic patterns for the win), but do their stripes noticeably change with different genes? Love your blog, was just curious if youd know since google isn’t helpful here.

Yes, every kind of tabby pattern exists with reds. The orange-agouti epistasis just reveals what a nonagouti cat carries, doesn't affect the pattern itself.

[amber-tortoiseshell]

You guys, i finally found and read the full paper, and there's some serious misinterpretation going on here. (I so knew that statistics can't be right!)

So. Both the first article linked by froody, and the wikipedia page suggest 80% of cats are or carry blotched (kinda unclear which one they mean).

But let's see what the actual scientific paper (cited as the source of their claim by both) actually says: "We found that the recessive allele responsible for the blotched-tabby pattern in 80% of present-day cats (W841X) occurred in our ancient dataset not earlier than the Medieval period in SWA (3%, minimum number of total alleles, see Methods) (Fig. 2). Thereafter, its frequency increased in Europe, SWA, and Africa (50% in total), showing late expansion of this typically domestic allele."

The 80% refers not to percent of the cats carrying the blotched pattern, but the percent of blotched cats carrying this particular allele they studied! They even mention the actual percentage of this allele in the cat population in the same paragraph: 50%. (Although i think that's a not entirely modern data point either, but still. Much better and a lot more believable.)

A new cat color has been spotted in Finland. This is really interesting. A lot of common cat coat patterns have only evolved in the last 1,000 years. The tabby cat coloration only evolved in the Middle Ages.

[wickedcriminal]

The LU boys as Warrior Cats 😺

(Top to bottom, left to right) Time, Wind, Four, Hyrule, Legend, Wild, Twilight, Sky, and Warriors!

What should their Warrior names be?

[sorry-not-feeling-it-right-now]

Is it just me or are almost all Burned Bridges fans have Smitten as one of if not their most favourite voice

[ohnopicturesofanothercat]

Bridget has different coloring and markings on either side. The other side is cute with an orange shoulder and the letter M in an oval but this side is pretty interesting too.

[koko2unite]

so happy over lackadaisy S1 teaser I have to draw my blorbos

[marblerose-rue]

halsin (as a warrior cat)

(request)

[aestian]

look at my perfect even weft boy

[catfindr]

[loafbud]

So i made a silly thing last night..... it doesn't have a name yet!

[amber-tortoiseshell]

Hi! Um... Can you please explain to me charcoal tabby, rosette tabby, braided tabby, sokoke tabby, and marbled tabby??

Sorry if I'm asking for too much, but my brain just doesn't get it. It's always better when someone explains something directly to me rather than just some random article that uses confusing terms for beginners.

(Also, are there some letters for some of these?? For example, MC/mc, D/D, etc. Or are all of them polygenetic?? I just need a simple explanation. You don't have to worry about it.)

1. Charcoal

Charcoal comes from the agouti allele of the leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis) called APb, so it's allelic with tabby A (Felis catus agouti) and solid a. For this reason i usually reserve the term 'tabby' for A_ cats, and call Apb_ just 'charcoal' (as opposed to 'charcoal tabby').

A is pretty much dominant over Apb, so A/Apb cats look regular tabbies.

A standard, dark faced, dark patterned charcoal is usually Apb/a genetically, but even Apb/Apb can and usually does look darker than A/_, sometimes even as dark as an Apb/a - these homozygous cats are sometimes called 'double charcoals'. Another, rarely used but in my opinion more fortunate terminology is 'midnight charcoal' for Apb/a and 'twilight charcoal' for Apb/Apb. (It reflects the level of darkness more intuitively.)

Apb/Apb, Apb/a, a/a (vö rosetted tabby below)

Charcoal is simply an agouti allele and as such, it's independent of any other gene, and can be combinated with all cat colors, including every patterns from blotched to servaline.

2. Rosetted, braided, marbled

I haven't found actual proof of this, but very likely these are all caused by the same modifier(s), from respectively the spotted, mackerel and blotched pattern. This hypothetical modifier is sometimes called the bengal modifier because rosetted and marbled are both bengal-specific patterns, and braided is the characteristic of toygers, a breed originating from bengal/domestic cross. The fourth installment of the series would be servaline (modified ticked).

servaline, ticked, rosetted, spotted, braided, mackerel, marbled, blotched

There's no gene yet associated with this modifier. I'm thinking it's probably fairly intermediate (and/or additive polygenic), because bengal crosses are often 'kind of' rosetted.

3. Sokoke

Sokoke is a rare breed with an unique pattern: very overticked blotched tabby. (This means there's little-to-no true solid black in the coat, even the darker parts have some agouti banding.) I don't think there ever were any genetic explanation for this pattern (although i think it can be an extreme form of the chaos polygenes (which themselves are hypothetical too, but you know. It makes sense to me)).

Image source

[scrunglepaws]

Babies! And some other things. :3

[cloverplover]

fogskip fam

[missilemarz]

plssss Draw Jayfeather

yea sure!!

[gracebethartacc]

YAYYY MORE WISH REWRITE THINGYS!! begging on my hands and knees send asks about it like either specific characters or suggestions for what I could do for certain things etc shrugs idk just wanna brainstorm more but not the best at it when I don’t have something to jump off of

[identifying-cat-phenotypes]

My Great Aunt's cat! He's a funny fellow. Can't sheathe his claws! ..he's also got a bad habit of being in low quality photos. He's a fine fellow with a curious tabby pattern! Amber-tortoiseshell suggested abundism back in June. I want to hear your opinon! :]

Last photo taken before I petsat him, keep cats indoors!!

this blurry specimen looks like a black classic tabby with low white! my own cat has a similar effect with the very thick stripes making him look darker, which is similar to abundism!