REVEAL YOUR PETS 2 ME >:3c

@Birdy this is all super interesting!!!! so our boy Isaac who's been aptly described as having "a lack of commitment to stripes" might be a ticked tabby? he's a street rescue, so no idea about parentage or siblings

pictures below! warning for anyone squicked by such things, Isaac is missing an eye, although it's long-healed in all these pictures I know one-eyed critters freak people out sometimes.

Spoiler: isaac

here's just him, decent view of face and front legs

Spoiler: isaac next to our other cat fiyero

and here's a better view of his side, with a bonus view of our other cat fiyero who's much more normally colored

 

yep! he's a brown/black ticked tabby!

 

Wait, do boy cats always look like their moms? Because my boyfriend's kitten had a baby that is mostly white with a bit of beigeish at the face, paws and tail, and she's black and white. he's the one not going fully apeshit bananas over the toy in this pic, which is the best i have of him
All of his brothers are black and white, Cassandra (the calico) is the only girl in the family - mom Catniss had two litters because "having a rottweiler in the yard is not cat birth control" didnt became apparent after the first

Spoiler

also do you mind doing your GENE MAGIC wrt my fat babies

Spoiler

 

Today has been a marvelous Day of Catte

 

also i have found this picture of the cat family that is shitty but also amazing because B E H O L D

Spoiler

 

lasers

 

It looks like you walked in on some sort of mystic ritual.

 

@witchknights
May I ask for some clarification? The three cats in the top picture are all brothers from the same litter, right? And their mother is black and white?

The bottom two are brother and sister, right? Is the calico in that picture Cassandra, and are they related to the cats in the top picture?

 

@Kit all of these cats are winners but also congrats on the sleepy kittos, i'm so fond of napcats and their toebeans

they sleepa.... they nappa. They nappasleepa.

 

Yes, they are all siblings! Mother is Catniss. The cat in question is from the first litter, and the others in the picture are from the second, including Cassandra and her brother Garrus, in the bottom pic.

Spoiler: NEWLY BIRTHED BEANS

We guessed that the father of the second litter is Pouncelot the Magnificent, a stray we were seeing around a lot during the time of the pregnancy.

 

So yeah; the two bigger cats in the first picture are brothers from the same litter, and the smaller is their brother from the second litter. the calico and the black and white dude in the second picture, Cassandra and Garrus, are also their siblings from the second litter. in the third picture, with the evil magick lasers, there are all four kitties from the second litter and also their older brother from the first litter.

 

@witchknights

Boy cats are always the same base color as their mothers. This ignores tabbying, dilution, white markings, silver, and most salient to your boy, colorpoint

As far as I can tell, this aberrant boy is a bicolor seal point! Colorpoint is the gene that results in the dark mask, tail, and feet on Siamese cats, but it can appear outside that breed. The mechanism it works by is absolutely fascinating - the recessive colorpoint allele causes a mutation in one of the proteins that helps build pigment, which causes the protein to degrade when it's too hot. Colorpoint kittens are born pure white, because it's hot inside a cat. Once they're born, the protein will start depositing pigment, but can't do it as effficiently as non-mutant protein. So more pigment gets deposited in the coolest areas of the body - the face, the feet, and the tail, while the main body gets a little pigment but stays pale compared to the extremities. Colorpoint cats tend to darken as they age, and cats who live in cooler climates will be darker all over compared to ones who live in warmer climates!

Seal point is what you get when the base color of the pointed cat is black. So he still has his mother's base color, but looks brown cause of how his pigment is (or isn't) getting deposited. He's also got a white face and chest, it looks like - just like a non-point cat, these areas just don't express pigment at all and will stay white all his life. Since he's another color and white, he's a bicolor. So, seal point bicolor.

This is actually really unusual, because like I said, colorpoint is recessive - in order for a kitten to have it, both their parents must at least be carriers. So we know Catniss is carrying a recessive allele for colorpoint - quite unusual for an ordinary domestic shorthair. The father also had to be colorpoint or carrying it, but he could've been any color. (He was also solid or tabby carrying solid, cause again, tabby is dominant to solid. Tabby colorpoints do exist - they're called lynx points for whatever reason) The brother from that litter is just a black van with no colorpoint because he only had a 50% chance at best to get the necessary 2 copies of the allele. The dad also probably had quite a lot of white on him as well.

It's genetically possible that Catniss' second litter was fathered by Pouncelot. Tortoishell and calico cats have a black parent and a red parent. (Or a tortie mom and black dad, or a tortie mom and red dad, but ANYWAY.) Cassandra and her littermates had a red dad, and he also would have had some white spotting to account for how much white there is on the kittens. So it certainly could've been Pounce!

(I almost want to say Pounce looks like a colorpoint, but I can't tell from that distance. Colorpoint cats always have blue eyes, though. If your boy has blue eyes, or Pounce does, they are for certain colorpoints.)

Also, any of Catniss' children could be secretly carrying the colorpoint allele. Their brother is powerfully lucky, but they hide hidden potential. Be aware.

So anyway: Catniss is a black bicolor, as is Garrus. Cassandra is a calico. The other brothers are black vans or black bicolors. The fortunate boy is a bicolor seal point.

 

@Birdy I love both the information you're providing and the pics that people are asking you to look at. You have made my day.

 

i'm glad I could

 

Pouncelot did/does have blue eyes! (Sadly I have no idea what happened to him, but rumour has it that he has a home now. We were trying to catch him and while he got friendly enough to pee on my laundry, he wouldnt let us touch him). We also have another adopted stray with the same markings as the Oddity, but he had been degonaded long before we found Catniss in the trash, so he couldnt be the father

One of the Oddity's brothers also has long hair, so im assuming that the father was long haired too, or no?

What I am taking from it is that someone had a Siamese that got really busy for a while some four to six years ago

 

@Birdy could you expound a little on how the coat-type gene works for female cats? Lupin and Tiger were both longhaired and from the same litter, but Tig's fur was much thinner and lacked her sister's thick cold-weather undercoat.

Their mother was a tortoiseshell stray, and we suspect they might have different fathers while still having been littermates :3

 

I REMEMBER THAT because I saw a post on Tumblr of a Siamese that had his butt shaved for surgery, and since his butt was cold with no fur, his fur grew in brown and he had pants for a while.

 

hey hey hey @Birdy wanna take a gander at Fergus and Madelyn the beauteous tabby Maine Coons??? they are brother and sister!! i wish i had a better Madelyn picture but she is a bright tabby calico on top

(steve pictures too but he is just black with secret white ploofs)

Spoiler: cats cats cats

 

3x floof

3x beauty

 

That would make him a flame point (red cat with colorpoint), though he'd be quite dark compared to most flame point cats:

Actually, just like colorpoint, long hair is recessive, so a shorthaired cat can have longhaired kittens. Catniss has to be carrying the allele for long hair in order for one of her sons to be longhaired, and the father could either be longhaired or short carrying long!

It's therefore possible that Pounce is the father of both litters. Carrier + Colorpoint has a 50% percent chance for colorpoint kittens, so if he was the dad of both you'd expect to see colorpoints in the second litter too, but gene assortment is entirely random, and 50% chance of a pattern showing up does not mean half the offspring will definitely have that pattern.

The only way to tell would be to either outbreed the second litter to colorpointed cats (if Pounce really was their dad, they'd all be carrying colorpoint) or inbreed the boys to their mom and Cassandra to Odd Brother. I am not suggesting you do either of these things!!!

I hope Pounce has a good home.

So yep, long hair is recessive, and if the mom was shorthaired, she was carrying long. The dad could've been a shorthaired carrier or longhaired. It is not one of the genes affected by sex.

That's unfortunately where it stops being simple. 4 separate mutations causing long hair have arose in cats in different places at different times and it is largely unknown how these interact with each other. It's not really recognized in the breeding world as its own type, but there does seem to be such a thing as a "semi-longhair" cat, one who has long fur but lacks the fluffy undercoat - this is the fur type of the Turkish Angora and related breeds. The presence or absence of the undercoat may be caused by another gene but this only speculation, mostly because no one has proposed a hypothesis of how such a gene would act on the three separate layers of the coat. A cat coat has three layers - guard hair, awn hairs, and down hairs. I would say Tig probably had only guard hairs, the outermost hairs on the coat. This occurs in certain breeds such as the Javanese.

It is possible for cats in a litter to have different fathers. Female cats are induced ovulators - they release eggs upon copulation. The eggs live in the Fallopian tubes for 24 hours, so if the cat mates with more than one male during this period they all have a chance of fertilizing an egg or two. Moreover, every copulation causes more eggs to be released, increasing the chances of fertilization. This is called superfecundation. While it is possible for every kitten in a litter to have a different father, it's not terribly likely.

TL;DR coat length is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯