Well, just one girl, and she’s not actually in the same pic as the kittens. But, some shots of my daughter with Waffles, who became a mama cat tuesday night.
The kittens will by syrup, O.J., hashbrowns and bacon.
Have we overdosed on cute yet? No? Well, here’s the pictures.
I think you are confused.
1)a black and white cat is not a calico. A calico has three colors (black, white & brown in various shades – but note that tabby is a pattern, not a color, just trust me on that).
Since each X chromosome can carry 2 colors, all calico cats are female, unless they are genetically unusual (ie XXY).
Well, we’re in the process of sorting kittens by name. The one with the white collar around the neck is O.J. I saw him chawing on a sibling. That O.J. has a bite to it. The darkest one is Bacon. That bacon is burnt. Hashbrowns and Syrup are indeterminate. I can only hope one is male, and one female.
Well, when Waffles first showed up, I was calling her ‘Fatima’ (Face on, it kinda looks like she has a veil, kinda) But the landlord and his GF were calling her Waffles, so I went with it, The spots on her back do look like waffles, k…sort of.
So, we kept the breakfast theme for the kittens. Belgian Grand Slam, anyone?
Close, but not exactly - the key color is orange. The ( dominant ) gene that causes orange color only occurs on the X chromosome. So a male ( excluding the rare, usually sterile, Klinefelter’s males, like Zeriel’s examples ) can only ever get one copy, so they have a binary result. Either they get “O” and end up orange or they get “o” and are not.
But females get two copies and therefore can have three potential results. They can be “OO”, which gives you an orange female. Or “oo” which gives a female with no orange. Or they get “Oo” which results in a mosaic, with scattered orange and another color ( some variant of black/brown/grey ). If it is just two colors ( more or less ), you get a tortoiseshell. If in addition to those basic two, you also get the effect of the piebald gene coming into play, which will overlay the two-color pattern with white patches/spots, you get a calico.
The above also explains why male orange cats are somewhat more common than females.
Thanks. I adore my Molly. Her littermates were another calico girl, an orange boy, and a black boy, which ties in nicely with **Tamerlane’s ** genetics lesson above. Molly, Polly and Punky (orange boy) all got the orange (O) gene, and Smut (black, of course) did not!
Her littermates were another calico girl, an orange boy, and a black boy, which ties in nicely with **Tamerlane’s ** genetics lesson above. Molly, Polly and