Why are orange cats more likely to be male, but not black cats??

[Tamerlane]

Okay, maybe this is the confusion. If you take a given situation of say an orange male( O )mating with a black female( oo ) with no other confounding color genes, all females will be calico( X from dad has O, X from mom has o ), all males will be black( because the X comes from mom ). If you have a orange female mating with a black male all females will again be calico, all males will be orange ( X from mom = O ). So in the above simplified situation you get results where all the solid colors are males, all mixed are female ;).

But dominant orange isn’t universally distributed. Remember it can only descend through the female line. Apparently in some populations maybe 10% of cats are carrying it and the 10% that are males aren’t going to pass it on. So MOST cats don’t have a dominant orange gene affecting anything - colors just mix and match randomly. Generally I’m guessing this probably swamps out any slight skewing that might result from the earlier example.

[Malleus_Incus_Stapes]

@Tamerlane

Okay, maybe this is the confusion. If you take a given situation of say an orange male( O )mating with a black female( oo ) with no other confounding color genes, all females will be calico( X from dad has O, X from mom has o ), all males will be black( because the X comes from mom ). If you have a orange female mating with a black male all females will again be calico, all males will be orange ( X from mom = O ). So in the above simplified situation you get results where all the solid colors are males, all mixed are female ;).

Yes, Yes! Thank you, that’s what I was trying to say here!

But dominant orange isn’t universally distributed. Remember it can only descend through the female line. Apparently in some populations maybe 10% of cats are carrying it and the 10% that are males aren’t going to pass it on. So MOST cats don’t have a dominant orange gene affecting anything - colors just mix and match randomly. Generally I’m guessing this probably swamps out any slight skewing that might result from the earlier example.

And that was my [del]best[/del] only guess, that the gene distribution made the difference negligible.

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

@Tamerlane

But I may not know very far :). Cat color genetics can get rather complex with various exceptions and overrides and as much as I’ve dug into the topic out of curiosity, I’m pretty sure I still don’t have it all down. Heck, I think there are three completely different ways of getting a seemingly pure white cat and the least likely of those ( albino ) comes with various sub-iterations ( i.e. incomplete blue-eyed vs. red-eyed ).

Cat coat color is indeed very complex.

Just a summary diagram of the various types (see here) is a full wall-sized poster.

[Chronos]

Quoth (:3= :

If most orange cats were male and most not-orange cats were male, then most cats would be male.

No, because there are also some cats that are both orange and not-orange, and those are (essentially) all female.

[Pilgrim_Shadow]

Ben Franklin said, “All cats are grey in the dark.”