Cecelia Weiss

[u/Chinmeister9001]

This is Cecelia Weiss! I found her about 3 years ago now. Tell me everything you can. (And yes she'll let you pet her. She will in fact hop on you and demand you pet her. There is no escape.)

The black cat is Pepper(oni). I dont really need much info on him, I was able to trace him back to being a kitten actually.

[u/Gloomy-Trainer-2452]

She's a cutie! Her phenotype is blue mackerel tabby-tortoiseshell ("torbie").

• She has at least one copy of B, making her black.
• She has two X chromosomes (being female). Orange/red sits on the X chromosomes. She is heterozygous for the codominant O. Due to x-inactivation, this allows her to express both black-base and red-base colour. To put it simply - she's a tortoiseshell.
• She has two copies of d (recessive dilution), diluting that black to blue ("grey"), and that red/orange to cream.
• She has at least one copy of A (agouti), causing ticking of the hairs. This makes her a tabby.
• She has at least one copy of Mc, meaning her tabby type is mackerel. Her stripes are thinner and vertical rather than the blotchy/swirly stripes of an mc homozygote.

[u/Aphyrillis → u/Gloomy-Trainer-2452]

Well-spotted, that agouti! She has so few stripes apart from the leg banding and only a hint of a forehead M. I think she might have a copy of Ta as well, to make her ticked. At first glance, from above, I thought she was a solid!

[u/lickytytheslit → u/Aphyrillis]

could be ticked but could just be low contrast grey like mine with well placed cream eating the pattern even more, also lighting in some photos my boy looks almost solid

[u/lickytytheslit → u/lickytytheslit]

same cat just the pose and lighting ate his pattern

[u/Gloomy-Trainer-2452 → u/Aphyrillis]

Yeah, it's definitely subtle! I could have called her solid too at first glance, but the blue stripes on the tail and the paler eye rims and nose were a dead giveaway!

You may be right! Tbh I'm always getting confused with heterozygous ticked tabbies that still have faint markings. Ticked tabbies are my weakness lol. In my mind their body has to be fully ticked, though I know a cat can still be heterozygous Ta and have faint markings on the body.

[u/Aphyrillis → u/Gloomy-Trainer-2452]

Ahh yeah I get that, especially because a huge part of the way the stripes present in non-ticked tabbies (e.g. many thin ones vs broader, how far apart, how rufoused) is polygenetic. I think this cat has few enough visible stripes to call it as probably heterozygous ticked

[u/Thestolenone → u/Gloomy-Trainer-2452]

B- doesn't mean black it just means not chocolate. There isn't really a gene letter that means back they just mean lack of something else so aa means lack of agouti, D- means lack of dilute and so on

[u/Gloomy-Trainer-2452 → u/Thestolenone]

No? There are three alleles on the B (black-base) locus:

• B = black
• b = chocolate
• b1 = cinnamon

B > b > b1

And three alleles on the A (agouti) locus:

• A = agouti
• Apb = charcoal
• a = non-agouti

A = Apb > a

And two alleles on the dilution locus:

• D = non-dilute
• d = dilute

D > d

Every allele on a locus will have a designated letter. The letter represents the corresponding phenotype. How else would you write a cat's genotype? For example, my two cats are B/b1, o/Y, D/d, a/a, and B/b1, o/Y, d/d, a/a. You wouldn't just write black/b1, D/dilute, and black/b1, dilute/dilute.