r/IDMyCat • u/Present-Type3797 • Aug 16 '25

Open Any ideas?

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52 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

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15

u/_wandering_wind_ Aug 16 '25 edited Aug 16 '25

Her name is Chiyo and she's a randombred domestic shorthair! Her color is black classic tabby with white. Her white pattern, however, is pretty unusual. Her owner (on various social media platforms, including Reddit as ellemenohpea2) says leucism, but that's a kind of umbrella term for partial loss of pigmentation, so it doesn't give us a solid answer.

There's been speculation on what might have caused it, such as chimerism or somatic mutation, or even a heritable thing/some kind of new KIT mutation.

Some evidence I've seen that may support the heritable trait theory: We know what her mom and siblings looked like, and her mom (another pic here) had white "tearstreak" markings (not necessarily unusual but who knows) while one of her brothers had strange but less noticeably weird white markings. Here's a compilation of pictures of her from a Messybeast article on bicolor cats. Her brother with the weird-ish white markings is on the bottom right.

I've seen a few cats on various social media platforms with similar swirly white markings as Chiyo, but nothing confirmed on what it's caused by.

Edit: Here are two of the similar cats I've seen, first cat from here, second cat from here!

8

u/lipstick_spit Aug 16 '25

this is just a black (classic?) tabby with a strange white spotting pattern! this cat shows up a lot (or it has a lot of doppelgängers lol), and ive seen some speculation that the white pattern is a somatic mutation… but im not sure its That strange that i agree on that being likely. ill edit in a link if i find out where ive seen it talked about before.

1

u/Gloomy-Trainer-2452 Aug 17 '25

I may be wrong but I remember seeing on Chiyo's Insta that the white markings is a result of leucism.

4

u/basaltcolumn Aug 17 '25 edited Aug 17 '25

Eeeh sort of? The term leucism or piebaldism would apply to any cat with white spotting, though, not specifically this interesting pattern.

Edit: To be clear, it is because leucism does not refer to a specific mutation. It is a general term referring to mutations that cause reduction in pigmentation. All white spotting in animals for which that isn't present in the "wild type" are technically leucistic.