And now we have our first canonical chimera cat, and the reasoning from the writing team is the very same split face thing… I mean, I guess Moonpaw still *can* be a chimera but still

@@lindseylindsey9200 I mean the Erin's haven't done research then so why should they now I guess.

@@lindseylindsey9200 Actually, she has a green eye and a yellow eye, which as far as I know, is impossible to get on a cat without it being a chimera.

that's my personal sol hc and ive seen some GORGEOUS designs of him like that, tho sadly yeah not very many

Gotcha!

Oh wow thanks so much!! Lowkey thinking of making picrews out of my cat-shaped infographics when I'm done, if I can figure out how to organize the files well enough

YES MY FAVORITE CALICOS ARE WHEN YOU CAN SEE THEIR DEVELOPMENT ON THEIR BODIES BC OF LOW WHITE. IT'S SO COOL

oh that's smart actually. the way i remember it is just my synesthesia sees "pheom" as reddish LOL, lucky coincidence

I think the difference is bc "calico" is an American term and "tortoiseshell with white" is a british term? I could be wrong

@@littlehungrywarrior mine makes more sense genetics and visuals vise, but that could be the truth :/ I'll keep using it like this though, it's how I've always done it.

@@GoldenKitty9 Tbh it's a useful distinction for writing descriptions

yep! I personally headcanon him as a chimera :3

@@littlehungrywarrior I personally think he’s a cat with XXY chromosomes.

​@@littlehungrywarrior I headcanon him as trans to annoy people who don't like queer cat characters :3 (And my own oc is a transmasc tortie too for that matter)

@@AstralArbourSys ME WITH MOTHWING

@@dragonmoonwave hell yeah! that's my Redtail headcanon

tbh that sounds cool af, i love seeing chimera cat ocs that aren't just mimicking torties

@@littlehungrywarrior I think I might edit his eyelashes to be different on each eye since you mentioned your friends cat had different eye sizes also I gave him one orenge eye and one green eye since it’s a rare eye combination in cats with heterochromia but chimera cats have it sometimes

@@Thebeanthemself Cool!!

It's rare, but "cryptic" torties exist where either white hides the ginger (or black) or very little ends up showing up by sheer chance. Very rare tho!

I'm not a very experienced animator so I'd suggest asking people who know more than I do, but personally, I'd say: >Make a ref sheet for the character, preferably a turnaround so you know what the markings look like from all angles >try to connect the markings to particular parts of anatomy. for example: instead of a bunch of brindling just on the flank, have one brindle mark rising from where the elbow touches the side up to the spine; it's easier to keep markings consistent when you have reference for /exactly/ where they're supposed to go. whenever I draw torties/calicos, I like to have face markings touching the eyes or eyebrows for this reason, it's easy to remember where they go. >Don't use any special brushes. Even if it makes the cat look less "realistically brindled," it'll make your life SO much easier >same w/amount of brindles. Keep it simple. it doesn't have to be the same amount of brindling as a real cat, we'll understand the implication from just a few markings. it can be easy (for me at least) to get wrapped up in detail & realism, but look at how other things in animation are simplified. look closely at a photo of an eye, then an eye from any animated work. SUPER simplified - yet we still know it's an eye! don't be afraid to make just a few, simple markings & as long as you can place+size them consistently, the audience will understand :)

what're their sexes? :D

@@littlehungrywarrior the 2 black cats are one male and one Female, the torty is a female, and the brown tabby is also a female

@@ForgottenCat Well, the brown tabby is genetically black, so for bases, we're seeing a mix of sexes for black-base, and the only ginger-base is on an also-black-based female. Mom has to be black for the male to be black. But if mom's black and dad's ginger, we'd be seeing ALL the females are torties. If mom's black and dad's also black, we wouldn't see any torties at all. Thus, mom is a tortoiseshell. But if mom is tortie and dad is ginger, we'd be seeing that the non-tortie females are ginger, not black, because he could only pass ginger Xs. Thus, dad is black. Tabby is dominant (next video will cover this), so one of the parents had to be a tabby, but given the high % of non-tabby kittens, I think it's safe to say that only one of them was a heterozygous tabby, and the other was solid/"self." No telling which one tho! and it's /possible/ they could've both been tabbies and just gotten very lucky but i wouldnt bet on it. TL;DR: tortie mom, black dad, only one of them is a tabby, idk which. sidenote: mollies are capable of having multiple fathers for the same litter, so it's possible this is ALL wrong and there's 2 dads lol. Thanks for the fun question :3 I hope you understand how I got this answer so you can do it yourself next time, but always feel free to ask anyway.

@@littlehungrywarrior thank you so much ! :)

@@littlehungrywarrior This is assuming one male fathered the whole litter, which is not necessarily the case. If a female cat mates with multiple males during her heat, there is a chance that some of the litter are half-siblings rather than full siblings. This is especially likely for a stray, since without humans interfering, any male who is within range to smell her heat pheromones and/or hear her calling will come running. While males will try to drive away rivals to ensure all the resulting kittens are fathered by them, they're not always successful.

I think if you watch the series, you should be able to do this one yourself! But I'll help a bit :) I'm assuming by "brown" you mean solid chocolate, and I'm going to assume the dominant parents are heterozygotes bc that is more fun. -----B----b b B/b b/b b B/b b/b 50% black series, 50% choc series ------D----d d D/d d/d d D/d d/d 50% non-dilute, 50% dilute I suggest my black/choc/cinn episode & my dilution episode if you don't understand what I did here :)

@@littlehungrywarrior thanks

Wow interesting!! With such a small amount of black I'm not sure if I'd guess somatic mutation or chimera, tho either are possible - there's no way to know for sure without gene testing. so cool! do some punnett squares (or use my other non-punnett-square method) and see for yourself :3 As for mutations that could prevent those kids from being torties...I can't think of any, but I can think of another solution: cryptic torties. Sometimes torties get weird X-deactivation and end up with only like a ginger-base toe & the rest black-based (or vice-versa), or sometimes white """covers""" all of one base so only the other is visible. I watched a video of a blue mom cat give birth to like...three ginger kittens, and i was losing my MIND til i saw the TINY bit of cream that covered only two of her toes!!

​@@littlehungrywarriorHuh, well I've pointed out the spots to my friend but I don't think she really cares about it, so it might remain inconclusive 😂 cool insight though, thanks for responding :D About the blue mom ginger dad question, I ask because I have three characters, female siblings, two ginger and one gray, non tortoiseshells, with the parents stated above, and I'm trying to justify their designs because I made them before taking an interest in genetics lol. Anyways, I tried out some punnett squares for it before commenting and they came out how you'd expect, but since I only just now grasped the concept of them after watching your first video and I'm very new to genetics, I asked you thinking maybe I was missing something about it ( I also don't fully understand how the O allele works in the punnett square ). Once I figure out that allele I'll see if blue mom can carry ginger as a ressesive instead, but yeah, if all else doesn't work out, I think your suggestion about the hidden tortioseshell markings will work out perfectly! Thank you sm again!

@@rosestarofroseclan8094 I'm happy to have helped!!

remember: genes aren't some superficial thing where ppl blend together into a baby. when meiosis creates gametes (sperm & egg cells) it takes the ENTIRE GENOME with it (well...it takes half, since it's only 1 copy of every chromosome, but it's every locus!) EVERY SINGLE CAT has a B locus, whether we see it or not. Every single cat also has an O locus, whether we see it or not. Every single red cat has Bs/bs/b1s (whatever their genes happen to be there). If they didn't they'd be missing an important chunk of chromosome & would die, probably before even being born. You'd write a red cat's genome the same way you'd write a non-red cat's genome, except the red cat is O/O or O/Y on O instead of O/o o/o or o/Y :)

@@littlehungrywarrior oh, okey then. I think I kinda get the gist of it now. Thanks a lot!

@@littlehungrywarrior I was also a bit confused on this point; thanks for taking the time to explain it!

Yep! Unless smth drastic happens that changes my plans, the last episode (#10) will be a sum-up of all the little mutations (ear types, munchkin, manx, etc) that don't really fit into a larger category ^^

@@littlehungrywarrior okay!^^ and speaking of ear types I got a question,if a curly ear cat breed with a folded ear cat what would their kittens look like?

@@sparklykittez I wasn't able to find any information about the interaction of Folded & Curled alleles :( But both are dominant if it helps (folded = incomplete, curled = complete)

No sorries, questions are always good! The important thing to remember here is that these are NOT abstract letters representing surface-level traits. An allele is a real, physical thing, representing a small change in a complex code. Another important thing is the difference between an allele and a locus. You said "'o' non-ginger locus,' but "o" for non-ginger is an ALLELE, not a locus. "o" is a piece of coding information, not the address where you'd find coding information at. "O" and "o" are both different possible instruction books you might find at the library that give different instructions, but they're found in the same shelf. RNA goes to that library and checks that shelf. It will either find "O" and build what "O" gives instructions for, or it'll find "o" and build what "o" gives instructions for. It can be a little confusing that we name loci after their alleles so I understand where this misconception came from. It may help you to call it "the ginger locus" instead, to help differentiate between the specific library shelf & the actual instruction books RNA might find there. The "O" allele switches pigment production from eumelanin to pheomelanin. The "o" allele doesn't. The locus they're on is found in a specific chromosome. The "B" allele produces eumelanin that's shaped normally. The "b" allele changes the shape of eumelanin to reflect differently, appearing dark brown instead. The "b1" allele changes the shape of eumelanin even more, causing it to reflect light even more differently, appearing light brown. The locus they're on is found in a DIFFERENT chromosome than "O" and "o." That's why we don't use "B" for "o." They're totally different things, in completely different places, doing completely different jobs. In other words, when RNA wants to know whether to produce eumelanin or pheomelanin, it checks the "O/o locus shelf" to see which instruction book to follow. It does NOT check the "B/b/b1 locus" shelf; that would be like looking up blueprints for a bed when you're trying to build a table! If it finds the "o" instruction book, it says, "okay, I'm producing eumelanin, then. Let me go check the instructions for how to produce that eumelanin" and THEN it checks the "B/b/b1" shelf for its separate instruction book. As for how "O" works, your second explanation is correct. "O" acts by replacing eumelanin with pheomelanin. However, it's codominant. In an O/o cat, some cells will randomly turn off the "O"-having X chromosome, so only "o" can be read, and other cells will randomly turn off the "o"-having X chromosome, so only "O" can be read. In the cells where "O" is being read, the code that we use "O" to represent is coding to switch eumelanin with pheomelanin. This makes those individual cells red/ginger/orange. In the cells where "o" is being read, the code that we use "o" to represent is coding to keep eumelanin as eumelanin. So nothing changes. We typically say it's "not doing anything," which isn't true, but it's a good shorthand. I hope this makes sense :) feel free to ask for clarifications etc, I know it's a bit long but I tried to break it down as much as I could. (if the explanation for how b/b1 work is different than you saw in the B locus video, that's bc someone kindly corrected me & you'll see me fix my explanation when you get to the Corrections video)

​@@littlehungrywarrior Thank you for explanation, it very much helps! One thing I'm still having struggles grasping is how do you use a punnet square to find the genotype and phenotype of what could be a tortie cat? Like if the mom is a Cinnamon tortie and the dad is a Cinnamon self, then would you still use O/o to represent the mom but b1/b1 for the dad? Or would you have to use two different punnet squares to figure this out, if I had to guess probably the 2 different punnet squares? Also, unrelated to this question, but I'm thinking about going to college and would like to know if getting a degree in something like genetics would be worth it (since I do have an interest for them), or should I just keep it as a hobby since I want to research more specific animals genetics like cats, snakes, and various other mammals mostly, and a degree in genetics would be too broad for me, if you don't have answer it's ok :)

@@dovewing8598 2 different punnet squares :) When the body creates eggs or sperm (gametes), the cells undergo a process called "meiosis," which is a special kind of cell division that splits the cell into 4 new cells instead of 2 new cells. All 4 new cells are gametes. Each of your non-gamete cells has 2 of each chromosome. That's how people are able to be homo- or heterozygous. However, meiosis's process of splitting up into gametes creates 4 cells that each have ONE copy of each chromosome instead of two. So, your body cells are (for example) A/A, but your /gametes/ are just A on its own. Then, during sexual reproduction, an egg gamete & a sperm gamete fuse - allowing the chromosomes to have pairs again. One lonely A from the egg and one lonely a from the sperm become A/a - the genotype of the offspring. This is what Punnett Squares represent! it's a very simplified diagram of the mating process, what's actually physically happening inside the body during sexual reproduction: gametes fusing into new gametes, and the % chance of which gametes will fuse. So, if you did a single punnett square where the mom was O/o and the dad was b1/b1...you'd be representing an impossible scenario (or, potentially, a fatal one, if it meant 2 entire chromosomes just...didn't exist to have their pairs!) I think you're still a little bit confused about what a locus is, physically. That's ok! A cinnamon (or any non-ginger cat) still has a ginger locus ("O locus"), but the information ON that locus is different. So, for example, (completely inventing this gene here at random), let's say there's a gene in cats that turns them....idk, green. We CALL it "G" for Green, and "g" for Not Green. But what "G" REALLY, ACTUALLY is, is a set of "thymine adenine cytosine thymine" molecules repeated 8,000 times. What "g" REALLY, ACTUALLY is, is a set of "thymine adenine cytosine thymine" molecules repeated only /5,000/ times. When RNA reads the genetic code to turn it into a protein (AKA, cause the gene to express as a trait), it reads the code in sets of 3 molecules at a time (3 molecules = 1 protein). something about the extra 1,000 proteins is causing the cat to be a different color. This is TOTALLY UNRELATED to whatever the B, O, D, etc loci are doing. RNA is reading THIS information at THIS address, and creating ITS proteins. I suggest using google image search to look up "Karyotyping" or "karyotype." You'll be able to see, visually, what I mean when I say chromosome pairs - in some of the pictures, they line them up all neat & numbered with pairs next to each other :) Find one of those pictures and point to a spot on one of the chromosomes. That's a locus! The same spot on the chromosome beside it (with the same number label) is the same locus. One of those is G, and one of those is g, creating a G/g individual. One of those chromosomes was once sperm. The other was once egg. The parents performed sexual reproduction, wherein the sperm and the egg fused. Now, they're together :) That's what a punnett square is showing you. Point to the same chromosome in the same spot. This time, we're pretending this is a g/g homozygote who does NOT express ANY green - so, in your example, just a cinnamon cat. That spot is STILL the G locus. Its information now says "g." Point to the same spot on its pair. That spot also says "g." The spot hasn't vanished. It hasn't gotten a new pair. It just says something else. If your parent left you a note asking you to, idk, put the dishes away, you put the dishes away. If they left you a note instead saying to take out the trash, you'd take out the trash...but you wouldn't say the note doesn't exist! It just has different information on it. As for college - I'm not sure! I can't speak for job availability, but my degree is in evolution (population genetics) not classical genetics. I'd say start off in general bio (you'll probably be required to take Bio 101 anyway no matter what your major is) and feel out what you enjoy the most. Your professors will have better info on jobs than me, and you yourself will find out what you enjoy :3 it's definitely worth studying something you love tho - even if you end up in a field you weren't expecting!

@@littlehungrywarrior Ok thank you for taking the time to help me understand better! Sometimes it's hard for me to process information I can't see, but I can't help liking researching genetics, what a struggle lol. I'm not sure what kind of job you have currently, but you'd totally make a great teacher! Your explanations and examples are all really good at helping understand the subject! Yeah, I plan to go to one of my local colleges for a tour next week to ask them some questions so hopefully I'll get more answers there as well :3 Again, thanks for helping me understand the information better and I hope that you and your cats have a great rest of your day or night! 😊

@@dovewing8598 Oh i'm 100% the same way, i'm VERY visual I NEED to see what's going on lol!! There's a lot of fantastic videos on meiosis, I bet you could find one that would help you! I have great news - I am a teacher! :D Thank you so much!! You too, and I hope your college stuff goes well

Absolutely! They can express any modifier of tabby, that includes ticked :)

@@littlehungrywarrior thank you! I imagine a ticked ginger would certainly minimize those ginger stripes

@@nightlily64 Oh very much so! look at some ginger abyssinians, they're not only homozygous but have been bred for as few stripes as possible. absolutely gorgeous!

Spotted & classic are different types of tabby :) I suggest watching the Tabby/Agouti episode for that, it'll answer your question

@@littlehungrywarrior the cats generated were specifically described as tortoiseshell, so would that be tortie + tabby?

@@eclipsedmoon87 yep :)

>O is codominant, it will always show >O is not epistatic to "everything," just black and some genes that only affect black >carrying a dominant gene is impossible + male cats only have 1 X anyway I recc watching the 1st video in the series for a foundational grasp on dominance/recessiveness & sex-linkage :3

⁠​⁠@@littlehungrywarrior do not worry. i am rewatching every video multiple times rn 😂 should’ve known that “carrying a dominant gene” made no sense

@@benfunch it's ok! sometimes things take longer to learn :3

possible; there's definitely been observed behaviors between sexes in other animals. but it's usually AGGRESSION in one sex or the other. and I wouldn't be quick to assume that's the case. I've never noticed that at all myself, my female cat gets zoomies ALL The Time & is silly as FUCK, compared to my childhood ultra-chill tom who lazed around all day and let me put clothes on him. There was a study done a while back where strangers watched footage of a baby doing something. It was the same footage every time, but half the participants were told it was a girl, and half were told it was a boy. the majority of participants who were told "boy" perceived the boy's behavior as "aggressive," but the majority of the participants told "girl" (iirc) perceived her as whining. It's VERY easy for even well-meaning and even left-leaning humans to fall for gender bias. The descs of behavior here, esp the use of "girlboss,," to me definitely suggests a level of anthropomorphizing in behavior that lends itself to the stereotype that women/girls are more mature & put-together than men/boys are. It's a very "human" way to word your observations that strongly suggests a sexist bias to me - no offense meant, again we ALL fall for these things without constant conscious self-correction. Black male cats are ALSO more common than black female cats, due to the same sex distribution. Thus, brown tabby male cats are ALSO more common than brown tabby female cats. Seal Siamese males are more common than seal siamese females. Blue tabby males are more common than female blue tabbies. Yet no one says these things about any other color of male. It's only orange. Also: when people call orange male cats "stupid," in my experience, they mean it in the Lazy Dumbass Never Notices Anything sense, brain empty except for treats etc, never in the energetic "haha my cat has adhd" sense. But we may have different experiences there. it is - as all things are - worth a study, to see if there's a notable difference in behavior between cat sexes, but I'd sooner assume another form of bias (societal like above or just anecdotal coincidence; my crazy cats were females, yours were males, they're ultimately not that many cats) unless a careful double-blind study suggests otherwise. EDIT: sex-based differences in behavior in domestic animals tend to significantly lessen if not disappear after fixing, so if a personality behavior (like "being silly" or "aggressive") rather than a specific behavior (like nest-building) is observed post-neuter/spay, it's almost certainly NOT connected to sex. I assume your males are neutered so they would be nonindicative of typical male cat behavior. Those personalities are driven by hormones the cat no longer produces in significant quantities. EDIT 2: literally like 5 minutes after I wrote all of this my friend who's getting a new cat messaged me, having been looking up the differences in personality between males and females, and while not at all a scientific study by any means, literally the only difference she's been able to dig up is "sometimes males are so bad at peeing that they die."

as always, I reccommend doing the squares yourself, since there's a bazillion possible recessive combos etc etc. I'm happy to help w/more specific questions if those squares prove difficult or you don't understand something along the way, but I'm not going to do all the work for folks ^^ I'll reply on tumblr when it.......loads. (tumblr's been struggling to load for me a lot lately...) EDIT: OKay I got around to it! longer/better answer there, elaborating on how I can still help w/out just doing all the work for ya ;)

@@littlehungrywarrior fortunately my question isn't "do the work for me please" it's "does this combo I thought of make sense: yes, or no and here's why"

@@littlehungrywarrior I reblogged your reply with my clarification and actual question

@@eclipsedmoon87 sure, I can do that! what's the combo of parents? sorry for misunderstanding :3 EDIT: okay tumblr's stopped shitting the bed for 10 minutes so I can see the reblog now lol! let's continue this over there :D

@@littlehungrywarrior I included the combo in my reblog, it's written out there. But my idea was ginger tabby dad, solid black mom, both with low white, both carrying dilute and long hair, and both could carry chocolate ig, since dad is epistasis ginger (to explain Troutpaw being a chocolate torbie as opposed to black)

Oh sure! Happy to help Sex linkage has nothing to do with dominance, it has to do with the physical presence of a locus. Chromosomes ARE genes. If you google "chromosome" and look at it, those ladder rungs are adenine, thymine, cytosine, & guanine. Those are the molecules that RNA reads as the "code" that tells it what proteins to build. So when we say something like "O" what we ACTUALLY mean is (I'm pulling this out of my ass this isn't accurate it's just as an example) adenine thymine cytosine cytosine thymine adenine thymine cytosine guanine (+probably like a couple thousand more). Go ahead and google image search "karyotype" or "karyotyping" and find one where all the chromosomes are neatly arranged in their pairs. You might be looking at one where ALL of them have pairs - that's an XX individual. Those last two chromosomes are named "X." However, if the set you're looking at only has ONE tall "last" chromosome, and its pair is shorter...that's an XY individual. The tall one is named "X" and the little one is named "Y." Y isn't actually X's pair. It doesn't have a pair, and (barring a type of mutations called "nondisjunction"), it never does. It's the smallest mammalian chromosome and it has very, very, very little information on it at all. X, however, has a LOT of information on it - including, in cats, the O locus! So in the sets that have 2 Xs (XX individuals), there's 2 places an O or o allele can be, because there's 2 Xs. So we write that as O/O, O/o, or o/o. However, if it's a set that only has ONE X (XY individuals), there's only 1 place for an O or o allele. There's no second X for the O locus to exist as its rungs. We COULD, hypothetically, write the males as just "O" or "o" (whichever their single X has) but that might get confusing. So I write them as O/Y or o/Y instead, to signify that instead of a second X chromosome w/its O locus somewhere in its rungs, this cat has a Y chromosome. Barring something like Klinefelters Syndrome (XXY nondisjunction), a male cat CAN'T be O/O, O/o, or o/o. They don't have a second X for that second O locus. They can only have 1 O locus, because there's only 1 X.

@@littlehungrywarrior Thank you so much! I had some "Wait, what? Oh, that makes much more sense" reading that. I really appreciate that you answer questions like mine, even on a really old video.

@@MeltingEgg Aw, a year isn't THAT long lol. but no matter how old, as long as KZfaq notifies me (which...sometimes it does not :\) I'll always respond to questions :3 I'm glad that helped you understand better!

@@littlehungrywarrior ❤

O allele is epistatic to B locus, in that its presence covers "black base." However, being codominant, when heterozygous O/o, it only covers /part/ of the black base. Any black base that's exposed is unchanged/unaffected, meaning any other modifiers still apply. Google "chocolate tortie" :)

@@littlehungrywarrior thank you ^-^ now I can start on Troutpaw's markings

​@@littlehungrywarrior I'm happy with what I came up with for the two cats I've mentioned, and I think you'd like them too. I've sent you an ask about them on Tumblr (as I've been doing for my cat designs as I complete them)

@@eclipsedmoon87 Yay! I'll check soonish

@@littlehungrywarrior ^-^ I think the only one I won't show you is Sparrowleg since she's just a chocolate short-hair, no notes