Feline housemates

[luzula]

So my new place to live has four cats: one mother cat and three half-grown kittens. This means I can finally contribute to the purpose of the internet and post cat photos! I am really more of a dog person, but yes, they are charming and have won me over with no great effort.

I kept them out of my room for the first two weeks, because they do have a tendency to claw at things, and also I had boxes everywhere and I was afraid they'd get stuck in some unlikely hiding place and get squashed or something. This annoyed them mightily, because the kittens were born in that room and felt it rightfully belonged to them.


Now that I have let them in, they have taken my bed into their possession. From the left, that's Ester, Charlie, and Skuggan (=Shadow), and the mother is Müsli. Ester and Charlie will go to other homes eventually.


And yes, they still want to suck milk, even though they eat cat food now! Look at the mom almost buried underneath them--they're almost as big as she is.

Comments

[feroxargentea]

Oh so cute!

Random Interesting Thing: Black-and-orange markings are usually X-linked. All-ginger tabbies are therefore most often male (XY). Cats with a mix of orange and black patches, with or without underlying stripes (Musli & Skuggan) are usually female (XX), except for the occasional rare XXY males. During foetal development, one X chromosome in each cell is turned off at random - either the one carrying "orange" or the one carrying "black". The size of the resulting colour-patches depends on which point it's turned off - if it's early in development (when the kitten is just a few cells) the patches are bigger than if it's later.

(This also makes it quite probable that Black Male Kitten, Orange Male Kitten and Tortoiseshell-Tabby Female Kitten are all full siblings :-)

eta: Or Black Female Kitten? Not sure. Black can be either...

[luzula]

Oh interesting! This is just the kind of thing that I wanted to know. : )

So do you mean that the black and orange genes are alleles on the X chromosome, so that the males can only get one of them, and females can get one of each? Or both, like Black Female Kitten--yes, Ester is a girl. And does the whole X chromosome get turned off? So I guess that's inherited when that cell divides, which makes for the patches...wow, this is so fascinating! \o/

I guess we can deduce that Müsli mated with a black male, then, since Ester is black.

[feroxargentea]

Yes, they're alleles of the same gene. And the whole X-chromosome is turned off (becomes a Barr body) - it does this in human female foetuses too, except that it's not so obvious because we don't have the colour-coded skin patches as a result (which seems a bit of a shame, really!)

The father must have been carrying the black allele, I guess. But he might also have had other genes - tabby gene (black & brown stripes - not unlikely since two of the kittens are tabby) and/or the "washed out" gene (so, grey) and/or one of the "white patches" genes (so, black and white, or grey and white, or tabby and white)...

[luzula]

Huh, I actually had no idea X-chromosomes were turned off like that. *goes to read about it on Wikipedia* Interesting.

Now I'm thinking about the way huskies sometimes have one blue and one brown eye, or sometimes one eye is even half-blue, half-brown. That sounds kind of like the patch thing? Or maybe it's a completely different process.

[feroxargentea]

Hmm, no idea about the husky eyes! Is it only bitches that have mismatched eyes? In cats, at least, there are various white-patch genes that are not X-linked and which might affect the eyes. Sometimes you get a white cat with different coloured eyes - which might actually be a white (plus green-eye) cat with white (plus blue-eye) patches... I really don't know!