The contest is long over but I still have an immense backlog of readers’ cat photos, and they keep coming in. Here’s a nice one from reader “Pyers” that was headed “Less than 24 hours old”:
Belong to some friends … went round last night to wish them welcome to the world. Moms a persian; dad a mog…. (oops!)
They knew she was pregnant but not sure when the due date. They came down yesterday morning to find she had torn a book to shreds and had built a nest round the back of a freezer where the warm air is expelled. (Fascinating behaviour in a domesticated animal)
They had a closer look and saw the kittens …..
you know you’re going to be posting photos of kittehs forever, don’t you 🙂
But isn’t she a lovely mum.
“you’re going to be posting photos of kittehs forever”
Such torture…
just so 🙂
you know you’re going to be posting photos of kittehs forever, don’t you…?
As it should be. I have yet to do justice to my cat in terms of quality of photos or writing up how awesome she is.
Mr Coyne certainly would not hold that against the cat!
indeed no! And all cats are awesome, so I appreciate the time you need to take…
Oh, wow! Still wet behind the ears, even!
b&
I’m in awwww…
Lol, they look like drowned rats. Off topic, but here’s something funny;
http://acmebuddhistblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/why-do-people-laugh-at-creationists.html
I count five. Is that what others are seeing?
I’d like to see an update to this in about four weeks. L
Yes, but don’t trust ’em. They sometimes hide reinforcements in the fur.
Well, SOMEBODY looks tired.
We once came home from an evening out to find our cat had given birth in our infant’s changing table amongst the flannel blankets, onesies, t-shirts, and diapers. Nice soft, safe, quiet place. But shredding a book and going behind the freezer–that’s sheer genius!
Mom must be heterozygote for Oo and Dd but homogygote aa (heterozygote for Orange – gives red sons and red daughters if Dad is OY), and Dilute as one of the kittens is Dilute but she is not showing the Dilute phenotype herself) and non-agouti homozygote.
A nice case of epistasis: non-agouti homozygote does not show up in OO or OY (Orange, red) but only in grey (as black rather than tabby) and in (female) heterozygotes without ‘white spotting (ss) gives a fine streaking red versus black where the striped pattern of tabby is not visible in the grey parts but only in the orange parts.
Um…pretty kitty?
b&
Ah ha! A taste of your own medicine.
When medicine is looking at pretty kitties, I’d say the taste is pretty good….
b&
Heleen (& Ben, too, for that matter)
Moar (seriously!)
I understand that we can know something about human migrations because of the genetics of the cats those advanced apes brought with them to distant shores.
I don’t understand those genetics too well, though it seems obvious, if you’re not simply spoofing us, Heleen, that you at least know the Mendelian aspects of those genetics.
So again, Heleen, MOAR!
— Poxy
A.G. Searle, 1968.
Comparative genetics of coat colour in mammals.
Interesting stuff! I think I was accurate.
Look at three colour cats: white patches, black and orange. The orange patches show the stripes, the black might not (aa) or might (AA and Aa). Quite an interaction of loci O and A with the expression of white spotting too (SS lots of white, Ss variable, ss no white): SS large patches orange /black (grey) patches, ss small orange / grey (black) patches.
Does this imply a single father?
It’s not possible to say much about the father, apart from that the father of the light grey one should be Dd (any colour as phenotype) or dd (cream or grey).
If it is one father for all five: Dd.
To infer something about the father one needs to know whether the kittens are male or female. For instance, if the two red ones are males (OY) and the two black ones are females (oo) their common dad can well be black. Or, if the two red ones are females and the two black ones are males, the father should be red.
But if it is: red daughter, red son, black daughter, black son and / or grey son, there are two dads to the litter.
Multiple dads is a consequense of skewed sex ratio towards far more intact males than females in towns and suburbs, whereas in the more natural countryside situation males stake out territories with a claim on females.
The mother of this mother was a dilute calico tortie persian.The father of these kittens is believed to be a black and white tom cat.However,I have my own stud cat and although I did not see mating he may have.He is a chocolate colourpoint persian and his mother was a lilac colourpoint and his father was a shadeed silver chinchilla persian.I do not think he is the father as these kittens do not have long coats and flat faces although their faces have some flattening of the features and wider cheeks which are probably coming from their mum. So almost definately a moggy but maybe not the tom I saw hanging around!
Thank you for posting these! I took the photos!
Well, please give us updated photos as the kittens get older!
Will do!
“dad a mog”
“dad, not “dads”? In my experience, queens don’t put (so to speak) all their eggs in one basket.