Pretty much exclusively for Magpie (Read 661648 times)

magpie · October 07, 2011, 10:19:54 am

She? You got a ginger girl? That's quite unusual, usually gingers are boys.

She's utterly gorgeous, that second photo is fantastic, look at her tiny wee body and your giant hand! <3

slackline · October 07, 2011, 10:44:08 am

Someone else said that to me the other day, but we've just inherited a female ginger tabby, and my parents adopted one that wandered round their house a few years back (died after eating mushrooms). Although we do already have a male ginger tabby.

A quick search suggests that there is a 3:1 male:female ratio of ginger cats, although can't find any explanation as to why.

Whats more common is that calico/caliby (i.e. tortoiseshell where there is normal & ginger tabby) are invariably female because the mosaicism is caused by X-chromosome inactivation (and like humans and all other mammals its the females who are homozygous for the X-chromosome, whilst males only have one X and one Y).

Any male calico's will have the cat version of Kleinfelters (XXY for sex chromosomes).

There's a whole book on the genetics of cat fur Cats are Not Peas : A Calico History of Genetics (not read it though, waiting for a paperback version).

magpie · October 07, 2011, 03:22:42 pm

Oddly (or perhaps telling of the type of men I spend time with

), you have pretty much just told me the exact same things that my boyfriend did the other night when I mentioned the ginger boy cat thing to him, he also went off on a tangent about Calicos (I knew they were mostly ladies but not all the other stuff), you are both clearly using the same web pages to gather your cat info.

slackline · October 07, 2011, 03:37:23 pm

The 3:1 ratio of male-female gingers is related to the X-chromosome inactivation and calico's always being female (Cat Kleinfelters aside) from first principles of Mendelian genetics, as females will have to be homozygous for the ginger allele in order to be female (if they've one ginger allele and one other allele then you end up being Calico), so you can have the following matings....

I've also a (boring) background in genetics/statistical genetics to supplement the web-pages

Bubba · October 16, 2011, 10:03:31 am

Plattsy · October 16, 2011, 07:22:19 pm

Is it a geep or a shoat?

andy_e · October 17, 2011, 10:34:51 am

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/15305502 Look at them run!

magpie · October 17, 2011, 05:44:59 pm

Winter jacket! <3

I am not sure about the geep / shoat, they look kind of odd.

The penguins are great, I can't wait for Frozen Planet, it looks like it'll be awesome.