#rufousing

[amber-tortoiseshell]

I'm sorry if this is a super basic question, but could you explain how a black-based tabby ends up with either a brown or grey coat? I know we often call them brown tabbies or grey tabbies (when they have black stripes), but my understanding is that's technically wrong, and that they're black tabbies with 'x' color? Can you clarify?

It's not wrong, many registries actually call black-based cats brown tabbies, i just prefer black because it's more genetically precise. When someone calls a cat gray tabby, you can't really know if they're thinking grayish black or blue, and with brown, there is chocolate and cinnamon to consider.

The brownness/grayness of a black tabby is called rufous. This is basically about how strong the pheomelanin is in the agouti hairs of the tabby background. Stronger pheomelanin adds warm shades, makes the cat brown, weaker pheomelanin will result in a cold-toned, gray cat.

In this paper about bengals, they made a great rufous scale:

[whatcoloristhatcat]

This is sisi (like "sissy") and it's very hard to convey through camera how..... orange she is under the pattern. She also may be a short hair, but she's a fucking curse upon the world, because both of her parents were Long Hair, and while she doesn't look it, she's got a super compact double coat that sheds like hell. We also don't understand where her coloring and fur comes from, because her mother was a long hair silver tabby and her father was a long hair deaf white cat? The genetics there don't make any sense, and her litter mates looked respectively white and silver and were also long haired.

She's 15 years old and I love her. This has been part 2 of Cats With Weird Genetics i've gotten because my neighbors and friends are weirdly into breeding unusual cats or collecting and breeding weird strays.

she’s a black classic tabby ! she looks to have high rufousing

by silver do you mean like grey tabby in color or more like this?

for the first one, dilution is recessive so it’s possible mom passed on the gene and dad didn’t. for the second, silver is dominant, so it’s possible the parents were heterozygous for silver and passed on non-silver for her and silver for her siblings.

also, depending on the genes making dad white, it’s definitely possible for him to have kittens with no white! one thing throwing me off is that longhair is recessive, so i’m not sure how she’s a shorthair since she’d HAVE to have the genes for it. not too sure about the genetics of it, but maybe that just transferred to her thick coat somehow. gene stuff can be pretty random 🤷🏻‍♀️

[sparrowminder]

Hello! Black tabbies are brown cats with black stripes basically, right? I've seen cats that had black stripes but instead of brown, their fur was pretty dark, almost a dark gray. is there a specific term for that? And how does that work?

This is variation in the amount of rufousing! Black tabbies are often brown due to the optical mixing of the black and red bands, but if they produce very little red pigment they can also very commonly look gray.

They are mislabeled as silver all the time, but this is distinct from silver because, as I've learned from the hair shaft data, silver will make the base of the tabby hair pale, while standard black tabbies have a dark band at the base. There is a bit of overlap but usually you'll know if a black silver tabby is actually silver.

[amber-tortoiseshell]

Hello!

My little girl Pepper has a nice black tabby and white going on.

But I saw some pictures of her sister, Candy, and she is way more orange. Are those rufousing genes at work? Or is something else going on?

The thing is that rufousing is hardly defined outside of "thing that makes tabbies more reddish", and i don't know if the general rufous (warmness of the color) is causes by the same genes or even has any relation to this kind of thing, when the muzzle is rusty like this. It might be the same, it might be very different genetically. But yeah, i'd classify this a kind of rufousing, yes. It's probably genetic.

Anyway what beautiful photos of such beautiful cats!

[amber-tortoiseshell]

this might be a dumb question but is it possible for the rufousing (i think that's the right word?) of tabbies to be affected by natural selection?

i live in a pretty rural area (dirt roads, huge untouched patches of sagebrush, the works) without any animal control or anything, and there's a pretty big colony of stray cats near my house that's been around for at least 20 years, probably more. i've noticed that most of the black tabbies that come from there trend towards a paler grayish-brown color rather than the darker or richer browns. it could be random but i thought there might be some sort of natural selection at play, since the deer and rodents around here are also grayer than average for their species

Not dumb at all, in fact, it makes complete sense! Black tabby is the wild type because it provides an excellent cover mimicry for the cats, and in a feral colony this probably matters a lot. So this is exactly what i'd expect in certain environments: they are selected toward the best possible hiding color.

Cat spotting game: where's the fourth one?

[amber-tortoiseshell]

you should ramble about your genetically warrior headcannons

Well if you say so...

I have a few unpolished headcanons about the typical rufousing and other similar polygenes in 'full' (not halfclan or new joiners) clan cats. Shorthair black mackerel tabbies for illustration.

Thunderclan is dark, warm, but still kind of dull.

Shadowclan is also dark but cold-toned, the markings are dense and defined.

Riverclan: bright and cold, the markings are loose and very well defined.

Windclan is light and dull, washed out, very confused (not well defined markings).

Old skyclan is warm, moderately dark and confused. New skyclan is mixed, it hasn't had the chance to develop a "standard" yet.

Since in almost every generation there are cats switching clans or rogues and kittypets joining, the clans aren't actually very uniform and many cats deviate from these 'platonic ideals'.

It works the same for other colors, too: Fireheart's line always marries into thunderclan, and their red gets darker with every generation (except for Lionblaze, who's half windclan, so he's rather light for a red thundercat).

[amber-tortoiseshell]

Is it possible that nonsilver cats can have so little rufousing that they look silver?

According to someone on reddit it's a thing in BSH called silver line but whenever I try to google it I only find actual silver (inhibitor) BSH. (I tried to ask on reddit too but no answer yet).

Probably depends on your experience with silver cats (i can imagine someone working with them for a long time can always immediately tell), for me definitely.

I've heard that in some breeds there are rather separated lines for silvers and regular tabbies or goldens for example, and non-silvers coming out of silver-focused lines are recommended not to be used in the breeding of colors other than silver again (because of the conflicting rufous goals). This might be what that post is talking about.

But i don't know what they mean by 'silver smoke tabby', that doesn't make sense.

[amber-tortoiseshell]

How does silver with low ruffesing look like compared to a cat with high ruffesing.

I don't think it's proved to be the same thing, but possibly related: remaining "background pheomelanin", yellowish or brownish shades instead crisp white is often called tarnishing in silvers.

I think for example this bengal has prominent tarnishing around the muzzle and possibly on the legs.

Tarnishing is generally considered very undesirable, and breeders try to select against it.