Now the Pattern!

Alright, yesterday we discussed colors and today we are going to give a quick description of all our fancy names for patterns. Its hard to understand where the names came from and I don't fully understand myself, but its the jargon:)

First we'll start off with the most common and genetically dominant pattern - the mackerel tabby or mctabby. This is what most people refer to as the tiger striped cat. The pattern runs in lines vertically on the body and banding on the legs. We all recognize this familiar pattern and the name does come from a similar looking pattern found on mackerel fish.

You can see if the pictures of Gandalf and Andante that they have the traditional striped pattern.

The next pattern is from a recessive gene (meaning you need 2 of these genes to show the pattern). It is referred to as a classic tabby here in the US and in Europe it is often called blotched or marbled tabby. This pattern is recognizable from its strong bull's eye pattern and when looking from the top onto their back there is a butterfly pattern. Classic tabbies often appear darker in color than their mackerel counterparts since their are larger areas of the darker tabby markings.

You can see in Nova's baby picture that he, like all his siblings, have the nice classic pattern. All the kittens in his litter have the classic pattern because both their parents do - Veksha and Earbis.

More complicated is the spotted tabby which is recessive to both the mackerel and the classic. What is often complicated is that often a cat with an unclear pattern, or broken mackerel, may be mistaken for a spotted tabby. This is a common occurance when mating a classic pattern cat to a mackerel - the lines of the mackerel just have breaks in them.

A true spotted tabby would have markings like Bogie shown below (in a picture given to us by his owner Tracy and taken by Lynn at Blue Sky Photography). You can see the distinct spotted pattern.

Now, in those instances where a cat has the "non agouti" gene. This is what makes a cat solid. The non agouti really just fills in the parts of the hair that show the markings. That's why you often see ghost markings on younger cats until they grow up. Solids or non agoutis can be in black or blue (you can tell because they don't have the normal lining around the eyes and their noses are even blue or black) and even red or cream although the expression (appearance) of solid reds and creams often still looks like a faintly marked tabby. You can even have the mix of the color, the inhibitor gene (silver) and solid and you have a smoke like little Francesca "Pepper" directly below. As she grows you'll see a white color at the root of the hair that will extend about 1/4 up the hair shaft and gives a smokey appearance to her coat.

OK, now that we've seen examples of the various patterns we can show the white spotting gene. The white spotting gene causes the appearance of random white areas on the cat. This is a dominant gene so even just 1 of the genes can cause at least some areas of white. While its not totally confirmed, it would seem that larger areas of white are often seen on cats that have both genes. Some breeds have worked for years to specifically create patterns of white such as on the Turkish Vans which have a white body and color only on the tail region.

Some examples of cats with the white spotting gene are our own Darius - his mother has white on her bib, stomach and feet while his father does not have any. So he has white feet and a bib.

One of our boys, Hannibal, has such a small amount of white that it is only shown as 2 white toes.

Katie, seen below, has a lot of white with the colors forming a blanket over her and a "V" shaped mask. Both her parents had "with white."

Finally, we have a pattern we don't see around here much - the colorpoint. Here at Prekrasne we don't breed for this pattern since we don't think it is representative of the "forest cat" group (also includes Norwegien Forest Cats and Maine Coons). However, the colorpoint Siberian is recognized in both TICA and CFA.

Colorpoint patterns are often called Siamese patterns since the origin of the genes that cause the masking effects is traced back to Siamese cats. However, it appears in many breeds now from Himilayans, Ragdolls and Birmans to Balinese. It is a recessive gene that causes the appearance of the "points" or colored areas on cooler parts of the body while warmer areas tend to be the lighter colors. They also have blue eyes. Colorpoint Siberians are born looking almost entirely white (mom's womb is very warm) and their points darken with age.

The pointed areas are also affected by the tabby gene and the solid gene so you may see cats with tabby or lynx points like Ali'i - a blue cream tortie point from our first litter. Her mother Katie carried the recessive colorpoint gene and her father, Sultan Rossity, is also a carrier. Sultan is from another cattery. Both of our current studs and all our current girls are all now non carriers of this gene so we haven't had any colorpoints since this one pretty girl. You can faintly see the tabby pattern.

Since I didn't have an example of a colorpoint without the tabby pattern I just used a picture of my ragdoll, Seamus. He is a sealpoint which is esentially the black/brown markings on a pointed cat.