Cat coat genetics

Okay, imagine you have a big bag of blue and yellow marbles. These marbles represent something called genes, that live inside every living thing (plants, animals, you name it!) Genes are like tiny instructions that tell your body what traits to have—things like which color your eyes will be, or whether you’ll have curly or straight hair.

Now, let’s pretend we’re talking about cats. Cats have lots of different coat patterns, like stripes or spots or solid colors. Each of these patterns is actually controlled by a few different genes, just like how the color of your hair is controlled by a few genes. Some of these coat genes are dominant, which means that if even one copy of that gene is present, it will show up in a cat’s appearance. For example, the gene for solid black fur is dominant—so if a cat gets even one copy of that gene, its fur will be solid black.

But other coat genes are recessive, which means they need two copies of the gene to show up in a cat’s appearance. For example, the gene for white fur is recessive. This means that a cat needs to inherit two copies of the white gene, one from each parent, in order to have white fur.

So, when two cats have kittens, those kittens will inherit some of their coat genes from their mom, and some from their dad. This is why two cats from the same litter can sometimes have very different appearances!

There are lots of different coat genes that can combine in different ways to create all sorts of different cat coat patterns. But no matter what, it’s all thanks to those tiny genes inside each cat’s body!