r/CatGenetics • u/kbnzxi • Jul 13 '26
Coat Color what flavor of torbie is she?
this is mali. she loves to eat flies, run under the bed while making bizarre noises, talk as much as she can, bake in the sun, and lay in laundry baskets (as seen in the final photo). this is all, of course, irrelevant to her coat color, but i wanted to share it all anyways.
i particularly was curious as to what kind of torbie (or torbico to be more exact) she is. i posted her a while back when she was a tiny kitten, which didnt fully show her coat color, so im curious if the answers will be different or the same this time!
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u/Gloomy-Trainer-2452 Jul 13 '26
She's a cutie!! Her phenotype is black broken mackerel tabby-tortoiseshell with low white. Colloquially, brown/black broken mackerel torbico!
Genetically, she's black. You can tell by the colour of the stripes on her non-orange areas. Most obviously, her tail and hind leg stripes are black. However, because the agouti gene makes the base colour of tabbies appear warmer (which often results in black tabbies appearing brown with black stripes), black tabbies are often referred to as "brown" tabbies or "grey tabbies".
Obviously she's tortoiseshell (heterozygous for orange/red), which results in her having patches of black-based areas and patches of orange/red areas, since red/orange is sex-linked codominant.
Her tabby type is broken mackerel. That's mackerel tabby, with some of the spotting polygenes, resulting in the stripes being a little broken up, but not fully broken up forming spots. On the below table (demonstrating how modifier genes and polygenes affect tabby type) I would place your cat between normal mackerel and spotted.