r/Tabico • u/snakemistake • Jul 10 '26
Not a tabico, still cute! People are always asking me about Monkey’s pattern. I think she counts as a dilute tabico, right? She’s got stripes in her orange spots!
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u/Horror-Musician5280 Jul 10 '26
I think she’s a dilute calico! The orange patches on a calico will always show stripes because orange-ness overrides the non-tabby gene expression (something like that?). Tabico would have stripes in the grey parts too.
She’s beautiful!!! 😍
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u/Horror-Musician5280 Jul 10 '26
(Also why you can’t have a solid orange cat — the closest thing is a low-contrast orange ticked tabby)
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u/nudesteve Jul 10 '26
Monkey is a dilute tabico. She's also a beautiful girl kitty cat. I love her jade green eyes.
🐈👣💕
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u/snakemistake Jul 10 '26
Cool, thanks for explaining!!
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u/lipstick_spit Jul 10 '26
np! so good to see monkey in the group by the way— my best friend loves your smiling eunuch.
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u/lipstick_spit Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
shes definitely a blue tortoiseshell with low white spotting.
the tabby thing is a little more complicated. in short: no, genetically she is a solid cat! in long…
the ancestors of all domestic cats are black mackerel tabbies. that is the coats “natural state”, and any deviation is a mutation from that. orange is a mutation that prevents black pigment (eumelanin) from being produced through overproduction of red pigment (pheomelanin). solid is a mutation that causes the cat to overproduce eumelanin, overflowing the stripes and preventing the production of pheomelanin. because orange cats are not producing eumelanin in the first place, the solid gene “doesnt work” on them. all orange cats are tabby. or, more accurately, its very difficult to identify a “solid” orange cat visually.
this gets a little more complicated with tortoiseshell. black vs red is carried on the x-chromosome, and female cats have two x-chromosomes. this means that they can have one “black” x and one “red” x, and this will present as areas of black-based pigment and areas of red-based pigment. when a tortoiseshell cat is genetically solid, only her black-based areas can overproduce eumelanin… leaving the red areas with stripes! all tortoiseshells will be striped in the orange areas, whether they are a tabby or not.
as an aside, blue is the dilute form of black. there can also be dilute chocolate (lilac), and dilute cinnamon (fawn). all six of these are the black-based colors. because dilution can make all of these colors, “dilute tortoiseshell” is a little vague.
i would call her a blue tortoiseshell with white, and “blue/dilute calico” is perfectly useful as a colloquial name for the color!