Articles by Aisling Rags

"Why doesn't this kitten look like it's parents?"

By: Jessica Murphy of AislingRags

There are many reasons why a Ragdoll kitten may not look like its parents; this article focuses on the reds (flames) and torties. I had someone ask me once “Why doesn’t this kitten look like either of its parents?” when they were looking at a little male flame colored kitten out of a seal father and a seal tortie mother. The simplest answer is that the kitten got the red color from mom.

But to explain further, red is what is called a “sex-linked” gene. This means that the red coloring is carried on the leg of the “X” chromosome. Females have two X’s (XX) and males have one X and one Y (XY). You can look at the Y as sort of an incomplete X (missing a leg). It is that bottom leg (that is missing on the Y) that holds the sex-linked genes, in this case we are talking about the “O” gene (think of O for Orange).

Genes come in pairs and kittens get one gene from each parent. You could look at it as a seal tortie female has one red gene and one seal gene, which gives it the spotted or speckled seal and red coloring. Remember a female has two X’s so a tortie has the red on one of her X’s and no red on the other X. When a tortie is bred she can give her kittens either of these two genes, seal or red, since she has both of these genes herself.

Coming back to our little flame boy, his mother was a tortie. She gave him the orange gene on his X. Remember males are XY. Males need only ONE red gene to actually be red in color because they only have the one X. If his mother would have given him her seal gene instead, this kitten would have been seal colored.

A female has two X’s, so in order for a female to be red in color, she would have to have TWO red genes. She would have to get one red gene from her father and one red gene from her mother. So only a flame male and a flame or tortie mother could produce a flame female. Two seal colored parents could not produce a flame or tortie, at least one of the parents would have to have red on them.

While there are variations to all of this, of course, for simplicity’s sake we are assuming that the cats in the above examples are pure seal and pure flame, not carrying any dilutes. The dilute colors could be addressed in a future article. But cream is the dilute of red. Since this article does focus on the reds, suffice it to say that any of the above would also apply to the creams depending on if the parents were a dilute color themselves or carried dilute gene or not.

A good article on the inhibitor gene and silver Ragdolls can be found here-http://www.rfwclub.org/Silver.htm

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This page last updated on July 3, 2009
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