The Two Varieties Of Tabby Cat

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barfing_pumpkin

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Dunno if this should be on the cryptozoology page or not, but what the hell...

Anyway, I heard a long time ago (don't know if it was a book, TV show or what) that the reason why there appear to be two varieties of domestic tabby cat - one with a stripy, 'tigerish' pattern to its coat, the other with a more swirly, 'blotchy' style - is because of towns. Yes, towns. And cities.

Quite simply, it comes down to this: That the stripey (and presumably 'original') tabby cat is more suited to a rural environment. The markings add a suitable camouflage, making it much easier for the cat to hunt and evade predators, and thus deeming it 'fit for survival'.

However, the ever-encroaching urban environment has given rise to a recent - and sustaining - mutation: that of the 'blotchy' tabby cat, whose markings, apparently, offer much better camouflage in a built up environment - and offer also a visible affirmation of Darwinism in action.

My question is - is this true? Or is there any evidence that a reasonably large population of blotchy tabby cats existed before, say, the industrial revolution.

And if there isn't any evidence one way or the other, then how did the zoologists/biologists/whatever come to the conclusion that the blotchy tabby cat is the direct result of a recent evolutionary/environmental dynamic when no-one can be sure if both varieties haven't already existed side-by-side for a long time?

Has a comprehensive study of tabby cats ever been undertaken? Do we find, as a proportion of the overall population, more stripy tabby cats out in the country, and more blotchy ones in cities and towns?

I would quite like to know, as I harbour an ambition to do a sculpture of a pope being knocked down by a fallen...blotchy tabby cat.
 
I suppose if it were a sustainable mutation, one wonders if there are now less 'orignal' style tabbies. However, as most cats in big cities are domesticated, or once were owned (as much as a cat can be), the survivability dynamic is questionable - indeed, did regular tabbies survive more in towns (after abandonment) more than other types? Were the original tabbies who had the least tigerish patterns the best adapted to survive? over what time period has this succesful adaptation occured? My gut feeling is that (apart from chinchilas and v. fluffy cats) most are damned good survivalist and hunt well day or night; are excellent scavangers - and if not too manky, can worm their way into homes! Perhaps, people like the swirly tabbies more and that has encouraged the shift? Interesting thread - will do a bit of research!!
 
Also, am I the only one who has noticed a lot less ginger cats - otherwise known as 'marmalade' or 'red' tabbies - around these days? In the seventies and eighties, there was nary an early 1900s terrace which didn't have a ginger tom striding across its rooftops somewhere. I guess they must be out of fashion at the moment...

On a related note, it's been ages since I saw any cat - ginger or otherwise - striding across a rooftop. As there are now much fewer early 1900s terraces these days, one must wonder why our cats are so wary of modern building design.

Maybe they know something we don't.

Or maybe it's just, uh, that modern rear kitchens don't have a long sloping rooftop - usually low enough for a cat to climb upon - which connects to the main one. (forgive the terminology - I'm no architect)
 
the tiger stripe tabby is referred to as a mackeral tabby, while the blothcy, swirled tabby is called a classic tabby. As far as I know, both have been around a very long time.
 
And as far as I know all tabbies are female, and all gingers are toms (or as near as dammit)

Not sure if that helps the argument or not. Certainly isn't cryptozoology.
 
It's all calicos that are female. Something about the mosiacism being sex-linked.

I have a couple of generic tabby males.

A quick scan of pet adoptions indicates that orange/ginger tabbies are of both genders.
 
Cat color pedantry: Calico is tortoiseshell with white; tortoiseshell is black and orange. By far the majority of tortoiseshell cats are female. The males are sterile.

Tabbies come in gray and yellow and of both sexes. Many cats are tabby with white splotches, or white with tabby splotches.

I've noticed that certain features come and go in local cat populations as successful toms blow through. The present boss feral cat displays the stigmata of two monumentally successful ancestors: a gray tabby with a white shirtfront, and a yellow tabby. The current cat's father, Minion, was unique as far as I know, in that he did not strive much after status - his name derives from his acting as faithful lieutenant to Margo, Queen of the Jungle for some years - and actually assisted in the education of his offspring.

Margo, herself, had a peculiar coat color which was for a time prominent in the area, which I call "tortoiseshell tabby" - not so much black and orange as gray and pink, with a tabbylike pattern underlying. The best dead-leaf camoflage I've ever seen. In the fall you could step on Margo before seeing her, and she'd milk it for all it was worth.
 
Actually, calico has patches of black, white and orange, where tortie is orange and black finely mixed (literally cell by cell).

Tabbies come in brown, blue, red, cream, and silver.

You also get what's called a patched tabby or tortie tabby or tobie, which is has patches of different tabby colors, or patches of tortie and tabby markings.

There's also a form of tabby that produces spots rather than stripes on the body, but still has the typical tabby markings on the face.
 
My sweet kitty :D is a brown tabby with orange tortoiseshell patterns on her back. Best of both worlds.
 
Aargh! It's another CATS thread!

But back to the original question:
Evolution works mainly on natural variations within a species. Mutations are not necessary, but may play an occassional role.

But I suspect human preferences for certain types play a much larger role than 'natural selection'...

(although in the eye of a god-like being, human preferences would be part of the 'nature' that's doing the 'selecting'... :? )
 
On a related note, it's been ages since I saw any cat - ginger or otherwise - striding across a rooftop. As there are now much fewer early 1900s terraces these days, one must wonder why our cats are so wary of modern building design.

Maybe they know something we don't.
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You don't see quite so many cats out and about on the streets, period. I think more people are keeping theirs in.
 
Not in Leeds!!!!!

U walk up my missuses terrace street an the cats only have 1 or 2 house front territories, the population is that dense. Only toms wander further than a 5 house radius coz the other cats are scared of them.
 
I think that there is some truth to this.

The strange this is that in Canada, specifically Toronto, torties are almost never seen. Growing up reading storybooks from the UK, I assumed that torties are common! I always though that their coats looked pretty cool. But, alas, they are very rare in these parts. Most kitties here seem to be solid, (a lot of black solids) or striped tabby. The striped tabbies seem to be mainly brown or grey ones. It is also common to see a two colour kitty, black with white patches for example.

I have also heard that there are very few female ginger or orange cats. Do you guys find this to be true?
 
What is interesing is the fact that there still seem to be a lot of white BSH cats about. Bearing in mind that most of these cats are congenitally deaf - which one would think to be almost fatal in a cat living in an urban environment - they seem to do fine.

Presumably, then, a cat can get along quite well without the ability to hear - in Darwinian terms, deafness doesn't seem to be a factor when it comes down to 'survival of the fittest'. Of course, a cat has extensive sensory resources to fall back on anyway - as well as sight, taste, touch and smell, they also have their whiskers (which I understand are extraordinarily sensitive to changes in air currents - almost a spidey-sense, if you think about it) and that peculiar Jacobson's organ thing, which proferrs an extra sense which is supposed to be something between a taste and a smell.
 
Tabbies- there are three types genetically, in order of dominance
Ticked -like the abyssinian, probably inherited from felis chaus
Mackered/spotted. Spotted is a variant of mackerel where the stripes are broken into spots. Probably inherited from European wildcats,
Classic or marble tabby, a mutation that has been around a few hundred years at least. I have noticed in very young classic tabby kittens the circular oyster marks on their sides show up as quite startling 'eyes', maybe this is a possible reason for their persistance?
I have wondered if the classic tabby is actually the feline version of the black and tan gene found in dogs rabbits, mice etc as it seems to work in the same way in relation to wild agouti and self genes.

Not all male torties are infertile- Ch and Gr Pr Marilaine Harlequin was a tortoiseshell point siamese male who was fertile, but bred as if he were a seal point, the red didn't follow through.

Not all white cats are deaf, its a threshold trait in high white and dominant white animals, which is why hearing tests are reccomended in dalmatians and other very white dogs as hearing parents are much less likely to have hearing defective offspring.

I read somewhere that the most common colour of cat in ther UK is black and white, hard to know what that means, as its a mix of dominant (white spotting) and recessive (self black).

I am currently reading siamese cats- Legend and reality by Martin Clutterbuck, a translation of the Thai Cat Book Poems plus lots of info about the cats in Thailand. Great stuff if you are into cats.
 
This is what the Thai Cat Book poem Document B676 (Berlin) says about tabby cats:

Any cat with stripes like a tiger, look at its shape, a wild cat, who raises it in the house will be sad every moment, that cat cries ngaao-ngaao, an insolent cat,do not look at it, wealth will lose, parents will lose their life, smite your chest in grief, do not raise it, there is loss, elephants horses and slaves, wife and children will be seperated, , there is harm because of the evil cat striped like a tiger. Do not raise the cursed cat, my good sirs.

So I guess they don't think much of tabbies in Thailand :D
 
hedgewizard1 said:
It's all calicos that are female. Something about the mosiacism being sex-linked.

I have a couple of generic tabby males.

A quick scan of pet adoptions indicates that orange/ginger tabbies are of both genders.
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Until reviewing this thread, I'd never seen the term 'Calico' with reference to cats.

A calico cat (US English) is a domestic cat of any breed with a tri-color coat. The calico cat is most commonly thought of as being 25% to 75% white with large orange and black patches; however, they may have other colors in their patterns. Sometimes a variation occurs with cream and grey patches that is called a muted calico. Calicoes are almost exclusively female except under rare genetic conditions.

Source with quite a lot of depth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_cat
 
Yithian said:
Until reviewing this thread, I'd never seen the term 'Calico' with reference to cats.
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I have quite a few American friends who talk about calico cats. We just call them 'tortoiseshells'. But they have weird names for horse colours too, which always stops me, and I'm still not quite sure what a 'sorrel' is. Roan, I think...
 
catseye said:
I have quite a few American friends who talk about calico cats. We just call them 'tortoiseshells'. But they have weird names for horse colours too, which always stops me, and I'm still not quite sure what a 'sorrel' is. Roan, I think...
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US horse colours confuse heck out of me too, but a sorrel is a pale chestnut, not roan.
 
Fluttermoth said:
US horse colours confuse heck out of me too, but a sorrel is a pale chestnut, not roan.
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So what we would call a bright chestnut. I was over on a horse site the other day and they had all different terms for different types of piebald and skewbald markings, which was a revelation to me! We just call them piebald or skewbald (or sometimes, prejudicially, 'gypsy ponies'.
 
catseye said:
So what we would call a bright chestnut. I was over on a horse site the other day and they had all different terms for different types of piebald and skewbald markings, which was a revelation to me! We just call them piebald or skewbald (or sometimes, prejudicially, 'gypsy ponies'.
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Ah yes, tobiano, sabino, overo... useful for genetics to be able to differentiate the patterns though :)

I'm old enough to remember the last bits of that prejudice against 'coloured' (ouch!) horses. I don't hunt, but one of our local ones (Lamerton, IIRC), the whippers-in used to make all the piebalds and skewbalds stay at the back because they made the MFH angry, he used to call them 'The Rabble' :mad:
 
Fluttermoth said:
Ah yes, tobiano, sabino, overo... useful for genetics to be able to differentiate the patterns though :)

I'm old enough to remember the last bits of that prejudice against 'coloured' (ouch!) horses. I don't hunt, but one of our local ones (Lamerton, IIRC), the whippers-in used to make all the piebalds and skewbalds stay at the back because they made the MFH angry, he used to call them 'The Rabble' :mad:
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Yep, I also remember the prejudice against the piebalds and skewbalds, which is where the 'gypsy horse' insult came from.
 
Apparently Gypsies started preferring the white marked horses in the first World War as they weren't wanted when the army was requisitioning horses as they were too visible to the enemy.
 
And what we would call a skewbald cob, they call a Gypsy Vanner.

They don't seem to have cobs in the US, do they?

Sorry, seem to have strayed a bit from cats...
 
marion said:
Apparently Gypsies started preferring the white marked horses in the first World War as they weren't wanted when the army was requisitioning horses as they were too visible to the enemy.
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Woah, a horse fact I didn't know, OMG!
catseye said:
And what we would call a skewbald cob, they call a Gypsy Vanner.

They don't seem to have cobs in the US, do they?

Sorry, seem to have strayed a bit from cats...
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Yeah, the American Gypsy Vanner is a strange creature; take the ordinary British 'vanner', a small-ish, cobby horse used for light draft work, and, as our American friends are wont to do, make it ridiculously big and with an excessive amount of hair. No gypsy or costermonger could feed one of those 17 hand monsters, nor would they want to cope with that amount of feathering!

Gorgeous horses, but so far from their original, practical, origins as to be unrecognisable.

You know us horse people, once we get started, we can't be stopped :chuckle:

I do remember something about tabby cats though; I watched a documentary about cats on the BBC a few years ago, and it mentioned that all ginger cats in Europe are descended from cats carried around by the Vikings! They got them in Egypt or the Middle East, IIRC. To my eternal embarrassment, I said out loud, "How amazing, I wonder what it was about ginger cats that appealed to the Vikings so much?"

:oops:
 
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I did not know that tabbies were differentiated by their coat patterns. My very limited knowledge about the tabby breed (I have never been interested in purebreds) is that it has the M marking on its face and is typically striped.

I have seen spotted, but wonder if they have bengal cat in their lineage.
 
Here is my Sweet Pea, a long haired Calico. She turned up one evening about half grown severely wounded and almost dead. She's a lucky girl and knows it.
 

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brownmane said:
I did not know that tabbies were differentiated by their coat patterns. My very limited knowledge about the tabby breed (I have never been interested in purebreds) is that it has the M marking on its face and is typically striped.

I have seen spotted, but wonder if they have bengal cat in their lineage.
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Bengal cats were only invented in 1991, by Jean Mills in California. They didn't exist before then and haven't had any influence on the general cat population. Spotted tabby is a modification of mackerel (same gene with minor modifications) and can be found worldwide.
 
Color does not make a breed. Some breeds have certain color schemes as a part of its standard, but just because a cat is a certain color scheme does not make it a certain breed. Most kitty colors are evidenced across most all breeds. That said, most cats are some kind of mongrel which makes them healthier overall and not as prone to genetic diseases.
 
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