#mixedmonday

© Dr. Mirjam Kessler

© gladkova.ru

I have a rare treat for you guys today! One of my followers was so kind to anonymously share these photos of a very special cat with me.

This stunning boy is called Zuko. As you can perhaps see from the pictures and his split coloured face he is not only a male tortie (with white) but also blue and black at once!!

Blue is a dilution of black and usually a cat can visually only be one or the other (blue or black), but not both! 

Most likely Zuko is a chimera, meaning two (or more) separate embryos fused during pregnancy which resulted in a single cat with different sets of colour traits.

People often like to throw the word chimera around when it comes to split face torties, but in most of those cases it is being misused and simply a striking looking but otherwise normal expression of the tortie colouration. 

True natural occurring chimeras are quite rare and can only be confirmed with DNA testing. 

I am not aware that Zuko has been officially tested for chimerism so we can’t be 100% sure, but the combination of showing two otherwise non co-existing colours and being a male tortie makes him a much more likely candidate.

You might have seen my post about Narnia not too long ago, which has similar features. Narnia’s DNA tests are still ongoing for the moment, but he too might be a chimera cat.

The Topaz is a very new blue eyed cat breed which is in development by Iryna Merzlenko in Ukraine. It currently has experimental status with the WCF.

Blue eyed cats with very little or no white fur at all are usually very rare, but that’s exactly the goal of this breed. Thanks to a dominant blue eyed gene these cats can have any coat colour and still have striking blue eyes. Odd eyes with at least one blue eye are acceptable according to the breed standard as well.

As the breed is still so young the genetics behind the blue eyes have not yet been fully uncovered. It seems that homozygous cats whith large amounts of white increases the possibility of deafness. It also seems to produce extremely unusual markings and white distributions (see examples below).

Kaonasi (black smoke with white)

Panda (black roan bicolour)

Dakota (black spotted tabby)

Cyntiya (black silver spotted tabby)

Blot (black with white)

Maryska (black with white)

Lourdes (black)

Yes, I have because one of my own cats (Faolan, see below) is a black smoke with an underlying classic tabby pattern. ;) However let’s just talk real quick about the proper terminology, because a “tabby smoke” is by definition not possible. “Smoke” means the cat is a solid colour + silver. If the cat is a tabby + silver it will be called “silver tabby”. 

BUT sometimes we can see a smoke cat (solid) clearly showing tabby markings! So what’s going on here? All cats are in truth tabbies. There are other colours   though— like solids — which will hide that tabby pattern from being visible. Sometimes the tabby pattern is not fully surpressed and it shines through. This is called “ghost marks”. They are especially common in smokes and usually better visible when the cats are kittens or still young. Ghost markings tend to fade if not completely disappear with age. 

Personally I think all smokes look fantastic be it with or without ghost markings, but at least for show cats ghost markings are a big “no-no”, because they are supposed to look solid and not like a tabby, which makes sense.

Here are a few examples of quite extreme black smoke with classic tabby ghost markings (+ scroll to the end for my boy Faolan <3). Enjoy!

Mixed Monday Special:black smoke with ghost markings (classic tabby)

© Nathalie Boogemans

Boulette (JUNA “du Double Zéro Cat”)breed: British Shorthairbreeder: Mme Sefiani

© Cattery Cheshire Rose

breed: British Shorthair

© thesilverpaws

© Tetyana Dovgalyova

Butterflies Ural breed: Sphynx breeder: Tetyana Dovgalyova sphynx.tv 

© Tetyana Dovgalyova

© Eva Køhler

© Corinna Steinbrecher

© Coralise Noske

Lunia Noske breed: Egyptian Mau breeder and owner: Coralise Noske egyptianmau.net

© Coralise Noske

Asaar von Skarrabäus & Milou of Silver Shine (Lunia Noske’s parents) breed: Egyptian Mau breeder: Sylvia&René Hodel egyptian-mau.de breeder: Eva Roerbert cattery Silver Shine owner: Coralise Noske egyptianmau.net

© Coralise Noske

Milou of Silver Shine with her kittens Lunia, Lara, Lamares, Lameras, Levino, Lauro and Livio