#princetfae

killer notification i got from you dhskhd

southeast queensland, id needed

my mum ran into this guy's web in the dark lmao (she was fine)

im doing a warriors genetic project where im compiling and fixing the cats' genetics in the order that the cats are named (i need to read every book for this...), and looking at willowpelt. she is so pale. one-eye i could make lilac, but willow is specfically described as "silver-gray" (but not silver, as she's not a tabby) and doesn't read as lilac to me.

im geniunely considering slapping some kinda theoretical pink-eyed dominant on her and calling it a day (which. actually. the "unusual blue eyes"... hang on...)

sigh i wish there was a website or smth where you could just easily view the ranges of different colours of cats instead of trudging through the internet and praying. i searched "powder blue cat" and got results of cat collars.

Assuming just a purely solid-blue cat, no tricks like siamese or anything, they can get pretty pale but you're not gonna mistake them for white/silver.

The thing w/solid blue shorthairs is that they can be pretty shiny, which adds to the apparent paleness even tho the fur isn't actually that unpigmented.

Russian Blues are a great example of this! They're bred to be very shiny so they look paler than they are under worse lighting. (Not all Russian Blues are this pale and plenty are v dark, but when I look for pale blues, I tend to find Russians)

So for a "silver-blue" I'd make them a decently pale, shorthair blue who is very shiny, and just choose to depict that as pretty pale in art :3

Idr if Willowpelt is shorthair. If she's a longhair then they can still get pale enough to be called silver-blue (which is a p loose/subjective term)...

apologies for the.. imperfect quality, they are tiny and FAST. ive been assuming theyre camponotus consobrinus ants, but they move very strangely compared to the other ants in my yard, in short twitchy bursts

a video probably wouldve been easier to look at but submissions dont work for me 😭

in other news, i was the guy who had a dome web spider in their yard with a bunch of eggs and babies, well now her babies are all grown up and having spiderlings of their own!

Photos are almost always better than a video for ID. Those lil friends are black-headed strobe ants, Opisthopsis rufithorax.

no id needed, here's one of the many beautiful and polite roommates that live on my walls

who is this marvelous little guy?? they floated down from the sky in front of me

also, its pedipalps were vibrating up and down rapidly, what might that behaviour mean?

also since the blue is caused by lack of pigmentation, how exactly IS there variation in... the pigmentation?

also in non-albino cats ive only seen heterochromia involving one blue eye, never anything like one green + one yellow. what's the reason for that? or am i just not looking hard enough

eye genetics continue to confound me

Hmm good question! I don't have definitive answers for you but I'll share what I know.

The "red"/pinkishness of albino eyes comes from the retina being visible behind the iris. I don't know what causes more structural iris blue vs more retina red to be visible.

I suppose if we knew what that mechanism was, we could conceive of a way that the same individual might have two different variations in that mechanism.