Meet Mr. Calico: A Truly RARE MALE Calico!!!
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How then can a male be a true calico? Sometimes there is an incomplete division of the chromosome pair when the chromosomes are separating at the time of fertilization. When that happens, the incomplete chromosome ends up attached to another of the two required chromosomes, giving the offspring one of the following combinations:
To learn more about calicos and their genetics, read here. |
Mr.Calico is our gorgeous male calico who has gone to his his forever home. We love to share him since he is so rare. He is exceptionally rare, and he seems to know it!
This handsome guy is very, very rare. Only 1 in about every 3,000 calico cats are male!! Why is this? Male calicos are a genetic anomaly. Cats, like humans, have two sex chromosomes. Chromosomes carry genes and determine an animal's traits. The required red color for a calico cat is passed only on a female (X) chromosome. How then can a male cat inherit the red colored required for a calico cat?To put it simply, two chromosomes determine gender. Each parent contributes one chromosome to the offspring. The mother, who has only X chromosomes, always contributes an X chromosome. The father, who has both X and Y chromosomes, can contribute either an X or a Y chromosome to his offspring. Thus, it is the father who determines the sexes of his kittens. The red color gene cannot be passed to a male offspring due to unusual characteristics of the gene in question. Under certain conditions, when the red genes are passed to a female offspring, she displays not the expected red or orange coat, but the tricolor coat of a true calico cat. |
