alt Hacker NewsFrom my understanding, orange cats are almost exclusively male.
They also have one shared brain cell.
Source: My family is owned by a marmalade tom.
Replies
> orange cats are almost exclusively male
This is also equally true for black cats as the genetics works the same for them too.
However, it's more that "female cats can be tortoiseshell" and thus the ratios will get somewhere around a 2:1 ratio of male orange cats to female orange cats.
Assume that you've got 50% tortie females, 25% orange female, and 25% black female... and 50% orange male and 50% black male. You can run Montecarlo simulations on that but it will always be the case that orange (and black) cats are predominantly male because of the smaller number of options.
There's also the increased visibility of the "trouble puffs" on a male orange cat (compared to black male) and so conformation bias of "yep, that's an orange male cat."
> They also have one shared brain cell.
You will appreciate:
Only about 80% are male. This is as opposed to torties and calicos, which always by necessity have two X chromosomes (as the patchy pattern results from X-inactivation [1]). The very rare male torties are XXYs.
I had an orange female cat. It was on Bali. I think they are quite common there.
> They also have one shared brain cell.
Confirmed. Very early cooperative multitasking.
The interwebs say cats have XY sex determination, and that the orange color gene is on the X chromosome and is recessive. So a male cat with an orange X will be orange, but a female cat needs both X's to be orange to be orange (a female cat with one orange X and one non-orange X will likely show as tortoise shell or calico). Assuming equal probability (P) of each X chromosome being orange so we have a chance at modelling, the males will have P chance of being orange, and females would have P * P chance. Assuming cats have evenly distributed sex,
If P is 90%, 90% of males are orange, and 81% of females are orange; and 47% of orange cats are female. If P is 10%, 10% of males are orange, 1% of females are orange, and ~ 91% of orange cats are male, ~ 9% are female.