KittyCatS! Community Forum

I think this has been asked a few times, but I am still not totally sure I understand it.

I've got a couple kitties that have traits that are really recessive, while also having really dominate traits in other areas. For example, i have a snowshoe cream with gen earth eyes. I am having decent enough getting good furs by breeding him against other cats, but i cannot seem to get rid of the eyes for some better ones.

There are also some cats that have specific recessive traits i am looking for. I've made no secret of the fact that my quest is foxie blondies with foxie ears, and I have gotten a few males, but still not females to start a line. Also, i've decided that I want my foxies to have blonde-streaked whiskers. I have a couple cats with recessive fur to foxie, but the ears are dominant to foxie.

I've got a few other examples like this, but those are the two biggest ones, so the question is two fold: how to i breed a dominant trait out in general, and how do I breed for a specific recessive trait?

thanks!

As a picture tells it better than words i've chosen a simple example :




I shall now be pairing Tangerine with this guy :

Fur: Foxie - Salt & Pepper Mask
Eyes: Jade (Mysterious|Small)
Shade: Porcelain
Tail: Swanky
Ears: Rounded
Whiskers: Blonde Streaked (Wavy)

So Tangerine has Light Wash hidden from her mom, and hopefully Jade will pull them through.
I choose a Foxy S&P which is recessive Bali Cream to try pass her hidden Siam Tortie so of course the S&P must show too for it to remain present in the offspring.

So if all goes well i should soon be getting this or better from the pairing:

Fur: Foxie - Salt & Pepper Mask
Eyes: Light Wash(Mysterious|Small)
Shade: Porcelain
Tail: Swanky
Ears: Rounded
Whiskers: Blonde Streaked (Plush)

and once i have this i shall build up with more recessive traits and so on and so forth until i have a pair which can make me the super traited Tortie that i want.

It's sorta like weaving really.

Hope this helps a bit

** In case you aren't clued into this yet, any shown trait will always have a more recessive hiding and never a more dominant. This hidden can be either a parents' shown or it's hidden trait.
Shown trait from one parent and the hidden from the other.

this is where things get a little confusing for me...and where i come to things like cross breeding and back breeding.

i am going to need to get some pics i think....

my biggest problem seems to be trying to get the recessive traits out. the dominant ones always seem to pass as shown, but the recessives seem to never pop out.

Well, lets take the example of your Snow Cream with genesis Earth. If it doesn't have another eye hidden then no amount of breeding with other eyes can give you anything but gen Earth.

In my example, Daviel is also gen Earth with no other hidden eye as far as i know, which is why i use the only sure method possible to put a different eye onto this coat.

The only ways that one can get a specific recessive eye out, or any eye for that matter, is to have an even more recessive eye either shown or hidden on the partner, or the desired eye shown and/or hidden on BOTH partners.
And this goes for all trait slots too.

Now lets take the Exotic Breeze eyes for example, which we believe to be to top recessive (or True Recessive as we call it), at the moment.
There is no known eye that is more recessive, so to obtain it showing on an offspring one partner must be showing it and the other hiding it, or both partners hiding it.
If hidden on both partners it's also recommended to have it behind two different shown eyes as if the more recessive shown appears instead of the Exotic Breeze then we can know for sure that Breeze has been passed on to hidden but if the more dominant shown appears we can be sure that it hasn't.
If both shown eyes are the same and they don't produce Breeze then there's no way of knowing if Breeze has been been passed to the offspring.

Sorry if this is still confusing but as i don't know you yet i cannot adequately adapt my explanations to your thought processes.

Hmm. this may go a long way to explaining a problem I had all through breeding one cat's life.

It was an Occi Ebony Silver, and I was breeding him with his daughter, a Pandie Plat. Since Ebony Silver is recessive to Plat, and since one was showing it and the other was hiding it, most of their kids had Ebony Silver. Is that correct?

In other words, breeding a recessive hidden with a recessive shown causes that recessive to become an effectivly dominant trait, in that it will show up significantly more frequently than the normally dominant trait?

if so, then my snowshoe won't ever have anything but genesis-eyed cats, but his kids will if i were to backbreed them with their non-genesis eyed moms, or other cats with the same hidden or shown eyes as their mom?

Karloff Wrote:In other words, breeding a recessive hidden with a recessive shown causes that recessive to become an effectivly dominant trait, in that it will show up significantly more frequently than the normally dominant trait?

I hope I'm understanding you correctly and that my remarks are relevant to what you need. I think your statement is on the right track but not precise.

The dominant trait will show 100% of the time - not just "significantly more frequently". 100%. The less dominant doesn't get a small percentage to "pop out". It Never Pops unless there is another More Recessive hidden trait that "lets" it pop out. Dominance of course is a relative term, which is why we all consult Saga's dominance documents so obsessively. I think of it as a kind of game of rock, paper, scissors, where rock always beats scissors but paper covers rock. You have to choose your mates so that a more recessive trait will "let" the trait you want out. [The problem with my rock, paper, scissors analogy is that that game is circular, and KittyCats charts/traits aren't, but I still find the analogy helpful in some ways to talk about how a trait beats another trait.]

OR, and this is what we mainly end up doing, you mate two offspring that both have the desired hidden trait, and hope that they both end up tossing it, in which case it will show. Statistically, two cats should both toss their hiddens 25% of the time, but as with all runs of coin tosses, there's a deviation from the statistical average in any given sample.

So yes, given a run of offspring, over time, the hidden will "pop out" more often if you've buried a more-hidden trait in the parents. Conversely, if you haven't, the hidden trait will Never pop out, unless there happens to be a recessive hidden present that you didn't know about.
I'm sure I've said that in a too-condensed way, but I hope it helps.

i'm not trying to be dense or obstinant, just want to make 100% sure i know what is happening so I don't "waste" breeding oportunities.

I'm still a bit confused on the math here. If the dominant trait shows 100% of the time, where does the 25% chance to recessive hidden trait come from?

For example, here's the Pandie Plat I talked about:

Fur: Pandie - Platinum
Eyes: Crystal Spring (Mysterious|Small)
Shade: Natural
Tail: Tiger Curl
Ears: Soft Fold
Whiskers: Silver (Guitar)

Size: Normal


and her dad:

Fur: Ocicat - Ebony Silver
Eyes: Platinum (Mysterious|Small)
Shade: Twinkle
Tail: Tiger Curl
Ears: Mysterious
Whiskers: White (Mysterious)

Size: Normal

I bred the two of them together ten times, and of those times I got Occi Ebony's 8 times and platinum eyes 7 times, despite the fact that Pandie is more dominant (her mom, had pandie showing, her grandmom had it hidden).

If the dominant fur pops out 100% of the time, with no chance for the recessive, what is happening here?

I guess I am confused as to the percentages. If a dominant trait will 100% of the time pass, and is always showing, how can the recessives show up?

Again, I'm sorry if it seems like i'm being intentionally dense, i'm not trying to...

edit: probably worth mentioning that i was trying for a pandie plat with platinum eyes, a combination i only got once.

I think what Ivy means is just that the shown trait will always be dominant to the hidden trait, but this doesn't necessarily mean that these will be the two parents' shown traits.

I will again quote part of Saga's Facts about KittyCats Traits as she's explained in the simplest and clearest way possible i find :

- Confirmed Basic Facts About KittyCatS Traits:

--- A KittyCat has TWO "genes" per trait you see - a visible trait and a hidden trait. Traits in this context can of course also be genesis traits.

-BOTH a KittyCat's traits, the hidden & the visible, will be inherited directly from the parents - one from mom, one from dad.

- Hidden traits can become visible and vice versa, and hidden traits can be inherited and remain hidden through generations.

-If a kitten has mom's VISIBLE fur, it can not also have a HIDDEN fur trait from her - the hidden fur trait will then be from dad.

-The visible trait is ALWAYS more dominant than the hidden trait, unless the shown & hidden traits are identical.

-When two cats breed, they both pass either their hidden or visible trait, and the kitten will have the more dominant of those two traits as the shown trait, and the less dominant as the hidden trait. -Again, unless they are identical. ---

With your example you are doing exactly the right thing so do keep asking away until you get it all straight in your mind, we all had to learn at sometime and no one thinks that you're being dense or obstinate

thank you. what makes it frustrating is that i'm (i think) pretty decent at breeding for dominant traits, it is pretty straightforward... recessives are where i am tripping up.

the last point in bold seems to speak to what I thought might be happening.

So, I'm going to lay out a hypothetical scenario and see if my math is correct:

breeding a pair of siblings by the same parents. they both end up with the same fur and eyes, both of which are of higher dominance than the hidden fur and owned by the parent whose trait didn't pass.

I breed the two siblings together. Because the hidden fur and eyes are recessive to the shown (dominant) fur and eyes, the kittens will share the parent's shown traits, but will still have the same hidden traits as the parents as well?

To get the hidden traits to show, i need to take a cat from outside the bloodline that is either showing or hiding the recessive trait from the sibling's kitten? Or, alternately breeding one of the siblings back with the parent that showed the hidden trait of the sibling?

Again, that would explain why I got a huge batch of Occi's from my Plat and Occi backbreeding pair: the dad's shown fur was the same as the daughter's hidden fur, and i'd have been better off breeding a plat back with the mom (who was also a pandie plat).

Is this correct?

Yes, Anna, that is what I meant, the shown trait will always be dominant to the hidden trait.

Karloff Wrote:breeding a pair of siblings by the same parents. they both end up with the same fur and eyes, both of which are of higher dominance than the hidden fur and owned by the parent whose trait didn't pass

Is that a typo? Because of course the parent’s trait did pass. Both parents passed a trait to the offspring, you just don’t see one of them; you only see the one which is more dominant.

Karloff Wrote:I breed the two siblings together. Because the hidden fur and eyes are recessive to the shown (dominant) fur and eyes, the kittens will share the parent's shown traits, but will still have the same hidden traits as the parents as well?

Well, yes, the shown traits will be the same as the dominant trait shown by the parent, but as to the hidden traits, that can change. You asked about the math, the 25%, so this is as good a place as any to put this example. I’m sure something like this has been posted on the forum many times, and I looked to see if I could find one that I thought Tad had written up, but didn’t find it.

Taking your example the generation before your back breed as I understand it:
So Dad is OciES/hidden fur Y. And Mom is PandiPlat/hidden fur X.
When they make a box there is a 25% chance of each of the following options. We don’t know the relative recessiveness of the hidden furs X and Y to each other but we know that they are both recessive to OciES (although I’m wondering if in your specific case one of the hiddens WAS also OciES since you don’t mention seeing any 3d fur, and you mention seeing a lot of OciES.)

1. Dad throws OciES, Mom throws PandiPlat -> OS will be PandiPlat/ocies.
2. Dad throws hiddenY, Mom throws PandiPlat -> OS will be PandiPlat/hiddenY.
3. Dad throws OciES, Mom throws hidden X -> OS will be OciES/hidden X.
4. Dad throws hidden Y, Mom throws hidden X -> OS will show whichever of the two is more dominant and hide whichever is more recessive.

Karloff Wrote:To get the hidden traits to show, i need to take a cat from outside the bloodline that is either showing or hiding the recessive trait from the sibling's kitten? Or, alternately breeding one of the siblings back with the parent that showed the hidden trait of the sibling?

Result 4. will show a hidden - whichever is most dominant. Or you can do a back breed, which is often faster, or you can get another cat from outside the bloodline, yes.

I hope I wrote all that correctly and that it is helpful.