Original photo by Sari ONeal/ Shutterstock
If you know anything about calico cats, it’s that they’re especially cute. If you know two things about them, the second might be that only about 1 in every 3,000 of them is male. The tricolor kitties — which are most often but not always white, orange, and black — get their distinct coat from their chromosomal makeup. Female cats have two X chromosomes, which carry the coding gene for black and orange coloration, and the only way for calico coloring to occur is for a kitten to get one black-coded X and one orange-coded X. The same is also true of tortoiseshell (tortie) cats, which are predominantly black and orange — and known for their “tortitude.” (The white patches in calicos, meanwhile, happen through a separate genetic process called piebalding, which produces areas of skin and fur without any pigment.)
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It's a fibQuite the opposite, in fact — about 81% of orange cats are male. Whereas females will be orange only if they carry that gene in both X chromosomes, males will be orange if they carry it in either the X or Y chromosome.
Though extremely rare, male calicos and torties do exist. This is usually the result of one of two conditions: chimerism or Klinefelter’s syndrome. The former occurs when two embryos fuse early in pregnancy, resulting in two different sets of DNA, while Klinefelter’s is the result of a male inheriting an extra X chromosome and therefore having XXY chromosomes. Making them even rarer is the fact that male calicos are almost always sterile, meaning it’s all but impossible to breed calicos — every one you see is an anomaly, and all the more special for it.
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Calicos are the official state cat of ______.
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Calicos are the official state cat of Maryland.
Calicos are considered good luck.
There’s a reason that maneki-neko are so often depicted as calicos: They’re considered good luck. The “beckoning cat” figurines found throughout Japan and at Japanese and Chinese establishments around the world are intended as tokens of good fortune, with one of their paws raised high in a waving motion. This dates back to the tradition of Japanese sailors traveling with calicos to bring about safe passage — the multicolored cats were believed to be able to chase away storms and ancestral ghosts. In the United States and England, meanwhile, male calicos are considered especially lucky because of their rarity.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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