Tabby patronen – hoe herken je een tabby kat?

A tabby cat is a cat that has agouti hairs. An agouti hair is composed of several bands of colors: a dark one with the base color of the cat, alternately with lighter and more reddish ones. So, a fur composed of agouti hairs has a clearer color than a solid one.
When a cat has a tabby pattern, the dark markings are made of solid hairs of the base color while the fur in between the markings is composed of agouti hairs.
Tabby cats can come in any existing cat colors, such as black, blue, chocolate, lilac, cinnamon, and fawn. For example, in a chocolate tabby, the markings are composed of hairs with a chocolate color, while the agouti hairs have bands of chocolate and light reddish chocolate.
Tabby cats usually look clearer than their equivalent solid color because of the agouti hairs. That’s why in many cat fancies black tabbies are called brown tabbies, but they shouldn’t be confused with the chocolate genetic color. Cats called “brown tabby” are genetically black tabby

Some characteristics of tabby cats are:

• ‘M’ shaped marking on the forehead

• Thin pencil lines on the face

• Dark ‘eyeliner’, and pale fur around it

• Pigmented lips and paws

• The nose is pinkish and outlined with darker pigment

• Torso, leg and tail banding

• The chin and the belly are often white or a paler color than the rest of the body. 

These are just a handful of shortcuts to identify a tabby cat, but they’re not an exact set of rules: some ticked tabby, for example, don’t have any leg and tail banding.

Tabby Patterns

There are 4 main types of tabby patterns, which I’m going to describe more in detail in this article. These are mackerel, blotched, ticked, and spotted. These types of patterns correspond to the way agouti hairs are distributed on the cat’s body.

Mackerel tabby

The mackerel pattern is composed of vertical stripes similar to the one of a tiger. The name comes from the mackerel fish, which also has vertical markings. This pattern is the wild-type one, which means it’s typical in wild cats. All the other patterns are natural mutations that occurred in domestic cats. Mackerel is the most common tabby pattern, along with the blotched pattern.

Black mackerel tabby from @foxyyboxes

Blotched or classic tabby

The blotched tabby, also called classic tabby, is characterized by thick curved bands in a swirled pattern. The mark often looks like a bullseye and seen from above it can look like a butterfly pattern.

On the left a black golden blotched tabby from @britishcat_goldenmoonglade and on the right a red blotched tabby and white from @pizza_and_luna

Spotted tabby

The spotted pattern, as its name indicates, is characterized by spots on the cat’s body. The spots can be more or less elongated into broken lines. 

Ticked tabby

The last tabby pattern, ticked, is in fact an absence of any pattern: all the hairs are agouti on the body of ticket tabby cats. This means that there are no distinct dark-colored markings on the cat’s body. This can give a salt-and-pepper effect to the coat.
Nevertheless, residual bandings on the legs, tails, and torso might be present in some ticked tabbies. 
This pattern is often called the Abyssinian one, as it’s the pattern found in Abyssinian cats. However, the ticked tabby pattern is not limited to the Abyssinian breed.

Other patterns

The four main tabby patterns are not the only ones we can find in tabby cats. In addition to those, we can find some other patterns which are often an intermediate between two of the main ones, or patterns which are specific to some cat breeds such as the rosette and marble of the Bengal cat, or the Sokoke marbled pattern.
For example, broken mackerel is an intermediate between a mackerel tabby and a spotted tabby: these cats have broken stripes or long spots, depending on the point of view.
The Bengal breed has two specific tabby patterns: the rosetted, which is a subcategory of the spotted tabby, and marble tabby, a subcategory of the blotched tabby. This breed has an additional tabby pattern because it was hybridized with wild cats: this brought new genes for the new tabby pattern. These patterns were then improved and selected through selective breeding. 
I will describe more in detail all the Bengal-specific tabby patterns in a detailed article on breed-specific cat colors.

The genetics behind tabby cats

Note: in this part, I will dive into the genetics behind the tortie color. I advise that you first read the introduction to genetics in this article.

All cats have a tabby pattern!

All cats have a tabby pattern, and yes, this may sound confusing. I know you are going to say “but solid black cats aren’t tabby”. Right, but while they are not agouti (they don’t have any agouti hairs), they still genetically carry a tabby pattern!
In fact, there are different genes at play in tabby cats: one that determines if the cat is agouti or solid, and others that determine the tabby pattern of the cat. This means that all cats have tabby patterns but this tabby pattern is masked if the cat is solid. The tabby pattern can sometimes still be seen on some solid-color cats, especially on kittens, and it’s referred to as “ghost markings”.

Agouti

First, let’s talk about the agouti gene. There are two possible alleles: the dominant one (“A”) which means the cat is agouti, and the recessive one (“a”) which means a cat is non-agouti or solid. So, as A is dominant, if the cat is A/A or A/a, it will be agouti. If the cat is a/a, it will be solid. This also means that if you breed two solid cats, all their kittens will be solid. However, if you breed two agouti cats, it’s possible to get solid kittens.
As explained in this article on red cats, the orange gene is dominant over the non-agouti genotype. This means that an orange cat carrying a/a will still look tabby and that explains why all red cats always look tabby.

Tabby pattern

Now let’s look at the genetics behind the different marking patterns. Here it gets a bit more complicated as there are several genes at play, and still some incertitudes.

Spotted

Finally, the last theorized gene (it could be that, in reality, it might be one unique gene but the influence of multiple polygenes) is the Spotted gene. Its effect is to modify the mackerel or blotched patterns. The characteristic lines of these patterns are broken into spots in spotted cats. The Spotted gene (“Sp“) is dominant: if a cat is Sp/Sp or Sp/sp the tabby pattern transformed into spots. If a cat is sp/sp, it has a normal mackerel or blotched tabby pattern. This gene is recessive towards the ticked pattern and, therefore, has no effect on a ticked tabby cat.
It has also been theorized that homozygous and heterozygous cats don’t have exactly the same types of spots. A broken mackerel could be a cat heterozygous for the Spotted gene. 

Similarly, the other tabby patterns of the Bengal and Sokoke could be the influence of some “wild” modifiers. There is still much to learn about the genetic behind the different tabby patterns!

Here is everything you need to know about tabbies and their pattern. In the next article I will  talk about the colorpoints cats: stay tuned to know more about cat furs!