Cat Genetics for Writers & Artists part 1: Concepts & Terminology [CC] 

Making the cats in Warriors genetically accurate can actually have major implications to several important stories, most notably firestar and bramblestar, both characters are heavily defined by their appearance.

I don’t really try making realistic cats but god i am so interested in this even though it’s a bit confusing

9:37 *pause* draw a pe-" THATS HOW YOU GET ME TO LEARN STUFF. LOVE IT

also tip for anyone who is confused: you can just search pretty much any of the vocabulary terms next to the words “amoeba sisters” for a more in depth explanation of it :)

Omg thank the algorithm I found this video. My friend got me into cat genetics because she always got mad that I made characters who were completely impossible. It’s been 4 years and I finally found someone who can actually explain it in a way I understand.

I got my paper out and starting taking notes all throughout the video. Back a year ago I had tried to learn this stuff for my biology class but little of it stuck, biology has always been my worst class, I’m always behind and it makes me feel stupid. This video explained it in a way I got and that had me really connecting to the material, thank you. I know you made it for Warrior Cats fan (which I am too), but it’s also very educational

This is fascinating and I would KILL to see more videos where people tie real academic fields in with fun stuff, even if that fun thing isn't something I know a lot about. If somebody took anatomy and biology and used it to explain....I dunno, figure skating and how the body moves to make those things possible, I'd watch it. So this is AMAZING.

I am constantly torn between wanting to make a 100% genetically realistic cat with 100% genetically realistic parents and 100% genetically realistic kids, and the urge to make an all black cat with blue eyes just because it’s pretty

As a person entering the field of genetics for college (getting my minor in evolutionary sciences) this video was incredibly well made! I’m not an expert on cat genetics so i was planning on these just explaining what genes are dominate to others, how they present etc. I was shocked, and honestly so so happy you actually went into not only the foundations of genetics but the ETHICS behind it. In this field it’s so common for people to misuse and bastardize terminology in a way that promotes ableist and racist rhetoric. You did an absolutely phenomenal job in clearly and concisely putting these notions to rest. As a fellow warrior cats enthusiast and science enjoyer I seriously cannot thank you enough for making these. Also adding on here: The way you explained all the scientific stuff made me SO HAPPY. It was such a simple and clear understanding that i’m sure people who don’t have a genetics background could understand and follow along. I’m seriously obsessed with your video style

on one hand i love making fictional cats more complex/realistic than they need to be and on the other hand i'm striving to be a zoologist and understand animal genetics better so i love this video i'll probably have to watch it a million times over to get most of the info to actually stick because of my short attention span n whatnot but i will enjoy every single rewatch

I've come here as someone who's interested in genetics, so it's incredibly amusing to me that my teacher here is a digital artist with a fursona (no hate, I love cats!)

I am so excited to have found this! Cat genetics explained by an actual biologist! I also really appreciate the disclaimer at the top of your video about all the ways genetics have been used to hurt people. Its an important topic.

I absolutely LOVE genetics, it's so interesting. My interest in genetics started with the chao in 'Sonic Adventure' and 'Sonic Adventure 2', and then got sky rocketed by 'Niche: A Genetics Survival Game'.

24:59 The kid who's more extreme than either parent on a gradient trait is especially likely if the parents have a lot of heterozygosity. For example, if someone with a lot of homozygous low-melanin alleles (say, someone who's ancestry was entirely northern European for many generations) has kids with someone with a lot of homozygous high-melanin alleles (say, someone who's ancestry was entirely sub-Saharan African for many generations), they'll probably get a lot of similar-looking intermediate kids who are heterozygous for the majority of melanin alleles. However if two half European/half African people had a child together, the high heterozygosity in both parents means that the kid could come out with a skin color anywhere between typical European to typical African, which includes many possibilities that are darker or lighter than both parents. There's some news stories out there about fraternal twins who "look like different races" - most are full siblings whose parents have a lot of heterozygosity on genes coding for skin color (and a few are maternal half-siblings whose fathers have different ethnic backgrounds).

thank you for fueling my hyperfixation about genetics, your video was very easy to understand, definitely going to watch the rest of the series! :]

This is a BRILLIANT explanation that can be useful for so much more beyond cats. I will give it to my students (usually science courses studying English) to help them both learn English while studying for classes! Thank you!

Such an amazing video! I'm also a biology student and one of the things I enjoy the most is genetics...cat genetics (?

This was fun, which is an accomplishment because biology lessons are very hit or miss for me :p

What the hell made youtube think I wanted to learn about warrior cat genetics? Whatever line of code made the algorithm think this, thank you?!

As a fellow biology/genetics nut, I absolutely LOVE this video. Time to binge the whole series!!

help this made me fall asleep not cause I was bored but because your voice is so soothing, you should make asmr

13:18 oh dear, who’s going to give the bad news to Stan and Ford Pines’ dad

Fuck o clock am is such a relatable phrase. This is an excellent video! Thank you for making it

Thank you SO MUCH for these videos. I'm binging them. 🥺💕

Super comprehensive so far, I forgot most of the info from my one college genetics elective, but this was a great re-intro lol. Plus Punnet squares are always fun!

this is my new favorite video and playlist thank you so much i'm so obsessed with real life animal pattern genetics and there were some things in the video that i didn't know yet!!

I just want to say, (as I’m binging this right now) thank you so very much for doing this! I have been looking for good ways to realistically figure out my cats’ genetics for my stories, and Barnes and nobles doesn’t exactly have any books on cat genetics. You are a godsend! Thank you!

I’m so glad I started learning cat genetics for fun before it was taught in my schools because they made it SO BORING but I genuinely LOVE genetics. This is SUCH an interesting refresher and I’m so grateful to you for this. I accidentally watched the third video first but that was fine, I understood everything in there. I just wanted to watch in chronological order.

Damn I learned the punnet square in 7th grade😵‍💫 im lucky I liked that class

I've always wanted to get into genetics but I never had a reason to. I'm so glad I found this video series lol I love Warriors and I get to learn about a super interesting topic through it

im def subscribing, this was so entertaining and really fun! and ive never been so interested in something educational in my life,

Niche really taught me about recessive genes soo.... thanks

Hey, thank you so so much for making this whole series. Not only did you break things down in a way that was simple to understand, this specific third video also supplied a crash course on genetics that my own teachers like, impressed at you addressing nuances while keeping things straight forward. Wonderful work, I eagerly await the next release, have an absolutely wonderful day.

I only know the basics of Cat genetics which I learned all because I wanted genetically accurate characters. I'm hoping that this series will help me understand what I'm doing better.

thank you for making this!

I- I stumbled across this from the dog video thinking about ways to improve how I communicate visuals to an audio-only audience for an online game I run. But, I remembered something I said to myself at the end of the last semester: "I'll study a bit of the classes I'm taking next fall ahead of time so it's less stressful." I happen to be taking genetics this fall. This may not be professional, but it's helpful to serve as a reminder for terminology and application, I think. Thanks for reminding me of that desire I had. Now to find something on Mammalogy and Freshwater Ecology for some light background research.

I personally dont try to make my cats realistic, just that they look somewhat related. BUT I always think genetics in warrior cats is fun, even if the genetics hurt my brain.

Honestly this video was super interesting, especially since genetics in general have interested me. I have very blonde hair and grey eyes but both my parents are brunettes with brown eyes, along with my sister, so i was super curious at how that could happen when I was younger. Getting a more thorough explanation is just even more cool :D

When I do kitten looks based on genetics using punnet squares I use a random number generator to determine the pattern of the kits.

Using this to help prep for my zoology class next semester 💅

As someone who is in a lot of Horse Art RPGs and loves the genetic side of it its so cool to see the similarities in cats aswell. Like the agouti allele [saw it in your family tree video] and I'm quite curious in learning cat genetics aswell for some reason XD

I LOVE YOU FOR MAKING THIS UR A LIFESAVER I LOFE U SO MUCH PLATONIC

Videos like this are 10 times better without the grading and school aspect of it. Like this is perfect for my dumb fixation of cat genetics /vpos

I remember one time during 8th grade my science teacher had mentioned and showed us a video about genetics ONCE and I was SUPER excited to finally get on the topic of genetics since it's something i find so fascinating yet sometimes confusing, but it was stuff I already knew about, like the punnet square and the basics B, O, and A, and she never mentioned it again and i felt pretty bummed out, so I've taken it upon myself to figure out and learn about genetics, specifically cat genetics, just for fun!

I am not into Warrior Cats at all, but I am a biology student and am actually finding this really interesting and useful XD

just starting to learn about genetics in science... this hurts my brain but honestly it's really cool and I want to draw accurate Warrior Cats

I love this!!

YO I LOVE GENETICS !! THANKS SO MUCH

Good lord 5 seconds in and you immediately clocked why i'm here LMAO

I’m in grade 7 and I want to be whatever major you are when I grow up!

ooh this is so interesting!

I love these videos so much! I’ve learned a lot from them 😊 my parents like them too

There was an ad and i freaking hissed

I'd like to say that the goggle doc link isn't working- It says that the file does not exist??? Update: The goggle docs are working now!

I’m also studying evolutionary biology lol! It’s part of my undergrad stream, along with ecology and behaviour.

Genetics are so interesting

no because my biology teacher was so over it because he was close to retirement, and i (who was unreasonably excited for the genetics unit) was so disappointed when his teaching was… lackluster at best :/. this video was so fun, i took notes over the whole thing and will probably do so for the whole series!! i haven’t made a warriors oc in almost a decade but this is tempting me to make a whole line of realistic cats lmao. thanks for the video!!

watchin this for some reason, ive never drawn a cat in my entire life

I was always a big biology nerd as a kid and excelled in these sorts of high school level bio talk but gotta say the "dominent genes are just the alleles with higher priority" is interesting to me because I always imagined it as like scribbling two colors of crayon on the same sheet of paper. Both colors are still there, but the black crayon is going to almost entirely hide the yellow crayon just because it's a darker color. Even if it was like, white being dominant over red or something I'd just imagine it like it was a specific kind of art supply that just worked that way. That misconception must have come from being taught about it via eye color and all sorts of bits where the dominant trait was the one with more pigment.

I honestly never wanted or tried to make my cats genetically accurate lol, like, I have an oc named Storkflight who is a male tortoiseshell with brown parents, and I don't regret anything. I honestly just design my ocs however I want, honestly, but it's interesting to know how their genetics actually work :)

A fair amount of the terms and concepts in this video were already familiar to me, actually. And, all this pre-existing knowledge came from my British secondary school biology course, and I would've learned all this in either 2015, 2016 or 2017. Interestingly, I knew the term "allele" going into this video, but when I started watching your channel, the term "locus" was entirely unfamiliar to me, there wasn't any kind of recognition even when you explained the definition, but I am also accounting for me just mis-remembering. But I _think_ I'm remembering correctly that we did not learn the term "locus", or if we did, it was sparingly. Instead, we pretty much used the term "allele" as a stand in for "gene" when we were learning. But the _actual_ meaning and intended use of dominant vs. recessive, basic Punnett square calculations and the experiment with the pea plants was all taught to us in those years. I have a fairly decent memory and I did very well in science in school, even though I've gone on to specialize in English instead, but it's curious to me that one half of the current terms was taught to us, whilst the other half wasn't, or it wasn't as prominently. I have no way of knowing, but I am curious about how genetic basics are being taught nowadays in secondary school biology, and I wonder if it has changed at all and is now including "locus" (if my memory is correct and it wasn't for me). Genetics is fascinating, I keep coming back to this video to refresh my memory for the terms specifically, but gosh it's really interesting and if I find the time I want to learn more. I am a ginger-haired person, with very pale skin, freckles, green eyes, the whole shebang, and the entire discussion surrounding melanin just made me curious about how that affects people like me, as in, I'm curious about how _few_ melanin proteins I have in me, since for the majority of my life, I have always been the palest person I've come across. And I'm also now wondering if there is a genetic link between people with ginger hair and people having green eyes, since that's a very common combination I see, in humans and cats. Thank you for making this series, I will be a frequent viewer as long as this current warriors fixation lasts!

its 1am, what am I doing here

im not planning on making cats nor am i in cat oc spaces NOR do i know anything about cat genetics but i love horse genetics so why not edit. ooh lp mentioned, its one of my current favorite genes (in theory, since irl its been connected to a type of blindness)

you could always use sire and dam for mom and dad in these videos! they’re technically just words attached to the role the parent had in making the kittens, not actually gender-based terms. its like afab and amab afaik

I love genetics and will now be able to understand how thunderstar came from two grey cats (one of which comes from a family of grey cats)

The maths make it reaaaally confusing for me (I have dyscalculia) but I love genetics either way!

WAIT YOU CAN GET A DEGREE IN THOSE THINGS?!

do I know what warrior cats is? no. do I draw cats? …also no, but I still watched the entire video

Yay!

I know exactly what you mean by that MGS reference I just like to think Liquid it stupit.

11:53 Chromosome anomalies are an exception to this rule. For example, people with Down Syndrome have three copies of all or part of chromosome 21. This means that for any gene with a locus on chromosome 21, someone with Down Syndrome will actually have three alleles instead of two at that locus. Conversely, people with Williams Syndrome are missing a part of chromosome 7 (specifically, the 7q11 region, which is right next to the attachment point where two chromosome 7s join up during cell division). So, for any gene locus present in that particular region of chromosome 7, people with Williams Syndrome have only one allele.

“Put a smiley face :-)….draw a pe-“ KILLED ME

Can i consider this studying for my bio class?

I did a bit of digging, and I found that the light-switch gene in the genetic complexes (commonly known as the Locus Control Region) is called an Enhancer. I am in no way sure if this is true or not, but hope this helps!

I have a question! Can a longhair dilute female torbie (Calico Tortie), & a shorthair white male cat with silver tabby patches, what do they create? I have 2 characters for my comic series (Named Momo & Kumo, Momo being a long hair male calico, & Kumo looking like his dad aka the white male cat with sliver tabby patches & also being shorthair) How do the genes work for Kumo & Momo, what would they actually look like?

not an artist/writer or a warrior cats fan but a secret third thing (autistic)

I know this is an old video, but I haven't found a correction in the comments, so here: The "homo" in "homo sapiens" doesn't mean "same", it means "man/human", it's where the French "homme" and Spanish "hombre" (edit: and also the word "human") come from. It's Latin, while the "homo" meaning "same" is Greek. "Homo sapiens" means something like "knowledgable man".

I watched BlueCollarDen’s videos on cat genetics, will this be different?

Quick question... Is it true that if one of the cats is all black, that they will have at least one (1) black kitten? Just curious.

I have a question. What order are the loci written in on a genotype? Apologies if I'm using the wrong terminology, I can clarify if needed. I'm guessing it is written in this order: B Locus, O Locus, D Locus, A Locus, I Locus, Wb Locus, C Locus, W Locus? I'm going off of the order of your videos, but I just want to be sure. No need to feel bad if you don't get to my comment quickly!

.... s--some people think dominant genes make you more dominant emotionally...?

😃

Amazing!! Now do chicken genetics 🔫😔

25:40 Idk, I think they’re all horses /j

Data a lot of adds

THIS DOESNT HELP IM TOO STUPID TO REMEMBER WHAT EACH GENE MENS 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

6:03 I don't like using egg/sperm donor to describe situations other than intentionally conceiving a child with a prior agreement not to play a parental role, because I've run into far too many people who use donor as a derogatory term for parents who abandoned their kids or whose kids went no contact with them. As the mother of a donor-conceived child, I'm sick of people assuming I'm talking about a crappy ex when I mention her sperm donor, and I worry about the impact such assumptions will have on her once she's old enough to understand what people are assuming.

Oh hey, actually, I'd like to briefly point something out. Afab and amab are both social terms. I understand it is genuinely quite difficult to figure out a way to phrase these things correctly because gender and sex are both such blurred lines. I would highly recommend using terms that are more rooted in your field to discuss these things, such as "In most people we would class as biologically female/male," or even just simply using the terms female and male frankly in a scientific sense. Nobody would blame you because those words are not typically used socially except by incels.

Thanks for making this! I needed this for an assignment but also half because I find it super interesting