this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
889 points (98.5% liked)

aww

20214 readers
32 users here now

A place with minimal rules for stuff that makes you go awww! Feel free to post pics, gifs, or videos of cats, dogs, babies, or anything cute and remember to be kind to others.

AI posts must be labeled [AI] in the title and are limited to one per week.

While posting and commenting in this community, you must abide by instance-wide rules: https://mastodon.world/about

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] lemming@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago

I actually don't know, it's a good point. It's definitely stochastic, but I don't know how late in the development it happens. There are definitely cats with colours completely jumbled cats with large patches of each colour. But I just realised that colour comes from melanocytes. And melanocytes must migrate from the back, as they come from neural crest. Which strikes me as a great reason for straight division on the front (the cells coming from left and right meet there) that we see here, regardless of the origin of diversity of cell colours. So I think it shouldn't matter, but it's just a guess.