Brilliant and pretty dilute tortoiseshell-and-white Maine Coon

A brilliant and pretty dilute tortoiseshell Maine Coon. It looks like Russia. They breed some amazing Maine Coons in Russia.

Brilliant dilute tortoiseshell Maine Coon. She is very pretty to. This is a fantastic cat.Photograph: Reddit.com

This is a very pretty Maine Coon with a super, dilute tortoiseshell coat. Perhaps strictly speaking this is a tortoiseshell-and-white cat and in American cat fancy language that is a calico Maine Coon cat. You can see that this is a dilute version of the tortoiseshell coat because the colours are washed out except, interestingly, for the orange tabby patch on the face and between the eyes. This gives a brilliance to the face. The muzzle is great. Just a very good-looking cat which caught my eye and demanded that I share the picture on this website.

Dilution

Robinson's Genetics provides some information about dilution. The symbol genetically is dd. They say that the: "dilute or maltese locus produces a factor essential for even distribution of pigment granules throughout the hair. In the mutant form, pigment granules are enlarged and deposited unevenly in the hair shaft. This results in clumps of varying size along the length of the hair shaft. Segments of the hair may be very sparsely pigmented or even lack pigment altogether. To the human eye, this impairment causes the coat to appear diluted as this effect modifies the colour to a lighter shade by allowing more light to pass through the hair."

I have taken the great liberty of repeating that segment of the book verbatim for the purposes of accuracy. I hope that they will allow it under fair use principles.

RELATED: ‘Blue’ is the dilution of a black cat coat.

You can see that the black tabby markings have turned a dark shade of blue. This is classic dilution of black to blue. It is the reason why the Russian Blue is blue coloured and the reason why the blue British Shorthair is also blue coloured. But in truth, in the cat fancy blue is really grey but the cat fancy like to described it as blue. It's a kind of bluish-grey. 

RELATED: Russian Blue is a black Russian moggy from the north of the country.

When red is diluted, it becomes cream. The orange further on the face of this cat is more orange than cream to my mind but I guess the way the dilution gene works in variable. One last point is that the eye colour is not paler in cats with dilute colouration which is what you might have expected.