A tabby with grey/black stripes on top of a grey agouti coat will be referred to as a grey tabby. They are the undercoat and ground color hairs of your cat. That has to do with the base color of their agouti hairs. But what’s the difference? Why is one silver and the other grey? However, you’ll probably hear blue Maine Coons tabbies get separated into silver and gray categories. Orange – Orange tabbies are simply orange and white.Spotted – These tabby cats are covered in spot-like patches of pigment.Classic – These tabbies have the standard “M” marking on their foreheads however, they exhibit a bullseye-like pattern on each side of their bodies.Ticked – Ticked tabbies have fields of agouti hairs, giving the cat a sandy or salt-and-peppered look.The pattern displays a dark stripe down the cat’s backbone with other stripes branching down like ribs on a fish skeleton-hence the name. Mackerel – This is the most common tabby pattern.That means when you see a blue Maine Coon, you’re looking at a black cat with two recessive gene copies of melanophilin. Other dilute colors include lilac, which is from chocolate fawn, which is from cinnamon, and cream, which is from red. So, when you see them from your eye, the colors appear blended and diluted because we don’t have microscopic vision. If that’s the case, why are the colors diluted and not absent? The areas of clustering (both with pigment and without) are on a microscopic level. Instead, they experience pigment clumping that causes many areas in their hair to have no pigmentation at all. However, cats with two copies of the gene don’t have uniform pigmentation. Cats without the dilute gene have normal pigmentation uniformly through the fur. The effect is produced because the melanophilin alters the distribution of melanin granules (pigment) throughout the cat’s fur. This is only possible through the inheritance of the gene from both parents, making the effect autosomal recessive and rare. The dilute phenotype-or diluted color coat-only appears when the cat carries two copies of the dilute gene. Not all cats have the gene, and even those who do are not guaranteed to have a diluted coat. Understanding The Dilute GeneĪ gene known as the dilute gene (or melanophilin) can be present within the genetic sequences of some cats.

The running theory is that it just sounds fancier by judges at cat shows. Cats with grey-colored coats effectively have a diluted black coat-genetically speaking.īut what’s wrong with the term grey? Nobody knows. The blue is a subtle hue similar to that which military cadets wear. When referring to cat colors, grey or silver cats are called blue due to the bluish tint that their coats will have. Blue Rare Maine Coon Cat Image By: Pxfuel

Silver maine coon tabby