With Sugar and Grant you can definitely see rings in their tail in the
sunlight. pearl is definitely BLACK. No rings or brownish color.

Probably depends on the individual cat.  Genetics would be an interesting
study field.  MLB

I can't answer your question, except that I've heard somewhere that
all black cats are really tabbies.

Almost all calicos and tortiseshell cats are female.  You can get the
very rare male calico / tortiseshell, but he will have a genetic
defect such that instead of having the normal XY sex-determination
chromosomes, he has XXY.  It is called kleinfelter's syndrome.

I have a question of my own.  Spock has a very unusual coat pattern -
he is a dark grey tabby on the surface, but if you part his coat, his
pattern is only on the very tips of his hair/fur - the bulk of his fur
is a light beige / cream colour.  Can anyone explain this to me?  Is
there any such thing as a cat having the "point" gene on all their
hair such that the bit of fur that is exposed to cold (the outer edge
of fur) turns dark and all the rest is light?  For what it's worth,
his tail hairs and head hairs are dark all the way to their roots.  

Tish - who did some genetics *years* ago, but never had a talent for
it.

It sounds as if he might be a "smoke"  that is, his fur is very pale near
the skin,  but each hair has a darker tip.   I used to have a chocolate
smoke Oriental,  he looked as if his coat was watered silk,  specially on
his head.     Marie from OZ

Some of them do. Some don't seem to. I tried reading a bit about cat
colour genetics once, and I decided that if they had used cats instead of
pea plants and human eye colour (the simplified version) in basic biology,
I never would have passed it. Cat colour genetics are complicated!

Yes. It's a melanistic tabby, in the same way that you get a melanistic
(black) jaguar or a melanistic leopard. HRFL Tiger is exactly the same -
in the right light you can clearly see his tabby-ness, and in his kitten
coat which was a muddy brown/black you could actually *see* the faint
stripes. It's cause by a rogue gene.

Helen M

<snip>

<snip>

Laku is exactly like that. His outer, "cover" fur, is black and his
softer underfur is greyish, but you don't see the underfur unless you
part the outer fur. Also under direct strong lamplight or sunlight he
has definite reddish brown tabby markings.

Good question. I think, like someone else posted, that, underneath it
all, all black cats are tabbies.  I have three black cats, and there
are differences among them.  Sabra is coal-black; several people have
commented he is the blackest cat they have ever seen.  Like many black
cats, though, in the sunlight, you can see brown on him.  Trill is
pretty black, too, although he has a bit of white on him.  I've never
noticed the brown on him in the light.  Merlyn is black, with a
noticeably grey underbelly.  I think there is a term for that sort of
cat, but I forget what it is offhand.

That probably doesn't answer any questions, but that's all I know!

Ginger-lyn

[...]

I've never seen a black tabby.  Kitty FC is a classic tuxedo.  Usually she
is solid black with white, but sometimes in the summer the sun bleaches her
fur so that it looks dark brown.  She hasn't got any stripes, in any kind of
light.

Tweed

To answer my own question:

http://members.tripod.com/~siamkatze/cca/genetics.html

IBKFergus is most likely a black tabby. Although I'll have to wait until his
adult coat fully develops before its certain. It still doesn't explain the
speckles of pure white hairs on his legs, face and tummy, though.

Yowie

Djoser is anthracite, shiny, silky, coal black with no striping in any
type of light and it is all the way to the roots. And his winter
undercoat is dark gray. But he does have a very few white hairs
scatterd about.

Sheba is a ticked Tortie with white, a patch on throat and belly. Her
head and lower tail are colored to the roots. But the rest of her hair
is ticked with grey underneath. She has a lot of black, some dark
gray, and light orange and I can see in a few places thin very orange
stripes.

I used to have a tuxedo years ago. His black showed faint stripes on
the tail in  direct sunlight. I read years ago that true black cats
are rare because; during, or was it before, the Black Death, a lot of
black cats were killed, as they were during the later witch hunts.

--
CATherine

<snip genetics>

Neither Frank nor Nikki have any tabby markings, but Frank's black parts
have gradually turned brown as he gets older. Nikki is still black as
ink, at age 16. Frank was always somewhat brownish in the right light.
But no stripes on either.

I don't have an answer to your questions but I've uploaded some pictures
of one of my outdoor kitties that has unusual coloration.  You may
remember that I'm feeding a black cat in my yard.  She must belong to
someone as she's just entirely too friendly.  I'm afraid that she
belongs to someone who is neglecting her (what else would you call it
when your cat is outside and its below 30*F?) and she's decided to claim
us as her Onetruehome. I decided I really needed to call her something
other than Black Cat so I call her Mariah.

There is also a young, intact tom that was visiting daily for a meal. He
is a tabby with the circular pattern of tabby stripes on his sides.  I
started calling him Zucchini for whatever reason but he didn't like that
one bit and made sure I knew his name was Zeke.  I haven't seen him
since it got really cold so I'm hoping his family decided he needed to
stay inside.  He's friendly as well although a little more reserved than
Mariah who is simply a slut (except where Zeke is concerned).  I have
posted some pictures of Zeke and a one new one of Mariah from a recent
feeding session.  I wish I could have gotten better shots of his side
but you can at least see that he has unusual markings.

Mariah, who I thought was a black cat, has a lot of brown in her
undercoat.  She's a strange cat.  She hangs out on the roof of our house
and gets there on the side of the house where a tree is growing close.
We've been discussing cutting the tree down but DH said the other day,
"If we cut the tree down how will Mariah get up and down?"  Well, I
found the answer to that questions.  She doesn't climb the tree. She
climbs the brick chimney.  She totally ignores a perfectly climbable
tree next to the house and instead scales the wall.  Maybe I should have
named her Spidey.

Pictures of Zeke can be found at:
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/julie_snowshoe/album?.dir=/5055&.src=ph&.tok=phSmJ
ZCBTKP1uqa5

or

http://tinyurl.com/4do2e

Julie

I was told that all black cats are just tabbies in disguise ;-)