Blue-eyed Black Cat

blue-eyed shadow

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I just adopted a full black cat with blue eyes. I am not sure if it's rare to have an full black cat with blue eyes. any suggestions?
 

di and bob

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I have never seen one! Is it possible to post a picture? Genes are funny things, so I suppose there can be an endless combination, but black with blue eyes is definitely rare in MY book! It is older isn't it? All younger kittens have blue eyes that always change. I can tell now by the color if they will stay or not, normal kitten eyes are a more slate blue, a little gray in them Blue eyes that stay are more bright blue. I knew right away in the last litter that two of the kittens would keep their blue eyes, even though I had several people argue they would change. They stayed, and 10 years later I still have my blue eyed boy!
 

di and bob

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Well, it's a unusual combination of genes that make some white cats that way, only pure white cats carry the deafness gene. So it does kinda makes you wonder if an unusual combination like all black with blue eyes carries something(?).Now I'm intrigued!
 

1CatOverTheLine

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Well, it's a unusual combination of genes that make some white cats that way, only pure white cats carry the deafness gene. So it does kinda makes you wonder if an unusual combination like all black with blue eyes carries something(?).Now I'm intrigued!
Associative deafness in white cats is signaled by blue eye colour if and when it's owed to a lack of tapetum lucidum in the eyes (since it's formed from the same stem cells as melanocytes). The actual cause of deafness in these cases is an absence of the cellular membrane in the inner ear, which is likewise composed of those same stem cells.

Not all white cats' coat colouration is owed to epistatic white (the gene Wd); some are blue-eyed Colour Restrictives (i.e. "partial albinos" [sic] or Incomplete Recessive Whites, owed to the gene Ca), who are recessive white (as opposed to the dominant epistatic white which masks all other colours in the first case), and these cats will not exhibit deafness.

di and bob di and bob - Epistatic White and Melanism are carried on different genes on the C locus, and the two are mutually exclusive. A blue-eyed black cat has a zero percent statistical chance of suffering deafness from a want of tapetum lucidum stem cells, since its black coat is actually the result of an abundance of that which, in white cats, causes deafness.

Edit: to shed a bit more light on the subject of deafness in white cats, an excellent article by Dr. Sarah Hartwell:

White Cats, Eye Colours and Deafness
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