So to continue the book metaphor, their chromosomes are just reading a choose your own adventure book and as each mite lives they can choose to write and delete parts before they reproduce. I wonder if the ‘book’ is just read once and all the eggs are decided like that, or does each egg at the time of gestation start read their ‘book’ and have a different lottery then others.
This is kinda seen in mammals as the females (this is not a political meaning on the term) who have two X chromosome will shut down one copy (most the time, it can lead to issues for life if they dont, but those lives are functional just can fuck with looks and hair and the like) and use just the one. This is why (to my understanding) that you will see them as having a mothers or grandmothers allotment of features (the dads nose bit comes from the fact he has grandmas nose as well), and on the XY babies you can see a lot of different looks come out the rolls (genetic) they have. This is why some would be dead beat fathers will use the idea of “That baby looks nothing like me” while they can not see it if they go back and look at their grandmothers baby photos they would be like OOOOoooooohhhh. But that gets into critical thinking, and we shouldnt do that here.
Usually which X chromosome gets deactivated as a Barr body changes depending on where in the female body you are. Or, as Veritasium put it: women are stripey.
I thought that was only during development, but by the time you are viable you are just riding on the dominate one. But this is all armchair understanding of these subjects.
Nope. The egg starts dividing before the deactivation of the extra X, and that propagates.
For instance: In cats, a big part of their skin pigmentation is controlled by the X chromosome. Which is why you’ll only find female calico cats. Males only carry the one X and can only manifest one color pattern.
just to be contrarian I had a male calico, and I also had a female orange (full) cat. But I get your meaning and I think I was saying the same thing. The skin is doing its thing long before the other X is decided which would then set a lot of the bones and features that I think get set after one has shut down (sorry if it came off like I didnt mean this).
Your male calico is likely intersex XXY. very rare.
Sorry, I had indeed misinterpreted your previous comment. Thanks for clarifying.
It was only a small eraser sized grey dot in a other wise orange tabby white mix. His name was Ru after Ru-paul and he was fabulous.