By the way, while logged in, you can switch the user to a guest on the same instance. That way, you can easily switch between a logged-in and logged-out view. I don’t know what it would do to your filters. I guess it won’t help you, but might be usefull anyway.

I actually don’t know, it’s a good point. It’s definitely stochastic, but I don’t know how late in the development it happens. There are definitely cats with colours completely jumbled cats with large patches of each colour. But I just realised that colour comes from melanocytes. And melanocytes must migrate from the back, as they come from neural crest. Which strikes me as a great reason for straight division on the front (the cells coming from left and right meet there) that we see here, regardless of the origin of diversity of cell colours. So I think it shouldn’t matter, but it’s just a guess.

Beautiful cat! Thanks. Is there any particular reason to think it’s a chimera? If it’s a female, it’s more likely to be X chromosome inactivation.