Hiss & Tell: Cat Behavior and Beyond

How Pet Owners Power Cat Science with Darwin's Ark

• Kristiina Wilson • Season 3 • Episode 37

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Ever wonder what your cat’s DNA can tell us about fetching, affection, and health? We teamed up with Dr. Elinor Karlsson, chief scientist at Darwin’s Ark and professor at UMass Chan and the Broad Institute, to unpack how a simple fur-combing kit and smart surveys can unlock big answers about everyday feline life. No lab coats at home required - just your observations, your cat’s fur, and a few minutes of thoughtful reporting.

We dig into why cats are such a powerful, understudied genetic model compared with dogs. Because most cats aren’t shaped by recent, narrow breed histories, their diversity offers cleaner signals for behavior genetics and disease research. That opens the door to questions we’ve struggled to answer: Are fetching and other elements of the predatory sequence strongly heritable? How does early socialization change adult confidence and play? Which common diseases in cats have measurable genetic risk, and which are driven by environment? 

We also confront internet myths with data. The “orange cats are dumb” trope? Not supported by early looks, and ongoing work aims to test these claims at scale. Affection comparisons with dogs? Careful measures suggest cats are just as attached as many guardians know firsthand. Best of all, Darwin’s Ark is open data, so researchers everywhere can build on these findings - and your contributions fuel that progress. If you’re ready to help, there’s a limited-time $50 sequencing offer (use code Hiss&Tell25) using a gentle fur comb, making participation easier and less stressful for cats.

Join us as we connect guardian insights with modern genomics to advance feline science. Subscribe, share this episode with a cat-loving friend, and leave a review so more people discover the project - and consider enrolling your cat at darwinsark.org with the code shared on the show. Your cat’s fur might change what we know about cats forever.

Kristiina Wilson:

Welcome to another episode of Hiss and Tell. Today I am joined by Dr. Elinor Karlsson. She is the chief scientist at Darwin's Park, and we're going to talk about what modern genetics can teach us about cats, from fetching and affection to health, environment, and long-standing feline myths. Join us as we explore why cats are such a powerful and understudied genetic model and how everyday cat guardians are helping drive real scientific discovery. Make sure to check out our show notes for links and a special discount code you can use at Darwin's Ark. Hi, and welcome to another episode of Hiss and Tell. I am your host, Kristiina

Kristiina Wilson:

Wilson, and with me today is Elinor Karlsson a professor at UMass Chan Medical School and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and the chief scientist at Darwin's Arc. Welcome, Elinor. 

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Kristiina Wilson:

Thank you for being here. To start, can you tell us a little bit about who you are? What do you do? What is Darwin's Ark? All of that stuff.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Yes. So I am what we call a computational biologist, meaning that I study very large data sets to try and understand, in my case, how DNA works, how this very, very long string of A's, C's, Gs, and Ts that every animal is carrying around inside its cells, actually everything living is carrying inside its cells, actually ends up encoding things like behavior. Like, how is it that, you know, a dog that is complete like, you know, you've got dogs that are completely into retrieving things? Why? How do you change DNA in order to make that happen? And so rather than most people in my field who like to study humans, I decided that it would be much more interesting to study things that are not humans. And so when I was a PhD student, I got involved in the dog genome project and, you know, got involved in all these mapping coat color traits and things like that, finding the gene for white coat color, for, you know, furlessness and things like that in dogs. And, you know, for many years, everybody thought that I was doing this because I was like really into dogs. When the truth was that I had to get the giant breed encyclopedia in order to even know what a pug was. Like I got into it because they're a great genetic model. And I sort of told people, you know, that I my my dirty secret is that I haven't actually ever owned a dog, and I'm actually a complete cat person. And so I studied dogs, but I was like really into my cats. And so more recently, I finally had the opportunity to start our cat project, and I'm really excited about it.

Kristiina Wilson:

That's exciting. So can you tell, tell all of our listeners exactly what Darwin's Ark is?

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

So Darwin's Ark is a nonprofit, a community science project where we ask people to sign up their pets. Originally it was just dogs, and now we're enrolling everybody's cats as well. We ask you a lot of survey questions about your cats. We try to make it easy and fun, but you know, we ask lots of things about your cats' behavior and their health and what they look like. And then for people who are able to donate to support the DNA sequencing, we can send out a kit to get a fur sample and actually sequence your cat's DNA. And the reason the project is designed like that is that people often think that the hard part about doing something like genetics is the fancy DNA genetics part. And it turns out that's actually much easier than getting the information that you need to connect that DNA back to changes in the animal. Like we actually need to know, you know, referencing my previous example, which dogs retrieve and which ones don't. And that can be really hard information to collect, and it except if they're pets, because it turns out that pets live with people, and those people actually can tell us these things. So it's pretty exciting.

Kristiina Wilson:

That's cool. I would be so interested to look at cats who retrieve.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

You know, this was one of these things that's actually been surprising us a little bit. We have that question in our surveys, whether your cat retrieves or not. I've personally never had a cat that retrieved, and so I thought it was going to be a relatively rare trait. And it turns out that a lot of people are reporting that their cats retrieve. I can't remember the exact percentage right now, but I could find out. And that's actually particularly interesting to us in terms of behavior, because behaviors in dogs like retrieving and herding and livestock guarding and all those sort of working dog behaviors turn out to have a stronger genetic basis than things like personality. And so there's a good chance that that will actually be true in cats as well, in which case we might actually have a good chance of getting enough data to be able to explore the genetics of something like retrieving in cats.

Kristiina Wilson:

Oh, that's so cool. I'm so interested. I've always noticed in at least just just in our cats. We have 18 cats in our house right now. Wow. I know, I know, I know, I know. Thankfully, we thankfully we have a pretty big space, but 14 are ours, and then I'm like the only person in our town who does rescue. So whenever there's like a pregnant mom or whatever, I get the call and they they wind up here until they're old enough and then we can place them. But I've always found the fetchers to be um like tuxedo or piebald cats. I don't know if that like is true across the board, or that's just something that for some reason has like you know, selected into the cats that I've had.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Yeah, I mean it's an interesting question. And you know, it actually ties into another part of the project. So people will often ask us, like, you know, can I actually participate without being able to donate any any money right now? Right. And is it useful to you? And the answer is yes, because the the survey data on its own is incredibly helpful. We don't have to have the genetic information to start answering questions. And to your point, if we have a whole lot of people that have told us what color their cat is and also told us whether their cats play fetch or not, we can start asking questions like is there a difference in pigmentation between cats that fetch and cats that don't? And that way we can sort of immediately go from hey, it's sort of something that I've observed with the cats I know, but that's, you know, relatively small number of cats compared to all the cats out there to being able to actually ask the question for thousands and thousands of cats and figuring out if there's any truth to it or not.

Kristiina Wilson:

Yeah. That's so it's so interesting. I'm so excited about this whole project. Okay.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Yeah, no, I'm I, you know, as somebody whose first two cats were both orange and white, I'm I'm very interested in dispelling all of the mythical functions out there around the orange cat things. So I mean, I will go into it as a scientist, and that means that our null hypothesis has to be that there's no difference, and then we'll see if we can see a difference and we will test that. But it's interesting how much people sort of people, human brains are very good at attaching other things to characteristics like appearance. And so it's there's always lots of stories out there, and I'm sort of collecting them in my head so that we have an idea of which things we should start looking at.

Kristiina Wilson:

Yeah, no, that's a good one. I can't tell you how many I get journalists coming to me all the time from like, you know, little websites that talk about cats and whatever. And um, so many of them, especially last year when there was all of this like social media, I think about like, oh, orange cats are dumb, were coming to me asking me, like, what do you think about orange cat behavior? And I was just like, oh, you don't want to not this again. Yeah, exactly. Like, it's not a thing. It's just people have made an association. People made the association between this and now they notice it, but it's not it's not real.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Yeah, no, and and actually, so on the dog side of things, a few years ago, we had a paper we published that got a lot of attention because we basically looked at the what we call the breed stereotypes, the idea that breeds have distinct personalities and temperaments and things like that. And, you know, with with a few exceptions where we could see a little bit of difference, for the most part, we couldn't find big differences in personality or temperament between the breeds.

Kristiina Wilson:

Yeah.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

And one of the things that was interesting to me is that the reason that you can't find it is that there's so much variation in personality within a breed that the differences between breeds are really subtle in comparison. Nobody, everybody's like, how could this possibly be true? But then if you talk to anybody who's had like five dogs in the same breed, and you're like, Well, were all your dogs the same? Yeah. And they're like, no, this one loved people, and this one was really like like to be stay by themselves, and this one, you know, and it's like that's sort of what we're saying, is it that these animals are not things that fit into boxes, that they're actually really complex personalities that have their own opinions about the world. And it's not as simple as looking at them and thinking that you you know everything about them.

Kristiina Wilson:

Absolutely.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Luckily with cats, there tend to be fewer preconceptions because there isn't quite as much of a breed emphasis. I had an interesting experience recently. We did an event at the MIT Museum with the behavior expert in my group, a scientist named Catherine Lorde. And we were doing like an ask me anything sort of thing. People could come and ask their questions. And what struck me is that when people came and asked about their dog behavior, they would come up to us and they would say, My Cavalier King Charles Spaniel does X. But if people come and ask you a question about their cats, they generally just say, My cat does X. It's like we're starting from like less of inbuilt assumptions, which is going to be an interesting, it might be actually quite fun to see how that plays out as our research goes on.

Kristiina Wilson:

That's a very good point. I mean, like most people just have a cat, right? Most people do not have, oh, well, I have a Sphinx, or most people don't have a super specific breed of cat either. So I think already you've kind of eliminated that from people don't come to having a cat. Most people. Like most clients that I have aren't like, well, my cat's this. They're just like, it's it's a cat. I don't know. Yeah. You know, they're not even gonna Yeah, they're not gonna even say it's DSH versus, you know, a long hair versus whatever. They're not coming at you. Whereas dog people, like you noted, are very much like, well, my dog is this.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Right. And they they have these pre- although surprisingly, they're actually pretty good about answering, like, we couldn't see a big what we call a breed bias in the surveys. So I still think that most people are actually really good at observing the animal that they live with as an individual. Right. They sort of just don't do it on a on a breed level.

Kristiina Wilson:

That's fair. That's fair. So that kind of brings me into my next question, which is that like one of the things that you said was that even though we've lived with cats for thousands of years, we know very little about their genetics and their behavior compared to dogs or even ourselves. Can you talk a little bit about that gap and like what it means in terms of your research and everything that you're doing?

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Yeah, so with dogs, it's a little bit of uh, there's a little bit of science and there's a little bit of probably like cultural stuff. I can speak to the science sort of part of it, which is that early in the days of genetics and genomics, it was much because it was very hard to actually uh read off the sequence of the DNA, the A, C's, Gs, and T's, that was like really expensive when we started. And so in dogs, because we had all these breeds where the dogs within the breed were very, very related to each other, there wasn't a lot of genetic diversity, you could actually do studies within breeds that would be less expensive than trying to do it in an animal that wasn't from a breed, leveraging that lack of diversity. And that was how we found some of the initial genes like coat color and stuff. And so for scientists, they were like dogs are an amazing model system because you have these breeds where they're all very there's very little genetic diversity. And also because there's a lot of veterinary care in dogs. I mean, if you look at the the sort of veterinary end of things, there is researching cats, but a lot of times a lot less than what has happened in dogs historically. I think cats have been a little overlooked. And so that sort of bias in the veterinary world has sort of perpetuated in the genetics world. As sequencing DNA has gotten a lot cheaper, the advantages of the breeds are much less than they used to be. And actually, it turns out there's a lot of drawbacks of the breeds that mean that there's things we can't do in dogs that we are going to be able to do in cats because they don't have that historic um breed thing going on. Um basically in dogs, the breeds, the breeds that are around today, the way these sort of like lack of diversity populations, they're only about 150 years old. The ones in England sort of invented the idea of a breed because they're really into genetic purity. But today, in Europe and the US, which are mostly all the dogs we study, all the dogs are pretty much either from a breed or they're a mix of breeds. Like that is sort of the population we look at. Most of them are not what we call village dogs, which are the dogs that you could find in other countries. You find all over the world, which are just the dogs that live on the streets, been on the garbage patches, and are just like dogs.

Kristiina Wilson:

Yeah.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Cats are pretty much nearly all like those dogs that are living in other countries, but we can actually study the ones in the US as well. And so that's really exciting from a genetic standpoint because we don't have to worry about all the weirdness that happened in the 1800s, and we can actually look at the full history of cats by studying the ones that are around us today.

Kristiina Wilson:

Right. So you, when you worked with dogs, um you found that breed explained a lot of appearance, but less of behavior, which we, you know, already touched on a little bit. Do you kind of expect the same for for cats? Do you expect breed or ancestry to matter a lot for cat behavior?

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

I mean, it turns out that the first question we're gonna have to answer in cats is what is a cat breed?

Kristiina Wilson:

Yeah.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Because that's not actually very clear.

Kristiina Wilson:

Yeah.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

We took a look at the first set of cats that we sequenced. And for the most cats, most part cats tend to be most closely related to cats that are born near them, which is what you see in humans. Obviously, humans move around the world, but if you looked at my DNA, you'd find out that I'm most closely related to people that come from, well, my father's Swedish, so a bunch of people who are in Sweden, right? And so mostly that's what we see in cats, that cats are mostly related to cats that live near where they are born. That's not true in dogs. If you sequenced a whole lot of dogs, you would find out that golden retrievers are all most closely related to all the other golden retrievers, no matter where in the country they come from, because that's what a golden retriever is, is from this population. So now we're looking at a lot more cats. We're hoping to sequence more cats that are from breeds, like defined cat breeds, to see whether there are breeds where they cluster like the dog breeds do, like the golden retrievers, or if cat breeds in general tend to be more genetically diverse than dog breeds. And maybe some of them are actually more what we would call, in a lot of cases, like a phenotypic designation, meaning that a lot of times a Siamese cat is a cat that looks Siamese as opposed to its parents were Siamese, which is, you know, in dogs, you have to, your parents have to beat golden retrievers in order for you to be a golden retriever. In cats, it might just be that cat looks like a Siamese and people call it a Siamese. And so it's it's sort of a real it's a fascinating question to me as a geneticist. Like, how often is a cat breed like a dog breed, and how often is it actually something much more interesting? I like genetic diversity. So for me, like the weirder it gets, the more interesting it gets. So Right.

Kristiina Wilson:

And the healthier the animal also.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

I mean, I think that's a that's a upside to the cats that I think we shouldn't overlook. I mean, there's a lot of data now in dogs that shows, you know, dogs from breeds, dogs that are what what they call purebred or single breed ancestry dogs, tend to have, tend to live on average a year less than dogs that are mixed. And different breeds are prone to particular diseases at very high rates. And that's because when you lose genetic diversity, there's a risk of a lot of different diseases going becoming more common. And cats, because there isn't that history of of inbreeding within the with to create these breeds, right? You have these very diverse populations, and that is fantastic news for the cats for the cat's health.

Kristiina Wilson:

I'm curious about the few cat breeds that there are, like looking at that versus just kind of our standard cat and seeing like I think how the health questions would play out.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

I think if we can come up with a way to define a cat breed, because right now we just sort of ask people, is your cat from a breed? And they're answering the question, but apparently that might be a more messy question than we realized it was. But if we can actually find some of the breeds that are more like dog breeds, we could start looking at at questions like that. Yeah. And we've actually just added on our first, we're we're busy developing a series of surveys to ask about health questions, which, as you can imagine, is quite a challenging thing to develop because we need to walk that line between we asked the veterinarians and they gave us these extremely long and complicated questions. And then I sit there as a non-veterinary going, I have no idea what you're asking me here. And as a cat owner, I don't know what the answer is. And so then we have to go back and revise the question to be something that people can actually answer. But we now have our first health survey, I believe, live or about to go live on the site. And so we can actually collect that information in conjunction with the information on the cat's breed, and we, you know, we might be able to get to the point where we can start asking these questions.

Kristiina Wilson:

That's that's cool.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Yeah, and I think that brings up another point I should I should make sure I emphasize, which is one of the unusual things about our project, about Darwin's Arc, is it's what we call an open data project, meaning that we're not collecting this data just for us to do science on. We will share it with anybody else who's who's, you know, all the other scientists out there that are interested in studying cats.

Kristiina Wilson:

Right.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Uh, one of one of the reasons why cat research has lagged behind is that it has been really challenging for the people that are working in that field to get the funding to do larger scale studies. And so through Darwin's Arc and with the support of all the cat owners who actually donate for the sequencing, we can start to make the data sets much bigger, which means there's so many questions we could answer. And there's no way my research group could take on all of those questions. And so hopefully as we build up the data set, other people are gonna start doing this research as well. And then we can actually start doing all of these different questions and not just the things that that that you know my small group has the bandwidth for.

Kristiina Wilson:

Yeah, that's so exciting. It's so exciting that like you've opened it up to other scientists. I think that's gonna be I love it.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

It's great for me. It's nothing more satisfying to me if that when I actually like, because we have another large project that we called Zenomia, which was across all the mammals. But I get so excited when I go to meetings and people are like, we use the zoomia data. And I'm like, Yay!

Kristiina Wilson:

Yeah, it's science is happening. It's so nice when people can use your data.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

So a big focus of the some of the other research in our group is looking at the early socialization because we think it differs, the timing of it differs between dogs and wolves. And so we think it's one of the things that sort of is the origins of domestication.

Kristiina Wilson:

Yeah.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Which is fascinating and involves video coding, which was my introduction to it. And oh my God, it's time consuming and hard. It's just like it's so hard. I do it at all. I'm completely useless at it. I don't, I love Catherine's like you can clearly see X, and I'm like, Catherine, I can't see X at all. But uh but I did as a result learn an awful lot about early socialization, which really fascinates me in the cat because I feel like there's not, there's so many people that get litters of kittens, and then they're like in a room of their house, and then they get really surprised that their cats are quite scared of things when they're adults. And I feel like in dogs, there's more of an acknowledgement that they really, at the very early ages, need to be exposed to things that so that they're not scared of them later in life. And in cats, there hasn't been as much of a recognition of that role of environment in in behavior in some ways.

Kristiina Wilson:

It's true. And I mean, you can teach adult cats to, you know, not be afraid. Of the vacuum. You use DSCC to like to to modify that, but it's true in kittens, it's so much easier. And with the kittens that we have right now, who are right at that window, that's exactly what I'm doing. Like, here's a vacuum, we're not afraid of it. Like, here's here's everything. So that egg, our kitten, who's the one who just got spayed, she's not afraid of anything. You could literally vacuum her, and she'd be like, whatever, you know.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Yeah, no, so my cats have all come from well, one of them came from a program up at Kenesha's College where they clicker trained kittens at the under the undergraduates clicker trained with kittens, and I oh so cool. And then the other two came from a foster home that had they were born there, and like there was a dog and other cats and a kid. And yeah, my cats are like somebody comes to the door and they're like, hey, a person! People are great. I'm gonna go say hi to these people, right? So anyway, sorry, I went off on a random tangent. No, no, no. So did I. But it does tie into a question that was in your list of questions, which is looking at the genetics and the environment. So I've sort of got her anyway.

Kristiina Wilson:

It's it's okay. So I wanted to ask you also like, are there any behaviors in cats that you are particularly eager to look at? I I know that we talked a little bit about fetching. Or are you looking at anything in pr in particular that's like quirky or like everyday cat behaviors or you know, we try to capture a lot of difference.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

So we don't know how hard it's going to be to look at the genetics of traits in cats, really. It's easier in dogs than it is in people, but that probably has something to do with them being breeds and mixes of breeds. And so with cats, you know, both, you know, confident that we're gonna get some some of it to work, but I'm also a little concerned about how many cats we're gonna need to have signed up to have what we call statistical power because they're so genetically complex. And the more genetically complex something is, the bigger the sample sizes are that you need to study it. And so anybody who's taking our surveys will notice that we have a very wide breadth of questions on there. And so, all the questions, we ask a lot of questions about coat color and striping and things like that, patterning. And the reason that those are on there is partly so we can look at all those interesting questions about correlations between color and behavior, but also because often traits like patterning and coat color are genetically simpler, meaning that they're mostly genetic. Environment doesn't have a big effect, and often only a few changes in DNA are involved. So an example would be something like my cat Lacey is completely white, which means that she got this gene called dominant white. So it's one change in one gene, which means that her pigmentation doesn't show up and she's completely white. So those are sort of where those are the kinds of traits we'll start with, because we think they're going to be genetically simpler and we have what we would call positive controls, meaning that we can take the white cats and see if we can find the dominant white gene. And if we can, then we know we're on the right track. And so with the behaviors, we ask a very wide spectrum of different kinds of behaviors because we don't actually have a very good idea of which behaviors in cats are strongly genetically influenced and which behaviors are mostly environmental. And so we wanted to ask a lot of different things to maximize our chances of having something in there that was very genetically influenced, which will be the things that we can more easily study, right? Because our focus is on the genetics. For other people in the cat world, it may be that figuring out that a that a behavior is primarily environmental will actually be much more interesting to them because that means it's something you might be able to modify by doing things like changing early enrichment or behavior training later on. So that's sort of the way we've been thinking about it. Our guess is that, like in dogs, behaviors like, as I said, fetch. So it gets a little bit complicated here. There's some behavior science that Catherine's taught me that I'll try to summarize, which is so in dogs, there's this thing called the wolf predatory sequence, which in wolves is the series of behaviors or behavioral modules that they use to hunt. And so, you know, they'll they'll orient towards something, and then they do this eye stalk thing where they lower their head and they creep forward and then they chase, and then they do grab bite, and then they do kill bite, which is a bleeding bite to the jugular. Dogs, during dog domestication, dogs started using human garbage and waste as a food resource, and they no longer needed to be able to hunt in order to survive. And so that whole predatory sequence sort of broke down.

Speaker 1:

Right.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

And so now there's all these, you know, in an evolutionary term broken, but it turned out to be quite useful versions of predatory sequence that are actually we call retrieving and herding and livestock guarding and all those different behaviors that show up in dogs. We were sort of thinking that in cats, because they're still mousers and things like that, that the predatory sequence would be mostly conserved between the old, you know, the non-domestic, pre-domestic cat, cat, and modern cats. But the fact that we're seeing things like fetch in a lot of cats might suggest that there's actually a lot more variation in predatory behavior in cats than what we were anticipating. Right. And if that's true, and it's true that like in dogs, they're very genetically influenced. And to back up slightly, the reason they'd be so genetically influenced is that in wolves, it has to be genetics because you can't be a wolf and not hunt, right? Like there's evolution can't mess around with that. You can get to be a better hunter based on what your parents teach you, but there's gotta be genetics behind that. And so we think there might actually be a lot of variation in cats within this predatory sequence, which would be both quite interesting just on its own, but might also mean that those kinds of behaviors are are gonna be the most tractable to the genetic studies.

Speaker 2:

Hmm.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

That was a long answer, but I'm I'm quite intrigued by this because it wasn't exactly what I was expecting. And so it's gonna be as a scientist, I love anything where it's like I get surprised by things. So Right.

Kristiina Wilson:

I'm I'm also just personally really would be curious to see the age range of fetching cats in your study. Because just anecdotally, I've noticed that it tends to fade. Like it starts obviously in kittenhood and then it tends to fade through young adulthood. So I'm wondering how much of it is part of the of play and predatory rehearsal that then fades as the cat ages and would turn into more traditional just hunting.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

That's a great point. I mean, you know this already, obviously, but what I learned from Catherine was that when puppies play, they're basically sort of randomly doing all the different pieces of the predatory sequence. You'll see them orient and then grab bite and then chase and then orient again, and it's all random. And then over time, they sort of put it into the right sequence and get better at it. And so you're right, that may also be what we're seeing in cats. And so that would be, we do actually, to your point, ask everybody when they're how when their cat was born. We had to think a lot about how to ask that question because some people do know the exact date on which their cats were born and some people don't. And we always encourage people to make their best guess. Like we always know that people aren't going to know a lot of things perfectly, but a little bit of information is better than than no information. Sure. So then we can start. And so then when somebody answers a survey question about their cats, we take note of how old the cat was when they answered that question. And so then we can go back and look at the questions like what you're asking.

Kristiina Wilson:

So can you tell us like any findings or early observations that you found so far from Darwin's cats? Or, you know, even if it's preliminary, any patterns that you're seeing?

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Not really. And it's not because I'm hiding anything from you. It's because we've been so stuck in the like actually getting this thing off the ground. Sure. It's getting slightly frustrating for us scientists where we're like, we really want to go look at all this data, but we need to get the health survey going. I get it. So yeah, so it's we don't have a ton yet. I would love to be able to answer that question. And we did a few analyses just because we needed things to talk about. Um, and and this is going to be absolutely no shock to you or the audience of this podcast, but we have a question about how much you're how affectionate your cat is. And we we asked a lot of the same questions for dogs and cats so that we can compare them and, you know, showed that based on our survey data, cats are no less affectionate or into you than dogs are. Sure. Which is apparently very surprising to the audiences that I talk to often and absolutely not surprising to me as a cat owner at all. So, you know, it's kind of like so. We've done a few things like that, but we haven't done the whole thing. Oh, and I do think Kasha took a look at the ginger question and she's not seeing anything different about the ginger cats yet, but we need to do a much more rigorous analysis before we can say that for sure. Of course. Oh. Sorry, Kasha Brick is the is the chief scientist on the project. I should have introduced her earlier. She's amazing.

Kristiina Wilson:

I can't wait until you come out with that orange cat information because that's going to really help hopefully shut some people up about things.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

You know, you know, in the in the dog behavior paper we had, you know, we one of the behavioral factors that came up in our survey data was something that we called agonistic threshold, which encompassed a lot of questions related to aggression. And, you know, we didn't, we just named them like factor five or something to begin with, and had no idea what was in it. But it turned out that that particular behavior factor was both the least heritable, meaning it was the most environmentally influenced factor that we looked at, and also the least different between the breeds of all the factors we looked at. And so basically, we couldn't see any evidence in our data that this agonistic threshold, the likelihood that a dog is gonna react aggressively when something surprising happens, had I had a strong genetic component, let alone that it was, you know, you could determine it based on a dog's breed. And it is a really great opportunity as a scientist to be able to put data behind something that a lot of other people need to talk to other, you know, like I'm not gonna be the person that goes out and does the advocacy for things. That's not my role in this. But I can put together a really large data set, do a really rigorous statistical analysis and get that data and those results out there for the people that are doing that work, which for me is really satisfying.

Kristiina Wilson:

Absolutely. I I would love to ask you a bunch of nerdy questions about all of your statistical analyses and your models, but I'm not gonna do that because I don't think anyone else wants to hear about that. So I won't I won't get into that.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

I will mention, I was just so I don't think I've actually mentioned this yet. We're very excited about this. So, in order to sequence your cat, sequence your cat's genetics. So basically, to step back slightly. Yeah. We have all of our surveys that we ask everybody about their cat. And if people are interested, they can donate to do the genetics part of the project. And that's where we send you a kit to collect a DNA sample. And in this case, we've we've actually developed a very brand new process that we're incredibly excited about that involves sending you a comb in a tube. With dogs, we do saliva swabs, and people could saliva swab their cats. As somebody who has cats, I figured it could potentially be quite dangerous for the person doing the swabbing. Yes. But also very unpleasant for my cats. And, you know, we're not a project that, you know, we're doing really interesting science that will benefit cats in the long term, but not nothing where we actually want to harm the animals that are actually participating, right? And so I was talking to a friend that does ancient DNA, and she's like, you know, there's a lot of DNA in fur. And I was like, really? And so it turns out, and we've tested this now, of the first 200 cats we tried, all 200 worked. And so we just send out a tube with comb. And there's really pretty, I mean, we send out instructions, but there's really only one thing anybody's gonna do with a comb. And so they comb their cat and put it back in the tube and send it back to us. And it's like, I mean, I'm gonna tell you that my cats actually quite enjoyed the combing process. Of course, then Lacey got very excited and tried to attack the comb, but that's a different issue. Um, so yeah, so so and if we do that, then we look at the DNA of your cat. And everybody's like, what am I gonna find out? And I'm like, okay, so honestly, very short term, nothing, because we don't actually know enough about the genetics of cats to tell you anything yet. But we need this, we need the data now in order to develop the science. And as the science develops, we will update your your cat's profile on our website with anything we're learning. So that information about which, you know, can we tell where your cat comes from? Like where are the cats that are most related to them, all that kind of stuff. So up until you know, normally the price for that sequencing is $150, and that's done at cost. We don't make any money off of it, um, but we can't support the sequencing ourselves. And so this is a way of growing the data set without um having the funding to do all the sequencing ourselves. However, right now, our the company that we've partnered with on this uh has actually given us funding so that they can pay for $100 of that $150. Oh, that's great. And so until the end of the year, you can actually do sequence your cat for only $50, which is really exciting for us because we're hoping we know that price, that the the actual donation cost is a barrier for a lot of people to participate. We have absolutely amazing people that have filled out every single survey on our website and haven't been able to do the sequencing. And that's really frustrating to me because those are our most valuable participants, the ones that are able to do all the surveys. And so we got the cost down to $50 until the end of the year, and I can give you the code that you need to use in order to do that. Please. Thinking of your 18 cats too, because the other thing we do with our surveys that I'm quite proud of is that when you fill out our survey questions, we actually have a little tag so that we can insert the name of your pet into the survey question. Cute. Which is both personalizes it a bit, and if you have a lot of pets, it reminds you of which one you're actually answering the question for.

Kristiina Wilson:

Yes. That's that is true.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Yeah, I mean And I think with cat owners, we have a lot more participants at our cat project that have multiple cats enrolled than when we look on a dog side of things. So it's ended up being even more important.

Kristiina Wilson:

That makes sense. I'm not sure that we'll be able to do all 18, but we can do some for sure.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

That would be an awful lot.

Kristiina Wilson:

It would be a lot. That would require a grant, some type of thing.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

I would just pick a pick a few that you know better or, you know, right now we're actually particularly interested in cats that have some of the common diseases that cats get, like heart disease and kidney disease and things like that. We've been talking a lot with people about what we could learn from the genetics, you know, and what the time frame would be for doing that. And I realized that one of the big questions with cat diseases that isn't actually answered yet is how much genetics contributes to them for the most part. Like if you talk to any veterinarian because your cat gets kidney disease and ask them, is this because of something in their DNA or did it just happen because of the environment, they can't answer that question at this point in time because that data doesn't exist anywhere. And so we're hoping that if we can um get genetic information on cats that have some of these diseases, we need both ones that have and the ones that don't, but we, you know, have a lot of cats enrolled. And so in particular, it would be great to get the ones that actually have some of these diseases. We might be able to at least get that measurement of how much is genetics contributing to a cat's risk of getting the disease.

Kristiina Wilson:

Right. All right. Well, that's important for our listeners to know. We're we are lucky enough that none of our cats have, I think, any any of that stuff. Well, we have a cat who has FIV, but we know how he got that because he was a street cat and he he was he was out fighting. I don't think that he was an IV drug user. And I guess he he he could have loved a woman who wasn't clean, but I sort of doubt that that was the case. I think he was just out scrapping.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Yeah, that made more sense.

Kristiina Wilson:

Yeah, and uh Yeah, that's that's really that's really it. My my best friend, like soulmate cat, who's back in this this picture with me up here. He passed two years ago from uh squamous cell carcinoma, and that is something that I would have been very interested to know if there was a genetic component to that, or like why all of a sudden that just showed up and took him so quickly. But other other than that, like we've got a really healthy household, even the cats who are like 15 doing great. You'd never know.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Yeah, no, I'm I'm quite curious because I have a I have a cat, my cat Lacey, who's absolutely fantastic in every way, except for the fact that she has terrible environmental allergies. She was allergic to everything. And she had a brother who actually died very young. He got a disease when he was 11 months old called pure red cell aplasia, which is an autoimmune disease. Yes, where your your immune system kills off your red blood cells, and we couldn't get it under control. And so I'm quite curious to know whether the fact that she has an immune disease, not an immune disease, but allergies are your immune system responding inappropriately to things in the environment, whether that's just a random thing or if that's related to why, you know, like maybe there was a propensity there and her brother just happened to be at higher risk, or, you know, in him it was a severe disease and in her it's a mild disease. I will never enter this particular question, but it has got me thinking a lot more about immune diseases in general in cats, because if you talk to people, as I said, I've I've asked my my dermat my cat's dermatologist about this, and they're like, could be, we don't know. So it's it's just a lot of unknowns out there.

Kristiina Wilson:

Her allergies, do they present as dermatitis or how are they okay?

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

She's a white cat and she gets these like bleeding sores, so it's like really obvious.

Kristiina Wilson:

It's so interesting. I mean, again, this is just anecdote, you know, you know, as humans, we love to just like make these little right. But three our our three oldest cats are all related, and they're they're brother and sisters, and they're also all white cats that I rescued during Hurricane Sandy, and they all have that same thing. They all are very allergic and they have they will get those same spots, and then one of them is constant, they're kind of asthmatic, and it's just allergies to the environment.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Yeah, no, and I and when I was talking to the dermatologist a couple weeks ago, she actually said the same thing. She's like, I feel like white cats might be more prone to things, but yeah, it's hard to, and and so that's where, you know, I think what you're saying is actually a really nice illustration of the power of this community science approach, because there are there's a lot of things that the pet owners observe. And we can chat about it individually, and we're always going to be saying, well, but it was only a few cats, right? You know, maybe it was I was just biased in what I was seeing, you know, that kind of thing. But if we can get enough people to answer the questions, then we can start to untangle this. And so the anecdotes are actually quite helpful because now we can sort of go in and say, one of the questions that we should ask is, are we seeing a higher rate of people reporting skin problems in cats? And does that vary based on the cat's color? Because it's something, you know, there's a lot of different questions we could ask, and in a way, it can be sort of motivating behind the analysis. I have no idea what we're gonna find. As you said, people are really good at seeing patterns, and I'm sure, I mean, I know that's true of me as well, and so I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that it's just you notice the white cats more because you could see the the skin issues, or because it's kind of unusual to see a white cat or whatever it is, but we'll be able to actually test that now, which is really exciting for me.

Kristiina Wilson:

White cats genetically a little strange, like they're genetically a little bit less diverse, or something's like strange with like. An all-white animal. I will say that my cat is a little strange.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Yeah. But no, I don't know that it's because of her color. You know, I was actually thinking about this the other day, but I went and looked at some videos I had of Lacey's litter. And it turns out that she and her brother were the, I think, the only white cats in that whole litter. And so it really is something that that there shouldn't be any difference in the overall diversity. Because, you know, like all the other cats don't aren't white at all. So I I don't think it's that. Although it did lead me on to the interesting idea that as we develop, as we look at all the pigmentation traits and figure out the genetics of the pigmentation stuff, I'm actually going to be able to figure out what color Lacey would have been if she hadn't got that thing to make her white. Which is really a stupid thing to want to know, but I'm kind of fascinated by it. Like what would she have looked at if she had looked like if she hadn't gotten that one extra genetic change that turned her completely white?

Kristiina Wilson:

I mean, listen, whatever makes you happy, you know. I think that's interesting. I think all of this is interesting. So oh sorry, go ahead.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

I know I was gonna say, I I mean, I think that's one of the the the things that's the most fun about this project and working with all of the people that are really excited about it as part of that, is that it's a way to do science. Uh it's both really, really high quality science, but it's also science outreach. Like we can't do this research unless the pet owners are our partners in it, unless they're engaged in telling us what they know. You know, especially given that there's a lot of science, you know, that right now in our country, you know, the there's there's a lot of stuff on the science end of things that's really challenging and really stressful.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

It's really nice to have a project that's doing exciting science that people are excited about and that is really engaging with engaging people in the whole process of how we do research.

Kristiina Wilson:

Absolutely. So, to that end, how can our listeners get involved? How can we recruit some people for you? What do they do?

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

So it's yeah, so it's very easy to sign up. I mean, you go to darwinsark.org and you can set up an account and add your cats to it. Um, you can also add your dogs to it if you happen to have a dog. Some of us actually do have both cats and dogs. We also do do sequencing of dogs. It's on pause right now because we had a whole vendor switch thing going on and we're trying to develop our new process and all that fun that happens behind the scenes. But we're working very hard to have it up and running in the near future. And so you sign up your cats, you answer our survey questions, hopefully. I'm just gonna keep all my fingers crossed. And if you're interested in doing your cat's genetics, then you can sign, you can, you can basically do the donation and use the code to get the $50 until the end of the year, but you can do the donation and actually we'll send you the kit to collect the the fur sample from your cat. Everybody's like, I've got cat fur everywhere. I can go pick it off the couch. Don't do that. We send you a comb for a reason. We're always worried that there's going to be samples that are mixes of different cats and things like that. So just yeah, just we send you the comb, comb your cat, send it back to us.

Kristiina Wilson:

You don't want people to just get a big fur clump from the corner and roll it up.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

And then I think I was actually asking Jill about it this morning, and I think um that we've probably, oh, what was the numbers? I think that we've sequenced about 450 cats so far. No, we sequenced about 800 so far, and we've got another 400 in the pipeline. Um, so it's actually going really well. And we're hoping that it's gonna keep getting bigger. The more data we have, the more cats that are signed up, um the more things we can find. Everybody's always asking me, so how many cats do you want? And I'm like, well, honestly, I'd love to have all of them. Probably not gonna happen anytime soon, but but genetics is, you know, especially for traits that have an environmental and a genetic component, it can get really hard to untangle those two things and actually find the genetic changes that influence the traits. And so the more cats that are enrolled and the more that we know about them, the more power we have to do that science. And this really is a long-term sort of project. This isn't something that's gonna wrap up in a year. We're trying to build a data resource that will help, you know, whether it's my group or all the other people out there that are interested in studying cats, it's actually gonna keep cat science moving forward for a long time to come.

Kristiina Wilson:

I'm so excited for this project. And and for our listeners, the code, if you want to get involved and you want to send in your CATS fur, the code for that uh $50 price is HISS AND. So it's the and is the ampersand, so it's HISS Ampersand Tell25. So use that code to get your $50 price uh through the end of the year. Um and then you can just go to darwinsarc.org and get started. And I just I really want to thank you for coming on the podcast. This was so interesting, and I think all of our listeners are gonna also be so excited, and hopefully they're all gonna get involved and send in their cats for samples and and follow along to look at all of your research.

Dr. Elinor Karlsson:

Thank you so much for having me. I love talking about cats. This was a lot of fun.

Kristiina Wilson:

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review wherever you listen. It super helps. For more information and to support our podcast, check out our website at hissantelpodcast.com. You can also find us on Instagram at Hiss and Tel Podcast. Music provided by Cat Beats.

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