(Image via cats.com)
Staff Writer: Emma Bowser
Email: ebowser@umassd.edu
A new cat coat color has recently been discovered and promptly named “salty licorice.” Coming from the Finnish word “salmiak,” it is named after the Finnish snack because Finland is where this coat color is most prevalent among cat populations.
Salty licorice was first noticed back in 2007. The color started showing in a feral cat population in Petäjävesi, Finland, earning the nickname “the Finnish mutation.”
These cats are distinct from normal tuxedo cats due to their unique color gradient, which starts black at the root of the hair and ends in white at the tip.
A chapter from the book Animal Genetics provided by Wiley’s Online Library states,” Colored spots are also noticeable in the white areas of the front legs and chest. The end of the cat’s tail is white or nearly white. All known cats have yellow and green eyes, which are also the most common eye colors in domestic cats.”
The University of Helsinki then reached out to Dr. Heidi Anderson, a feline geneticist, in 2019. Since then, her research group has been trying to figure out what exactly causes this coat color.
Only non-pedigreed cats have shown this color, so all cats that do have it are believed to be descended from that original feral population. Anderson wrote in an article published to My Cat DNA, “Since all cats with this coat pattern brought in from the streets were neutered, no one knew if the pattern was heritable. That is, until recent evidence showed a cat with this coat pattern giving birth to a litter of four kittens.”
In May 2024, her research group also published a paper on the topic, titled “A new Finnish flavor of feline coat coloration, ‘salmiak,’ is associated with a 95-kb deletion downstream of the KIT gene.” You can read it for free online here.
The researchers conducted DNA analyses using samples of domestic cat blood that were collected with the cats’ owners’ consent through the University of Helsinki’s biobank under a permit that was approved by the Animal Ethics Committee of the State Provincial Office of Southern Finland, in Hämeenlinna, Finland.
They used 180 DNA samples from Finnish domestic cats that were stored in the feline biobank at the University of Helsinki. Some of the samples were from salty licorice cats, and others were not.
The researchers then used PCR and gel electrophoresis-based genotyping “together with Sanger sequencing to genotype,” which was the variant that was identified to have a correlation with the salty licorice phenotype. This variant was then named wsal for “w salmiak.”
Interestingly enough, the researchers “also genotyped one domestic cat from Romania and one from the UK, which manifested another type of unusual white patterning referred to as ‘karpati’ of yet unknown molecular cause.” While this is confirmed to be unrelated to salty licorice, Karpati has now become the foundation for a new breed of cat called “the Transylvanian.”
Salty licorice is now known to be a recessive trait, meaning that it can only be inherited by a kitten if both of the parents pass down the necessary genes for it. This partially explains why the coat color is so rare.
Although unusual white coat patterns in cats and dogs can cause hearing impairments, salty licorice cats are not thought to have any hearing impairments as a result of the color mutation.
But as Anderson’s research team points out, in order to “definitively exclude any potential auditory issues, it would be necessary to conduct brainstem auditory evoked response testing.”