Elinor Karlsson, co-founder and chief scientist of Darwin’s Ark, has always been a cat person. But when she began studying genetics as a graduate student, she quickly realized that dogs, rather than cats, were backed by a larger research community and greater funding. So when she co-founded Darwin’s Ark in 2018, the nonprofit launched with Darwin’s Dogs, now the world’s largest dog community science initiative. But Karlsson never lost sight of her goal to bring cats aboard the Ark and into the research spotlight.
Now, seven years later, Darwin’s Cats is finally here. In this Q&A, we spoke with Karlsson about how Darwin’s Cats came to be, the initiative’s research goals, and why community science is a good fit for studying cats.
Darwin’s Ark has been around since 2018, but only recently launched a cat-focused community science initiative in 2024. Why did it take so long to get to cats?
Even though I’m totally a cat person, I knew that Darwin’s Ark had to start with dogs because there was a large canine research community with funding opportunities that could help get our community science model off the ground.
Cats were always part of the plan. However, as everybody will tell you, cats are complicated and are not prioritized as highly in research as dogs. Funding for feline research was very scarce. So, we needed time to prove our community science model with Darwin’s Dogs and identify a funding partner who wanted to help us bring community science to the mystery of cats.
When you say the mystery of cats, what do you mean?
The truth is, science just doesn’t know that much about cats. For example, I have a cat who has skin allergies. When I expressed frustration about not being able to figure out why, the vet told me, “Cats are kind of a black box.” We don’t understand a lot about their physiology or their behavior, and we understand even less about their genetics. The number of unknowns about cats is part of what makes me so excited to study them. But it also means we have a lot of foundational knowledge to build before we can answer the more complicated questions, like the cause of my cat’s allergies.
So, where will Darwin’s Cats start its research?
One of our first goals is to understand the genetic diversity of cats, which I expect could be significantly more diverse than what we see in pet dogs. The breed structure of dogs means that we can look for connections between traits and genes with fewer dogs than is needed for species with a lot of genetic diversity, for example, humans.
Although we talk about cat breeds, cat breeding is a relatively recent development—certainly compared to dogs. Cat breed structure is not well understood or necessarily widespread across the cat population. As a result, the question “what breed is my cat?” may turn out to be a very difficult one to answer. I suspect that we may find that pet cats have as much genetic diversity as humans do, which means that breed may not be the best way to understand cat ancestry. A better way to look at cat ancestry may be the same way we look at human ancestry—tracing it to different parts of the world.
