Chief Scientist Q&A: What Darwin’s Cats hopes to discover
PUBLISHED ON February 18, 2025Elinor Karlsson talks about her vision for Darwin’s Ark’s long-awaited cat community science initiative
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.
Beyond ancestry, what are some other things you might discover about cat genetics?
I hope that, once we sequence 1,000 cats, we will be able to look for genes that control simple traits—things like coat color, coat patterning, and perhaps behaviors that are strongly influenced by genetics. You can find the genes for things like coat color with fairly small sample sizes—and, given the genetic diversity of cats, 1,000 is a small sample size! We can analyze simple traits with small sample sizes because these traits tend to be controlled by just one gene. You cause a change in that gene, and coat color changes. It’s very straightforward. Unfortunately, most traits and health conditions are not controlled by just one gene.
Over the long term, we want to explore traits and diseases influenced by more than one gene, such as cancer, kidney disease, and allergies. These diseases and traits are controlled by tiny changes in many, many, many different genes, as well as life experiences and things cats have been exposed to. For something that complicated, the only way to tease apart the genetic influences is to have very large sample sizes. In other words, we need a lot of cat owners participating together. That’s why I believe community science is a great way to study cats; it can harness the power of thousands of cat lovers to study genetic influences on disease.
Is genetics the primary focus of Darwin’s Cats research?
Genetics is a big focus of Darwin’s Cats research, but not the only one. Through our research surveys, we are gathering a wealth of information about thousands of cats that will tell us a lot about cat behavior. In particular, I’m excited to learn how common or uncommon some cat behaviors are, such as fetching toys or being sociable with strangers.
I am also interested to see if our survey responses help us debunk cat stereotypes. For example, there are all sorts of stories about how cat color is linked to personality and behavior. Do tortoiseshell cats really have “torititude?” Is there actually such a thing as “orange cat behavior?” I hope that, when we get enough people to tell us about their cat’s behavior, we’ll be able to put an end to some of these stereotypes—especially when it comes to orange cats. Because in my opinion, orange cats are fantastic and every cat is wonderfully unique.
What excites you most about Darwin’s Cats?
Our partnership with community scientists. If you want to understand pets, the best way to do it is to ask the people who share their homes with them.
Everyone thinks the hard thing is getting genetic information, but that’s actually fairly easy. The hard part is getting what we call phenotypic data, which is observational information. No one observes cats more than the people who live with them. Information about a cat’s health over time, their behavior when they are in their natural environment, or how they change as they get older, that’s not information that researchers can collect. There’s just no way to do it other than with community science. So, that’s probably what excites me most—how our community scientists can help us move away from the elitism of science and create a more democratic research project.
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