Can a cat with blood type B have a sibling with type AB?

Post date: 2020-11-22 17:31:56

I have 2 cats that are supposedly littermates. We recently found out one has type B blood and the other has type AB. Type B is rare in cats, but apparently type AB is super duper rare and now I'm curious. Can 2 cats from a litter have different, rare blood types like this or were my two boys just randomly put together and called littermates?

More info: I had 2 of my cats, supposedly littermates, blood typed to see if either could donate blood to my third cat (unrelated) who has type B blood. My way of handling stress is to research weird shit, so I'm currently reading about cat blood types. I learned that both types B and AB are pretty rare, typically in exotic breeds. These two chonky boys are just your standard DSH tuxedos, although they are longer and more muscly than any other cat I've owned. So yeah, I thought it was pretty interesting that they both have rare blood types.

Most of the Google results I'm finding are academic papers or breeding info, which gets way into technical details about blood typing that I can't comprehend right now. Really, my main question is whether it's possible for a litter to contain one cat with type B and one cat with type AB?

I have had these two boys for 9 years, they are the loves of my life (j/k, spouse. kinda). I got them when they were kittens who had been adopted, given up, readopted, given up again, and then fostered before I found them. Sooo, it's possible they came from different litters but due to all of the passing-around, they just got bonded and were tagged as littermates without it being technically true.

It has no bearing on anything whether they actually are littermates; I'm just curious because it's a good distraction.

Bonus: if you have any fun facts about these two rare blood types, I'm all ears. I did learn that type AB is a universal recipient but NOT a universal donor. That's useful to know!

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