User blog:Pacboy94/Faunus Genes

Recently I’ve been scouring the Internet for anything RWBY related to tide me over till Volume 2, and a lot of the fan art and talk deals with the faunus. That’s when the biologist in me started wondering, “How do the faunus pass on their features to their children? What would happen if a faunus with a cat tail and a faunus with monkey ears had kids?” Of course that kept me up all night, until I came up with a theory that kind of makes sense. I figured I’d post it here in case anyone else had wondered the same thing. Just a warning though, this might be a bit dry.

We’ll use the faunus I already mentioned as an example. I theorized that the features were determined by two related genes, the first determines what animal the faunus would receive traits from and the second determines what that trait is. Now anyone who has had high school biology is probably very familiar with Punnett squares. Using one of these I assigned a letter to each trait: C for cat-like features, M for monkey-like features, E for ears, and T for tails. So for the faunus with the cat tail the sequence I gave was CcTt, and the faunus with monkey ears got MmEe. I decided that cat features are dominant to monkey features and ears are dominant to tails. However this made people with monkey tails extremely rare. In order for this to balance out I decided that the recessive monkey gene would be expressed over the recessive cat gene, and the recessive tail gene would be expressed over the recessive ear gene. To make this easier to visualize I made a Punnett square (sorry about the drawings. I suck at Paint).



















So this pair results in a one in four chance of cat ears, one in four for monkey ears, one in four for a cat tail, and one in four for a monkey tail. Of course their are more than just these kinds of faunus, but this does work for all the scenarios I have tested.

Long story short, I need to stop thinking while I'm going to sleep.

