To determine the likelihood of the offspring's traits in cats where having a short tail is recessive to having a long tail, we need to analyze the genetic information from the parents.
Given:
- The mother cat is heterozygous for this trait, which means she has one dominant allele and one recessive allele. Her genotype is [tex]\(Ll\)[/tex].
- The father cat is homozygous dominant, meaning he has two dominant alleles. His genotype is [tex]\(LL\)[/tex].
Let's consider the possible offspring genotypes based on these parental genotypes:
1. The mother can pass on either the [tex]\(L\)[/tex] (long tail) allele or the [tex]\(l\)[/tex] (short tail) allele.
2. The father can only pass on the [tex]\(L\)[/tex] (long tail) allele, as his genotype is [tex]\(LL\)[/tex].
We can create a Punnett square to visualize the possible combinations of alleles from the parents:
[tex]\[
\begin{array}{c|cc}
& L & L \\
\hline
L & LL & LL \\
l & Ll & Ll \\
\end{array}
\][/tex]
From this Punnett square, the potential genotypes of the offspring are:
- [tex]\(LL\)[/tex] (long tail): from the combination of [tex]\(L\)[/tex] from the mother and [tex]\(L\)[/tex] from the father.
- [tex]\(Ll\)[/tex] (long tail): from the combination of [tex]\(l\)[/tex] from the mother and [tex]\(L\)[/tex] from the father.
Now we interpret these combinations:
- [tex]\(LL\)[/tex] and [tex]\(Ll\)[/tex] both result in the phenotype of a long tail because the allele for a long tail ([tex]\(L\)[/tex]) is dominant over the allele for a short tail ([tex]\(l\)[/tex]).
Since both possible genotypes ([tex]\(LL\)[/tex] and [tex]\(Ll\)[/tex]) produce long tails, we conclude that all of their offspring will have long tails.
Therefore, the correct statement is:
- All will have long tails.
The resulting probability of offspring having long tails is 1.0 (or 100%), and the probability of having short tails is 0.0 (or 0%).
