Heterochromia, known for being eye color.

Famous for being two different eye colors.

Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun.

Let's find out why heterochromia is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks, welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is.

My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie.

Yes.

What is your relationship to or opinion of heterochromia?

So I don't know a huge amount about it. I don't have it. Me neither. I know.

It means differently colored eyes. I think it can both mean one eye is one color, the other eyes,

another color, or you have an eye that has two colors, like the iris has two colors simultaneously.

Yeah, that's right.

And the other thing I know about it is, I believe that in, it's not a hard and fast rule,

but in pure white cats, ones that have blue eyes will often have deafness.

And in white cats that have blue eyes will often have deafness. And in white cats that have blue eyes and one of their eyes is a different color, the deafness is usually next to the blue eye in that year.

So it's very, there's weird genetics that are involved in eye color with, I don't think the same thing happens with

people, human people. I don't believe there's any correlation between eye color and deafness,

but it's very interesting, very interesting genetic shenanigans. Yeah, and we'll talk about

dogs, but especially at the end of the show. Yeah, either way, it seems like dogs, cats, horses, and some other mammals that we domesticate a lot.

We have noticed little genetic bottlenecks of heterochromia that are just different from how it is in humans.

Like that cat thing.

Yeah.

But like there's something people call an odd-eyed cat where it's a cat with heterochromia

...