Research overview: prey switching and dietary flexibility under climate stress

How flexibly a cat can switch prey when its preferred species declines shapes its resilience to drought and habitat change. This overview surveys evidence on dietary breadth across felids, from specialist hyperpredators like the Iberian lynx to generalists like leopards, and how diet flexibility buffers, or fails to buffer, populations against prey crashes. It reviews methods for studying diet, scat analysis, stable isotopes, kill-site investigation, and how diet shifts under environmental stress. The synthesis frames dietary flexibility as a key trait determining climate vulnerability, explaining why generalist cats may absorb prey fluctuations that would devastate specialists, and why diet studies help predict which species can adjust as climate reshuffles the availability of their prey.