Research overview: fishing cat wetlands, coastal change, and sea-level rise

The fishing cat is a wetland-dependent felid of South and Southeast Asia, reliant on marshes, mangroves, and waterways that are among the habitats most exposed to climate change and human conversion. This overview surveys how wetland drainage, aquaculture, coastal development, and sea-level rise threaten fishing cat habitat, and how the species' specialization on fish and wetland prey heightens its vulnerability. It reviews the patchy knowledge of its distribution and status. The synthesis frames the fishing cat as a wetland specialist facing compounding climate and land-use threats, illustrating that coastal and freshwater habitats, like the Sundarbans for tigers, place specialized cats on the front line of both rising seas and the loss of increasingly contested wetlands.