Research overview: cause-of-death monitoring in radio-collared felid studies

Long-term studies that radio-collar wild felids provide rare opportunities to determine causes of death, including disease, with precision. This overview surveys how telemetry-based monitoring quantifies disease mortality by enabling rapid recovery and necropsy of marked animals, distinguishing infectious disease from predation, conflict and other causes. It examines the contribution of such studies to understanding the population impact of diseases like distemper, leukemia virus and mange, and the value of continuous individual tracking for catching outbreaks. The synthesis connects field methods to epidemiological measurement. It aims to help readers understand that much of what is known about how disease kills wild cats comes from the painstaking monitoring of collared individuals, whose tracked lives and recovered deaths turn anecdote into quantified evidence of disease as a mortality factor in felid populations.