Research overview: fishing cats in the urban wetlands of Colombo

The fishing cat is one of the few wild felids to persist within a Asian capital, surviving in the marshes, canals and waterways threaded through metropolitan Colombo, Sri Lanka. This overview synthesises the Urban Fishing Cat Project camera-trap and GPS-telemetry findings on how these wetland specialists navigate a city of canals, paddy remnants, gardens and roads, hunting fish and rodents largely at night. It covers threats including road mortality, drowning in canals, retaliatory killing over poultry, and the relentless drainage and filling of urban wetlands. The synthesis frames Colombo fishing cats as a striking example of a habitat-specialist felid clinging to a megacity remnant ecosystem.