🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

The feline killing bite is precisely targeted to the nape, where the canines wedge between cervical vertebrae to sever or crush the spinal cord. This overview surveys research on how cats achieve this…

Purring is most associated with contentment, but cats also purr when injured, frightened, giving birth, or near death, prompting research into its varied functions. This overview surveys evidence that…

Adult cats rarely meow at one another but meow frequently at people, leading to the hypothesis that the meow has been shaped by life alongside humans. This overview surveys research comparing the call…

The roar of a lion or tiger is among the loudest sounds a land mammal makes, and biomechanical research has sought to explain how such low, powerful sound is generated. This overview surveys findings…

If cats form attachments, their owners might serve as a secure base that buffers stress in novel or threatening situations. This overview surveys research testing the secure-base effect in cats, inclu…

Early-life experience profoundly shapes how friendly and confident a cat becomes, and research has identified a sensitive period in kittenhood, roughly between two and seven or eight weeks, when expos…

The vertical tail-up posture is one of the most studied visual signals in domestic cats and is widely interpreted as a friendly intention signal that precedes approach, allorubbing, and amicable inter…

Despite being a large cat, the cheetah cannot roar and instead produces a distinctive repertoire including bird-like chirps, stutter-bark calls, churrs, and purring. This overview surveys descriptions…

Domestic cats produce a diverse set of vocalisations that researchers have grouped into categories such as murmurs made with a closed mouth, including purrs and trills, vowel-pattern calls such as the…

Owners often note that cats anticipate feeding times and other daily events, raising questions about feline timing abilities. This overview surveys research and theory on how cats track time, includin…

True tool use is essentially absent in cats, but felids display tool-adjacent behaviours that involve manipulating objects and environments to achieve goals. This overview surveys examples such as usi…

Spraying urine against vertical surfaces is a distinct marking behaviour, separate from elimination, used by cats of both sexes to deposit long-lasting chemical signals. This overview surveys research…

Cats communicate a great deal through the positions of their ears, tail, body, and fur, and through pupil dilation, conveying emotional state and intentions without sound. This overview surveys etholo…

Cats develop individually distinctive meows, and owners gradually learn to interpret their own cat's calls better than strangers do. This overview surveys research on acoustic individuality in cat voc…

A cat's facial whiskers, or vibrissae, are mobile tactile sensors that play a crucial role in the final moments of prey capture, when vision is too close to focus. This overview surveys research showi…

Many owners are puzzled when their well-fed cat carries dead or live prey indoors. This overview surveys the leading interpretations, including the transport of prey to a safe location for consumption…

Memory supports navigation, hunting, and social recognition in cats, and this overview surveys research on its different forms. It covers short-term and working memory for object locations, the persis…

Playback experiments on Serengeti lionesses tested whether females could judge the size of an intruding group from its roars. Researchers broadcast recordings of one versus three unfamiliar females an…

Karen McComb, Craig Packer, Anne Pusey · Animal Behaviour · 1994

Combining field observations with experiments using life-sized dummy lions, researchers tested what information a male's mane signals. Darker manes indicated higher testosterone and better nutrition,…

Peyton West, Craig Packer · Science · 2002

This detailed developmental study described how kittens in litters engage in social play, cataloguing motor patterns such as the belly-up, stand-up, pounce, and chase, and charting how their frequency…

Meredith West · American Zoologist · 1974

When confronted with an ambiguous, potentially frightening object such as a noisy fan, do cats look to their owner for guidance? In this experiment owners reacted to the object with either a positive…

Isabella Merola and colleagues · Animal Cognition · 2015

Surveying owners of over two thousand pet cats, researchers used questionnaire ratings to identify five reliable personality dimensions, dubbed the Feline Five: neuroticism, extraversion, dominance, i…

Carla Litchfield and colleagues · PLOS ONE · 2017

This foundational monograph reported years of direct observation of lion prides in the Serengeti, establishing baseline knowledge of pride structure, cooperative hunting, territorial behaviour, scaven…

George Schaller · 1972

Why can lions and tigers roar while domestic cats and cheetahs cannot? This comparative anatomical study examined the hyoid apparatus, the chain of bones supporting the larynx and tongue, across felid…

Gerald Weissengruber and colleagues · Journal of Anatomy · 2002

This widely cited quantitative synthesis estimated that free-ranging domestic cats in the contiguous United States kill billions of birds and tens of billions of mammals annually, with unowned cats re…

Scott Loss, Tom Will, Peter Marra · Nature Communications · 2013

Two experiments tested whether the narrowed-eye, slow-blink expression functions as friendly signalling between cats and people. When owners slow-blinked at their cats, the cats were more likely to sl…

Tasmin Humphrey, Karen McComb, Leanne Proops and colleagues · Scientific Reports · 2020

Owners often report that a hungry cat's purr is peculiarly hard to ignore, and this study found why. Acoustic analysis revealed that some purrs contain an embedded high-frequency, cry-like component i…

Karen McComb, Anna Taylor, Christian Wilson, Benjamin Charlton · Current Biology · 2009

Researchers tracked litters of kittens to examine how the timing of weaning relates to changes in play. As mothers reduced nursing, kittens increased object-directed and predatory play while social pl…

Paul Martin, Patrick Bateson · Animal Behaviour · 1985

To test the common claim that cats are aloof, researchers offered both shelter and pet cats a choice among four stimulus categories: social interaction with a human, food, toy, and scent. After a depr…

Kristyn Vitale Shreve, Lindsay Mehrkam, Monique Udell · Behavioural Processes · 2017

This influential analysis asked what selective pressures favour group living in lions, testing whether shared hunting and prey capture alone could explain sociality. Long-term Serengeti and Ngorongoro…

Craig Packer, David Scheel, Anne Pusey · The American Naturalist · 1990