🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This pioneering radio-telemetry study followed jaguars in the forests of Belize, providing one of the first quantitative pictures of the species' spatial ecology in Central America. The work documente…

Rabinowitz, A. R., Nottingham, B. G. · Journal of Zoology · 1986

This early field study examined how jaguars move through the seasonally inundated landscape of the Brazilian Pantanal, combining direct observation and tracking to describe ranging in relation to wate…

Schaller, G. B., Crawshaw, P. G. · Biotropica · 1980

As apex predators, big cats can exert top-down control that ripples through ecosystems via trophic cascades. This overview synthesizes evidence that lions, tigers, leopards, pumas, and jaguars influen…

Jaguars have one of the most diverse diets of any big cat, recorded preying on dozens of species. This overview synthesizes scat and kill studies documenting how jaguar diet ranges from large mammals…

Like tigers, jaguars are individually identifiable by their rosette patterns, making camera-trap capture-recapture a key tool for estimating their density. This overview synthesizes how researchers ac…

Across much of Latin America jaguars and pumas occur together, and their coexistence is mediated by differences in prey, habitat, and behavior. This overview synthesizes research showing that jaguars…

The jaguar has the most powerful bite relative to size among big cats, and this overview synthesizes research linking its robust skull and jaw musculature to a distinctive killing style. Unlike most l…

The Amazon basin holds the largest remaining expanse of jaguar habitat, and the cat's ecology there differs from open wetlands. This overview synthesizes research on jaguars in continuous rainforest,…

Jaguar home ranges vary widely with habitat productivity and prey availability, from compact territories in rich wetlands to vast ranges in drier or less productive forests. This overview synthesizes…

Where jaguars share land with cattle ranching, depredation drives conflict that threatens the cat through retaliatory killing. This overview synthesizes studies on the patterns and drivers of jaguar p…

Jaguars are the most water-associated of the big cats in the Americas, and in wetland strongholds they specialize on aquatic and semi-aquatic prey. This overview synthesizes research showing how jagua…

At the northern limit of their distribution, in northern Mexico and occasionally the southwestern United States, jaguars persist at low density and high conservation sensitivity. This overview synthes…

Black jaguars, often called black panthers, are melanistic individuals of the same species, and their occurrence carries ecological interest. This overview synthesizes research on the genetics of mela…

Estimating how many big cats occupy an area is a central and challenging task in their ecology and conservation. This overview reviews the main methods, from individual-identification camera-trap capt…

Where pumas and jaguars overlap in the Neotropics, the puma often shifts its niche in response to the larger cat. This overview synthesizes research showing that in sympatry pumas tend to take smaller…

The jaguar's continuous historical range once stretched from the southwestern United States to Argentina, and maintaining connectivity across this expanse is a central conservation goal. This overview…

In floodplain strongholds such as the Pantanal, the annual flood pulse governs jaguar ecology. This overview synthesizes how rising and falling waters concentrate prey on shrinking patches of dry land…

Using GPS telemetry on jaguars in the seasonally flooded Pantanal of Brazil, this study quantified home ranges, movements, and the degree of spatial overlap among individuals. It revealed that jaguar…

Cavalcanti, S. M. C., Gese, E. M. · Journal of Mammalogy · 2009

This comprehensive reference compiled the biology, ecology, and conservation status of all the world's wild cat species, from the great roaring cats to the smallest felids. Drawing together field stud…

Sunquist, M. E., Sunquist, F. C. · University of Chicago Press · 2002