🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This study documented the genetic and physiological crisis of the Florida panther, a puma population isolated and reduced to a few dozen animals in southern Florida. The authors reported very low gene…

Melody E. Roelke, Janice S. Martenson, Stephen J. O'Brien · Current Biology · 1993

This study evaluated the landmark 1995 intervention in which eight female Texas pumas were released into Florida to counteract the inbreeding crisis of the endangered Florida panther. Tracking the pop…

Warren E. Johnson, David P. Onorato, Stephen J. O'Brien, et al. · Science · 2010

This study used mitochondrial DNA and microsatellites across the puma's vast range from Canada to Patagonia to reconstruct the species' population history. The authors found surprisingly low genetic d…

Melanie Culver, Warren E. Johnson, Jill Pecon-Slattery, Stephen J. O'Brien · Journal of Heredity · 2000

This study sequenced complete genomes of pumas from across the Americas to examine how range-wide demographic history shaped genetic load and diversity. The authors confirmed the deep divergence betwe…

Nedda F. Saremi, Beth Shapiro, et al. · Nature Communications · 2019

The extinct American cheetah of the genus Miracinonyx superficially resembled the living cheetah, with adaptations for fast pursuit of swift prey such as the pronghorn. This overview surveys genetic a…

The cheetah and the extinct American cheetah independently evolved a slender, long-limbed body built for high-speed pursuit, a striking case of convergence given their separate ancestries within the p…

Effective population size, the number of individuals genetically contributing to the next generation, is often far smaller than the census count and is a key predictor of how quickly a population lose…

Pumas living near major cities, such as those in the Santa Monica and Santa Ana Mountains of California, are increasingly hemmed in by freeways and development, fragmenting their populations and restr…

Small populations accumulate deleterious mutations, the genetic load, but sustained inbreeding can also expose and remove the most harmful recessive variants through a process called purging. This ove…

Wildlife corridors aim to reconnect fragmented cat populations, and genetics provides a direct test of whether they actually restore gene flow. This overview surveys how landscape and population genet…

In many cats, one sex disperses farther than the other, with males typically moving while females remain near their natal range, a pattern that leaves distinct genetic footprints. This overview survey…

The jaguarundi is an unusually shaped small cat of the Americas, with an elongated body and uniform coat, whose molecular placement revealed it as a close relative of the puma and cheetah within the p…

For much of the twentieth century, cat classification rested on coat patterns, skull morphology, and geography, producing many poorly supported species and subspecies. This overview surveys how molecu…

Small or isolated cat populations frequently show the hallmarks of inbreeding depression, including reduced fertility, abnormal sperm, congenital defects, weakened immunity, and elevated juvenile mort…

Before genome sequencing became routine, microsatellites, short tandem repeats scattered through the genome, were the workhorse markers of felid population and forensic genetics. This overview surveys…

Because most wild cats are elusive and difficult to capture, conservation geneticists increasingly rely on noninvasive samples such as scat, hair, and shed cells to obtain DNA without handling the ani…

Since the first lightly sequenced domestic cat genome, feline genomics has advanced to highly contiguous, chromosome-level assemblies for the domestic cat and an expanding set of wild species. This ov…

Whole-genome sequencing reveals long stretches where an individual inherited identical segments from both parents, called runs of homozygosity, which accumulate with inbreeding and small population si…

Modern cats are divided into eight monophyletic lineages: the Panthera lineage (lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, snow leopards, clouded leopards), the bay cat lineage, the caracal lineage, the ocelot…

One of the most counterintuitive results of felid molecular phylogenetics was that the cheetah, long treated as a unique outlier, belongs to a New World puma lineage alongside the puma and the jaguaru…