🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

The IUCN Cat Specialist Group convened a Cat Classification Task Force to reconcile decades of conflicting felid taxonomy with modern genetic and morphological evidence. The resulting consensus recogn…

Andrew C. Kitchener, Christiane Breitenmoser-Wursten, Eduardo Eizirik, et al. (Cat Classification Task Force) · Cat News Special Issue · 2017

This study sequenced genomes from tigers representing multiple subspecies to reconstruct their demographic history and detect local adaptation. The authors found that tigers share a recent common ance…

Yue-Chen Liu, Shu-Jin Luo, et al. · Current Biology · 2018

This study sequenced genomes of Bengal tigers from across India, home to most of the world's wild tigers, to assess genetic diversity, structure, and inbreeding among populations. The authors found th…

Anubhab Khan, Uma Ramakrishnan, et al. · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021

This study sampled tigers from across their range and used mitochondrial and microsatellite markers to test whether the traditional subspecies are genetically distinct. The authors found support for s…

Shu-Jin Luo, Stephen J. O'Brien, et al. · PLoS Biology · 2004

The Amur or Siberian tiger of the Russian Far East recovered from perhaps a few dozen animals in the mid-twentieth century to several hundred today, making it a natural experiment in bottleneck and re…

Conservation managers must decide which populations to treat as separate units for protection, breeding, and translocation, and genetics provides the primary evidence. This overview surveys the concep…

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…

Environmental DNA, the genetic material that animals shed into their surroundings, offers a powerful new way to detect elusive cats without observing them directly. This overview surveys how environme…

Accurate tiger numbers are central to conservation, and genetic capture-recapture using noninvasive samples complements camera trapping to estimate abundance and density. This overview surveys how DNA…

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…

The South China tiger, considered the ancestral or stem population of modern tigers by some analyses, is likely extinct in the wild and survives only in a small, intensively managed captive population…

The Caspian tiger of Central and Western Asia went extinct in the twentieth century, but genetic analysis of museum specimens revealed a close relationship to the surviving Amur tiger, suggesting the…

Besides the white tiger, captive tigers occasionally display a golden or strawberry coloration with pale orange fur and faint cinnamon stripes, as well as theoretical combinations such as the snow-whi…

Tiger taxonomy has long been contested, with traditional schemes recognizing up to nine subspecies, several now extinct, while some genetic analyses and the Cat Classification Task Force proposed coll…

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…

Mitochondrial DNA, with its maternal inheritance, high copy number, and relatively fast evolution, was central to the first molecular phylogenies and phylogeographic studies of cats. This overview sur…

Natural history museum collections preserve specimens spanning centuries, providing a genetic archive of felid populations as they existed before recent declines. This overview surveys how museum geno…

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…

Zoos and breeding programs maintain studbooks to manage the genetics of captive cat populations, aiming to retain diversity and avoid inbreeding across generations. This overview surveys how pedigree…

Habitat loss and fragmentation increasingly isolate cat populations into small patches separated by inhospitable terrain, reducing effective population size and gene flow. This overview surveys how co…

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…

Cats span a remarkable size range, from the kilogram-scale rusty-spotted and black-footed cats to tigers weighing hundreds of kilograms, and body size has evolved repeatedly in different directions. T…

Crosses between lions and tigers in captivity produce ligers and tigons, hybrids notable for unusual growth patterns, with ligers often growing larger than either parent. This overview surveys the bio…

Cats are obligate carnivores, physiologically dependent on a meat diet, and comparative genomics has uncovered the molecular underpinnings of this specialization. This overview surveys findings that f…

Genetic tools are increasingly used to combat the illegal trade in cats and their parts, from tiger bones and skins to confiscated live animals. This overview surveys how forensic genetics assigns sei…

The big cats of the genus Panthera proved historically difficult to resolve because of rapid speciation and conflicting gene trees. This study assembled a large multilocus supermatrix and applied both…

Brian W. Davis, Gang Li, William J. Murphy · Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution · 2010

This study resolved the long-standing mystery of the white tiger by mapping the trait in a captive pedigree and identifying a single amino-acid change in the pigment transporter gene SLC45A2. The vari…

Xiao Xu, Shu-Jin Luo, et al. · Current Biology · 2013