🧬 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

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…

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…

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…

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…