🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

An overview of how the prey cats select shifts through the year with prey vulnerability, migration, birth pulses and weather. Many felids exploit seasonal ungulate calving and fawning peaks, when abun…

An overview of the long-debated tendency of cats to kill the young, old, sick and injured disproportionately, and what it implies for predation impact. If predators chiefly remove individuals with low…

A survey of how male and female lions differ in the prey they hunt and the habitats in which they hunt, driven by pronounced sexual size dimorphism. Larger, more powerful males are better able to tack…

A survey of how the Canada lynx's large, well-furred feet give it an advantage hunting snowshoe hares in deep, soft snow, and how snow conditions structure its competition with other predators. The ly…

An overview of the snow leopard's dependence on a few wild mountain ungulates, chiefly blue sheep (bharal) and Siberian ibex, across the high ranges of Central Asia. These prey constitute the core of…

An overview comparing the hunting effectiveness of solitary felids with the cooperative hunting of lions, addressing why most cats hunt alone. Solitary ambush hunting suits stalking predators that tar…

An overview of how cheetahs reduce the risk of intraguild predation and kleptoparasitism by avoiding lions across space and time. As a subordinate cursorial predator, the cheetah suffers heavy cub mor…

A survey of how stable isotope ratios of carbon, nitrogen and other elements in tissues reconstruct the diets and trophic positions of cats. Because isotopic signatures of prey are passed to predators…

An overview of how ambush felids select hunting habitat to minimize the distance over which they must close on prey undetected. Because capture success drops sharply with the length of the final rush,…

An overview of documented cases in which cats kill more prey than they can eat, extending Kruuk's classic analysis to felids. Surplus killing in cats typically occurs when normal prey escape responses…

A survey of how tiger predation interacts with ungulate prey in Indian reserves and why prey abundance is the master variable for tiger recovery. Tigers prefer large prey such as sambar, gaur and wild…

A survey of the leopard's distinctive habit of hauling kills, sometimes heavier than itself, into trees, and the ecological drivers behind it. Tree caching is most pronounced where lions and spotted h…

An overview of how large cats can structure ecosystems from the top down, with effects rippling through herbivores to vegetation and beyond. By killing and frightening herbivores, apex felids such as…

A survey of how the synchronized mass calving and movement of migratory wildebeest may swamp predators, reducing per-capita predation on any individual. By giving birth in a brief, highly synchronized…

DeVault, Rhodes and Shivik synthesized the neglected ecology of carrion use, arguing that scavenging is far more pervasive and important than traditionally recognized and that most carnivores, includi…

DeVault, T.L., Rhodes, O.E. & Shivik, J.A. · Oikos · 2003

Kruuk documented and analyzed cases where carnivores kill far more prey than they can consume, challenging the assumption that predators only take what they need. Drawing on spotted hyena and other ca…

Kruuk, H. · Journal of Zoology · 1972

Schaller's monograph is the foundational field study of lion ecology and one of the most thorough predator-prey investigations ever conducted. Over years in the Serengeti, he documented lion social st…

Schaller, G.B. · University of Chicago Press · 1972

Holling's classic paper dissected predation into its component processes and introduced the functional response, the relationship between prey density and the number of prey killed per predator. He de…

Holling, C.S. · The Canadian Entomologist · 1959

Brown, Laundre and Gurung laid the theoretical foundation for fear-driven predator-prey ecology, integrating optimal foraging theory and game theory to show how prey trade food intake against safety.…

Brown, J.S., Laundre, J.W. & Gurung, M. · Journal of Mammalogy · 1999

A decade after naming the concept, Laundre, Hernandez and Ripple reviewed how the landscape of fear had matured into a framework for understanding nonconsumptive predator effects. They synthesized evi…

Laundre, J.W., Hernandez, L. & Ripple, W.J. · The Open Ecology Journal · 2010

Periquet, Fritz and Revilla reviewed the full breadth of interactions between lions and spotted hyenas, the two dominant large carnivores of African savannas. They synthesized evidence on kleptoparasi…

Periquet, S., Fritz, H. & Revilla, E. · Biological Reviews · 2015

Prugh and colleagues synthesized global evidence that the worldwide decline of apex predators has triggered widespread increases in mid-sized carnivores, with far-reaching ecological and economic cons…

Prugh, L.R., Stoner, C.J., Epps, C.W., Bean, W.T. et al. · BioScience · 2009

Sunquist's radio-telemetry monograph from Nepal was among the first rigorous field studies of tiger spacing, movements and predation. He documented home-range sizes, land-tenure dynamics and how prey…

Sunquist, M.E. · Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology · 1981

A classic of population ecology, this paper assembled Hudson's Bay Company fur-return records spanning two centuries to document the now-iconic roughly ten-year oscillation in Canada lynx numbers. Elt…

Elton, C. & Nicholson, M. · Journal of Animal Ecology · 1942

Karanth and colleagues combined rigorous camera-trap capture-recapture estimates of tiger density with line-transect estimates of ungulate density across Indian reserves to test whether prey biomass p…

Karanth, K.U., Nichols, J.D., Kumar, N.S., Link, W.A. & Hines, J.E. · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2004

Hunter, Durant and Caro examined the decisions cheetahs make at carcasses when dominant competitors threaten, quantifying how the presence of lions and hyenas governs whether and when cheetahs abandon…

Hunter, J.S., Durant, S.M. & Caro, T.M. · Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology · 2007

Estes and a large group of coauthors synthesized evidence that the loss of apex consumers, including big cats, is among humanity's most pervasive influences on nature. The review marshaled cases acros…

Estes, J.A., Terborgh, J., Brashares, J.S. et al. · Science · 2011

Wilmers and colleagues showed that reintroduced wolves in Yellowstone act as ecosystem benefactors by providing a steady, more evenly distributed supply of carrion to scavengers, buffering them agains…

Wilmers, C.C., Crabtree, R.L., Smith, D.W., Murphy, K.M. & Getz, W.M. · Journal of Animal Ecology · 2003

Sunquist and Sunquist's comprehensive reference compiles the natural history, ecology and behavior of all wild felid species, with extensive treatment of diet, prey selection, hunting modes and predat…

Sunquist, M. & Sunquist, F. · University of Chicago Press · 2002

This paper introduced and named the landscape of fear concept, arguing that prey perceive their habitat as a spatially varying map of predation risk that shapes where and how they forage. Using elk an…

Laundre, J.W., Hernandez, L. & Altendorf, K.B. · Canadian Journal of Zoology · 2001