🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This overview synthesises research on the social and ecological factors influencing herder attitudes toward snow leopards and wolves across the trans-Himalaya, emphasising that tolerance is shaped at…

Net squared displacement, the squared straight-line distance from a starting point over time, provides a simple but powerful way to classify whole-trajectory movement strategies. This overview describ…

Where several large cats share a landscape, they coexist by partitioning resources along axes of prey size, habitat, and activity. This overview synthesizes research across continents showing how tige…

Leopards sharing space with dense human populations frequently become more strictly nocturnal, compressing their activity into the hours when people are least active. This overview surveys telemetry a…

Many felids become more strictly nocturnal as human activity increases, a pattern documented from Indian leopards to Californian bobcats and pumas. This overview synthesises camera-trap and telemetry…

Whether snow leopards maintain stable home ranges or wander nomadically is a genuine and consequential question, and this overview examines the evidence telemetry has brought to bear. Resident adults…

Protecting livestock and poultry from felid predation through non-lethal means is central to reducing conflict and retaliatory killing at the urban and agricultural edge. This overview synthesises res…

Snow leopards inhabit remote, rugged mountains where direct observation is nearly impossible, making noninvasive genetics essential for studying them. This overview surveys how scat-based DNA analysis…

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…

Beyond tigers, Southeast Asia's oil palm expansion affects a guild of smaller cats, including leopard cat, clouded leopard, marbled cat, and flat-headed cat, with widely varying tolerance of plantatio…

Hybridization between the southern oncilla and Geoffroys cat, documented through genetic studies, is a notable feature of the oncilla evolutionary history, and this overview reviews it. In contact zon…

Many captive cats, notably cheetahs and clouded leopards, undergo prolonged periods of ovarian inactivity in which they neither cycle nor ovulate, undermining breeding programs. This overview examines…

Leopard attacks on humans, though rare relative to encounter frequency, shape public perception and policy across urban-adjacent India. This overview surveys research on the spatial and temporal clust…

This overview reviews how payments-for-ecosystem-services (PES) frameworks have been adapted to compensate communities for hosting large carnivores, treating predator presence as a service worth rewar…

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…

Coat pattern played a central role in confirming the clouded leopard split. This overview describes the diagnostic pelage differences: Sunda clouded leopards tend to have smaller, darker cloud marking…

Individual cats differ consistently in boldness, fearfulness, aggressiveness and sociability, and these stable traits affect welfare, breeding success and how animals respond to husbandry. This overvi…

Snow leopards are exquisitely adapted to life at high altitude in bitter cold. This overview synthesizes what is known about their dense fur, long thick tail used for balance and warmth, enlarged nasa…

Although the snow leopard was traditionally treated as a single undivided species, genetic studies using noninvasive samples have proposed dividing it into several geographic subspecies or management…

A survey of how felids exploit the seasonal pulse of newborn ungulates, a period of high vulnerability that can dominate annual recruitment losses. During calving and fawning seasons, abundant, hidden…

An overview of how the scent of felid predators alone can suppress prey foraging, movement and reproduction, demonstrating nonconsumptive effects without any direct attack. Prey detect chemical cues o…

This overview surveys evidence on reinforcing nighttime livestock enclosures (bomas, kraals) to prevent attacks by lions, leopards, hyenas, and cheetahs across East African rangelands. It covers the p…

Reducing livestock losses is central to securing snow leopards, and predator-proof corrals are among the most effective tools. This overview synthesizes research and program experience showing that re…

Reinforcing the enclosures, or bomas, where livestock are kept at night is among the most direct ways to reduce predation by lions, leopards, and other cats, and thereby retaliatory killing. This over…

This overview reviews efforts to reinforce nighttime livestock corrals across snow leopard range to prevent the catastrophic multiple-kill events that occur when a cat enters an open pen and kills man…

The number of snow leopards a mountain landscape can hold is set largely by the abundance of wild ungulate prey. This overview synthesizes research linking the density of blue sheep, ibex, and argali…

A survey of the minimum prey abundance large cats need to maintain viable populations and why prey depletion is a leading cause of felid decline. Because predator density scales with prey biomass, the…

How flexibly a cat can switch prey when its preferred species declines shapes its resilience to drought and habitat change. This overview surveys evidence on dietary breadth across felids, from specia…

An overview of the behavioral defenses ungulates and other prey deploy against felid predators, from vigilance scanning to alarm signaling and habitat avoidance. Because cats are stealthy ambush hunte…

A survey of how big cats process and consume their kills, and why handling time matters for kill-rate estimation and competition. Larger carcasses take longer to consume and force predators to remain…