🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

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…

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…

A survey of the strong, general relationship between the abundance of prey and the density of the carnivores that depend on them, a cornerstone of predator ecology. Across species and systems, predato…

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…

A survey of the anti-predator escape behaviors prey use once detected or attacked by cats and how they determine the outcome of a hunt. Prey employ rapid acceleration, unpredictable zig-zagging, stott…

Across Africa lions take a wide spectrum of prey but show local specialization driven by abundance and profitability. This overview examines how some prides become buffalo specialists, particularly wh…

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…

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…

Individual reserves are rarely large enough to sustain wide-ranging cats on their own, so conservation increasingly relies on networks of protected areas linked by corridors, and this overview examine…

Pumas in human-dominated regions of North America, such as the mountain lions of southern California, have become a vivid case study in the consequences of severed connectivity. This overview surveys…

This overview reviews human-puma conflict across the sheep-ranching landscapes of Argentine and Chilean Patagonia, where pumas prey on sheep and guanaco and ranchers have long persecuted them. It synt…

Numerical cognition has been studied extensively in birds and primates, and a smaller body of work asks whether cats discriminate quantities. This overview surveys experiments testing whether cats can…

Rabies, an almost invariably fatal lyssavirus infection, occasionally strikes wild felids exposed through bites from infected dogs, jackals or other wildlife reservoirs. This overview surveys document…

This overview examines how radiocarbon dating is applied to the bones of late Pleistocene cats to reconstruct their chronologies and last appearances. Directly dating individual fossils of Smilodon, c…

A central question in distemper ecology is how a virus historically associated with dogs repeatedly jumps into cats. This overview surveys research on the molecular basis of canine distemper virus hos…

This overview examines how researchers reconstruct the hunting behaviour of the cave lion from anatomy, isotopes, prey associations, and prehistoric art. Skeletal proportions indicate a powerful ambus…

This overview surveys efforts to reconstruct how Panthera atrox looked, including the contentious question of whether males bore a mane like modern African lions. Because the American lion descends fr…

The kin structure of lion prides, with related females and coalitions of often-related males, underlies the cooperative behaviors that define the species. This overview surveys genetic studies of rela…

This overview examines how religious beliefs, sacred associations, and cultural traditions foster, or sometimes undermine, tolerance for big cats. It synthesises cases such as reverence for tigers and…

Long-term studies of wild lions allow researchers to examine how female reproductive performance changes with age and whether lionesses experience a post-reproductive period. This overview surveys evi…

When males cooperate in coalitions, reproductive skew describes how evenly or unequally reproduction is divided among members. This overview surveys reproductive skew in felid coalitions, particularly…

Male reproductive success in cats depends on the ability to acquire and defend mating opportunities, which often declines with age as competitive ability wanes. This overview surveys how aging affects…

This overview examines retaliatory poisoning, a leading and indiscriminate cause of large-carnivore mortality, focusing on the misuse of agricultural pesticides such as carbofuran (sold as Furadan) la…

Retinal ganglion cells are the output neurons of the eye, and their density sets an upper limit on visual acuity. In cats, ganglion cell counts peak in the area centralis and along a horizontal visual…

This overview examines the persistent gap between perceived and actual risk in human-big cat conflict, a theme cutting across lion, tiger, leopard, puma, and jaguar systems. It synthesises research sh…

This overview explores the cultural and conflict-driven dimensions of lion killing among Maasai and related pastoralists, including the traditional olamayio lion hunt as a rite of warrior status along…

A key reason cats see well in dim light is that many rods feed into each downstream neuron, a wiring strategy called convergence or spatial summation. By pooling the faint signals of hundreds of rods,…

This overview compares the killing strategies of sabertooth cats with those of conical-toothed felids such as modern lions and tigers. Living big cats typically use short, robust canines and a powerfu…

Small cats seem to out-jump big cats relative to their size, and this overview reviews how jumping ability scales across the felid family. Physical principles predict that absolute jump height does no…