🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Felids span from sub-kilogram wildcats to lions and tigers of well over a hundred kilograms, and body size profoundly shapes how they move. This overview reviews how speed, acceleration, jumping abili…

Lions are both hunters and scavengers, and their relationship with spotted hyenas is a central feature of African large-carnivore communities. This overview reviews how lions appropriate hyena kills a…

Many felids scavenge as well as hunt, and feeding on carcasses exposes them to pathogens including anthrax, bovine tuberculosis and parasites concentrated in dead and diseased animals. This overview s…

An overview of how much carrion features in the diets of cats traditionally viewed as pure hunters. While felids are generally more reliant on fresh kills than canids or hyaenids, many will scavenge o…

Lions advertise and defend territory through a combination of roaring, scent marking, and scrapes. This overview reviews how the long-range roar communicates presence and group identity, allowing prid…

Alongside roaring, lions use scent marking to advertise territory and reproductive status. This overview surveys research on lion olfactory communication, including urine spraying onto vegetation, scr…

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…

This overview examines the wider ecological fallout of retaliatory poisoning aimed at big cats, especially the catastrophic secondary poisoning of vultures and other scavengers that feed on laced carc…

Serological surveys, which detect antibodies as evidence of past or present infection, are a workhorse of wildlife disease epidemiology. This overview surveys how serosurveys reveal pathogen exposure…

The sex ratio of felid litters and any biases in maternal investment toward sons or daughters bear on population dynamics and evolutionary theory. This overview surveys evidence for sex ratio patterns…

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…

In several big cats, males have larger, more robust skulls and stouter canines than females, and this overview reviews the patterns and their likely drivers. Such dimorphism is often linked to male-ma…

Infanticide by males is documented or inferred across many felid species, from lions to tigers, leopards, pumas, and others, wherever killing dependent young can hasten a female's next conception. Thi…

The vertical slit pupil of small cats is a striking feature, and this overview reviews why such pupils evolved. Comparative work links vertical slit pupils to small ambush predators active across a wi…

Wire snares are among the most pervasive and indiscriminate threats to big cats, killing or maiming tigers, leopards, lions, and other predators directly and decimating the prey populations they depen…

This overview reviews how wire snaring set for bushmeat indirectly drives big-cat conflict and mortality, a growing threat across Africa and Asia. It synthesises evidence that snares intended for ante…

Snow leopards are killed and traded for their thick pelts and their bones, the latter increasingly drawn into the same markets that consume tiger and lion bone. This overview surveys research on snow…

Whether sabertoothed cats lived socially is debated, and this overview reviews the lines of evidence, including healed injuries and the abundance of Smilodon in deposits such as tar seeps. Some argue…

Felid sociality varies from the solitary tiger and most small cats to the group-living lion, and captive social management must respect these differences. This overview surveys research on housing cat…

This overview synthesises research showing that much apparent human-carnivore conflict is in fact conflict between human groups, communities versus conservation authorities, locals versus outsiders, e…

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…

Pumas, also called cougars or mountain lions, are solitary felids whose social lives revolve around spatial organisation maintained largely through scent communication. This overview surveys GPS and f…

Across felid species and populations, the quality of sperm morphology tends to correlate with the level of genetic diversity, linking population history to reproductive function. This overview surveys…

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…

This overview surveys the stable isotope techniques used to reconstruct the diets of extinct cats. Carbon isotopes in bone and tooth collagen and enamel record whether prey fed on plants using differe…

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…

Serological and molecular surveys of wild felid populations have documented widespread infection with species-specific lentiviruses related to FIV, often at high prevalence in lions and pumas, general…

Mountain lion exposure to plague is tied to the disease ecology of their rodent and lagomorph prey, which serve as the reservoir and amplifier of Yersinia pestis. This overview surveys how sylvatic pl…