🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Sarcoptic mange, caused by the burrowing mite Sarcoptes scabiei, affects a wide range of carnivores and occasionally strikes large felids, producing hair loss, crusting, intense itching and debilitati…

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…

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…

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…

Solitary cats rely heavily on chemical signals to advertise reproductive status and locate mates across large ranges. This overview surveys how felids use urine spraying, scrapes, cheek rubbing, and g…

Felids scratch trees and other surfaces and create ground scrapes that combine visual marks with scent from glands in the paws. This overview surveys research on the marking function of scratching acr…

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…

Cats living in temperate climates often show seasonal patterns of reproduction, with estrus and breeding concentrated in particular times of year, whereas tropical species may cycle year-round. This o…

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…

Interpreting antibody tests in wild felids is complicated by cross-reactivity, where antibodies to one pathogen react with tests for a related agent, blurring diagnoses. This overview surveys the diag…

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 serval possesses proportionally the largest ears of any cat, and research into its sensory ecology emphasizes how acoustic detection underpins its hunting. This overview draws together evidence th…

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…

In many felids, males range more widely and are detected differently than females, and ignoring these differences biases spatially explicit capture-recapture density estimates. This overview surveys h…

This overview examines whether Smilodon fatalis showed pronounced size differences between males and females, a question with implications for its social system. Because the La Brea sample is large, r…

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 effectiveness of wildlife crossings depends partly on shielding animals from the light and noise of adjacent traffic, factors that can deter wary felids from using overpasses and underpasses. This…

Some female felids ovulate or become reproductively receptive with few outward behavioral signs, a phenomenon called silent or behavioral estrus that complicates breeding management. This overview sur…

Cat skulls vary in robustness and proportion, and this overview surveys how that variation tracks the size of prey a species typically takes. Cats that tackle relatively large prey tend to have more r…

Agroforestry systems such as shade coffee and cacao, along with tree plantations and pasture-forest mosaics, can provide partial habitat for ocelots, margays, oncillas and jaguarundis across Latin Ame…

As agriculture and settlement advance into Neotropical forests, small cats face habitat loss, road mortality, retaliatory killing over poultry depredation, and competition with free-ranging dogs. This…

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…

Battery life is the hard ceiling on tracking duration, so engineers pursue energy harvesting to extend or even indefinitely sustain deployments. This overview covers solar panels integrated into colla…

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…

Banking living somatic cells, such as skin fibroblasts, preserves an individual's full genome for potential future use in cloning or stem cell technologies. This overview surveys the collection, cultu…

Initiatives to receive signals from very small animal tags via satellites or the International Space Station, such as the ICARUS effort, promise to shrink trackers and broaden which species can be fol…

Where multiple cat species coexist, smaller felids often adjust their use of space and time to avoid larger, dominant competitors, and camera-trap data are a primary means of detecting these interacti…

Building on spatially explicit capture-recapture, spatial mark-resight and unmarked SECR methods estimate density when few or no animals can be individually identified, exploiting the spatial pattern…

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…