🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Having passed through a severe bottleneck, the Iberian lynx carries very low genetic diversity, and this overview reviews research on the resulting risks. Studies document signs of inbreeding, includi…

The Iberian lynx depends on Mediterranean scrubland and woodland mosaics that support dense rabbit populations and provide cover for hunting and denning. This overview surveys research on lynx habitat…

The Iberian lynx, once the world's most endangered cat, has been the focus of an intensive recovery program in which camera trapping plays a central monitoring role. This overview surveys how camera t…

An overview of how the Iberian lynx, the world's most specialized felid predator, depends almost entirely on European rabbits, and how rabbit declines drive lynx conservation crises. Rabbits typically…

Reintroduction and translocation were central to expanding the Iberian lynx from two relict populations to a network of populations across Spain and Portugal. This overview surveys research on how rel…

This overview examines the science and management history of India's Project Tiger, launched in 1973, and the expanding network of tiger reserves it created. Researchers have studied how core-buffer z…

India conducts one of the world's largest wildlife monitoring exercises, a periodic national tiger assessment that combines landscape-scale occupancy surveys with intensive camera trapping to estimate…

Key Biodiversity Areas are sites identified as significant for the global persistence of biodiversity, and they offer a framework for prioritizing places critical to big cats. This overview surveys re…

This overview surveys Machairodus and its later, larger relative Amphimachairodus, big scimitar-toothed cats that dominated late Miocene predator guilds across Eurasia, Africa, and North America. Thes…

Macho B was a male jaguar photographed repeatedly over many years in southern Arizona, long considered the last known wild jaguar in the United States, until his capture, collaring, and subsequent dea…

The Iberian lynx inhabits Mediterranean scrub and dehesa woodland in a region projected to become hotter and drier. This overview surveys how aridification, increased fire frequency, and shifting vege…

MegaDetector is a widely used, freely available object-detection model that locates animals, people, and vehicles in camera-trap images regardless of species, primarily to filter out the empty frames…

This overview examines Megantereon, a relatively small but powerfully built dirk-toothed cat of the Pliocene and early Pleistocene whose remains are known from Africa, Eurasia, and North America. With…

This overview surveys Metailurus, a medium-sized cat of the late Miocene and Pliocene that lends its name to the Metailurini, a tribe of machairodonts with only modestly developed sabre canines. Less…

This overview examines the influential idea that the extraordinary running speed of the American pronghorn evolved as a response to predation by the extinct cheetah-like cat Miracinonyx. The pronghorn…

The extinct American cheetah of the genus Miracinonyx superficially resembled the living cheetah, with adaptations for fast pursuit of swift prey such as the pronghorn. This overview surveys genetic a…

As tracking generated ever-larger datasets, shared infrastructure became essential, and this overview describes how repositories such as Movebank let researchers store, manage, and selectively share a…

Bovine tuberculosis, caused by Mycobacterium bovis, established itself in Kruger National Park after spilling from cattle into African buffalo, and lions preying on infected buffalo became widely expo…

N-mixture models estimate abundance from repeated counts of unmarked animals at multiple sites by separating true abundance from imperfect detection, assuming counts arise from a binomial sampling of…

Namibia's communal conservancy program, which devolves rights to manage and benefit from wildlife to local communities, is among the most studied community-based conservation models and is credited wi…

This overview describes Natural Trap Cave in Wyoming, a deep sinkhole that acted as a pitfall for Pleistocene animals and accumulated a rich fossil assemblage including the American lion, the cheetah-…

This overview examines the Nimravidae, an extinct family of cat-like carnivores that independently evolved sabertooth forms long before the true machairodont cats. Though strikingly similar to felids…

Many of the most important felid diseases, from distemper to leukemia virus to Toxoplasma, originate at the interface of domestic animals, wildlife and people, making them quintessential One Health pr…

The One Welfare concept recognises that animal welfare, human wellbeing and the environment are interconnected, a framing increasingly applied to those who care for captive cats. This overview surveys…

P-22 was a male puma collared by the National Park Service after he made an improbable journey across two of Los Angeles's busiest freeways, the 405 and the 101, to settle in tiny Griffith Park beside…

P-22 became the most famous urban mountain lion in the world after crossing two of the busiest freeways in the United States to settle in Griffith Park, a small island of habitat surrounded by central…

Pallas's cat, or manul, is a stocky, dense-furred small felid of the cold steppes and montane grasslands of Central Asia, whose cryptic coloration and low density make it difficult to survey by any me…

Camera-trap and observational studies describe Pallass cat as largely crepuscular and active during daylight in the cold parts of its range, a pattern that helps it avoid the harshest nighttime temper…

This overview reviews the persistent challenge of breeding Pallass cats in captivity, where high kitten mortality, driven largely by infectious disease and the species sensitivity, has long limited su…

Pallass cat, or manul, ranges across the cold steppes, semi-deserts, and montane grasslands of central Asia, from Iran and the Caucasus through Mongolia and into China and the Tibetan plateau. This ov…