🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

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…

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…

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…

Clouded leopards are difficult to breed in captivity, and reproductive research has examined their semen quality alongside behavioral and stress factors. This overview surveys what is known about clou…

After the Sunda clouded leopard, Neofelis diardi, was recognized as a species, attention turned to whether its Bornean and Sumatran populations are themselves distinct. This overview reviews studies s…

In endangered cats, individual temperament can determine reproductive success and welfare in managed-care programs. This overview surveys research extending the cheetah findings to other species, exam…

Molecular phylogenetics partitions all living cats into eight monophyletic lineages, a framework that now organizes felid taxonomy. This overview names and characterizes them: the Panthera lineage (bi…

Modern cats are divided into eight monophyletic lineages: the Panthera lineage (lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, snow leopards, clouded leopards), the bay cat lineage, the caracal lineage, the ocelot…

The perennial tension between lumpers, who favor fewer broad taxa, and splitters, who recognize many fine ones, is sharply visible in cat classification. This overview examines how the debate plays ou…

The marbled cat, Pardofelis marmorata, is a small, arboreal Southeast Asian felid whose clouded-leopard-like coat once suggested a relationship to the big cats. This overview explains how molecular ph…

Clouded leopards occupy a pivotal position as the sister group to the other big cats within the subfamily Pantherinae. This overview explains how molecular phylogenies consistently place the genus Neo…

Genetic and morphological research established that clouded leopards comprise two species, the mainland clouded leopard and the Sunda clouded leopard of Borneo and Sumatra, separated for over a millio…

One of the clearest recent felid species splits separated the clouded leopard into two species. This overview explains how parallel molecular and morphological studies in 2006 revealed that clouded le…

Molecular phylogeography revealed that leopard cats on the Sunda islands of Southeast Asia diverge deeply from mainland leopard cats, leading to recognition of a separate species, the Sunda leopard ca…

Modern classifications divide living cats into two subfamilies: Pantherinae (the roaring and big cats plus clouded leopards) and Felinae (most small and medium cats). This overview explains how that s…

Faecal glucocorticoid metabolite monitoring is the workhorse of felid stress research because it avoids the confound of capture and restraint, but it requires species-specific validation to be meaning…

Cat classification is not merely academic; it directly shapes how cats are protected. This overview explains how taxonomy underlies Red List assessments, CITES appendices, and national legislation, al…

This synthesis reviews the conservation standing of the clouded leopards, both species regarded as threatened owing to their dependence on forest and exposure to rapid habitat loss. It weighs deforest…

This study developed and tested protocols for hormonally inducing ovulation and performing laparoscopic artificial insemination in two nondomestic felids. The authors administered exogenous gonadotrop…

Howard JG, Roth TL, Byers AP, Swanson WF, Wildt DE · Biology of Reproduction · 1997

The big cats of the genus Panthera proved historically difficult to resolve because of rapid speciation and conflicting gene trees. This study assembled a large multilocus supermatrix and applied both…

Brian W. Davis, Gang Li, William J. Murphy · Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution · 2010

Relationships among the big cats long resisted resolution because of short internal branches and conflicting markers. This study assembled a large multi-gene dataset and applied both concatenated supe…

Davis BW, Li G, Murphy WJ · Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution · 2010