🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Southern California's cougars persist in mountain ranges increasingly isolated by freeways and development, and this overview examines the science of designing functional linkages between blocks such…

Pumas are mainly crepuscular and nocturnal, and they intensify their avoidance of humans in space and time where people are present. This overview synthesizes research showing that cougars concentrate…

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…

Pumas typically kill prey larger than they can eat at once and cache carcasses to feed over several days. This overview synthesizes GPS-cluster and field studies showing how cougars drag and cover the…

Pumas are major predators of deer across the Americas, and their effect on prey populations has been long studied and debated. This overview synthesizes research on how cougars select vulnerable indiv…

A survey of how cougar predation can threaten small and recovering populations of desert and mountain bighorn sheep. Although bighorn are not preferred prey, individual pumas can specialize on sheep,…

An overview of the central predator-prey relationship between cougars and mule deer, the staple prey across much of the western United States. Puma density tends to track deer abundance, and puma pred…

By killing large prey and leaving partly eaten carcasses, pumas subsidize a wide community of scavengers and influence nutrient cycling. This overview synthesizes research showing that puma kills supp…

Pumas increasingly live near cities in parts of their range, navigating fragmented habitat threaded with roads and development. This overview synthesizes research, notably from California, on how coug…

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…

The Black Hills of South Dakota host a recovering cougar population that has become a documented source of long-distance dispersers spreading eastward across the Great Plains. This overview synthesize…

In 2011 a young male cougar was struck and killed on a Connecticut parkway, far outside any known breeding population in the eastern United States. This overview describes how genetic analysis and a t…

An overview of how large cats can structure ecosystems from the top down, with effects rippling through herbivores to vegetation and beyond. By killing and frightening herbivores, apex felids such as…

This study used fine-scale GPS and accelerometer data from pumas in the Santa Cruz Mountains to show that cougars respond to human development at multiple spatial scales, avoiding developed areas in w…

Wilmers CC, Wang Y, Nickel B, Houghtaling P, Shakeri Y, Allen ML, Kermish-Wells J, Yovovich V, Williams T · PLoS ONE · 2013

Drawing on years of telemetry across southern California, this study quantified survival rates and causes of death for pumas living in landscapes increasingly fragmented by roads and development. Vehi…

Vickers TW, Sanchez JN, Johnson CK, Morrison SA, Botta R, Smith T, Cohen BS, Huber PR, Ernest HB, Boyce WM · PLoS ONE · 2015

Studying pumas around human development in California, this research found that cougars exposed to greater human presence killed more prey, apparently to compensate for abandoning kills and spending l…

Smith JA, Wang Y, Wilmers CC · Proceedings of the Royal Society B · 2015

Riley and Decker introduced and applied the concept of wildlife stakeholder acceptance capacity (WSAC) to cougars in Montana, measuring the maximum cougar population level that residents would tolerat…

Shawn J. Riley, Daniel J. Decker · Wildlife Society Bulletin · 2000