🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

El Jefe was a male jaguar documented for years by remote cameras in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson, one of very few jaguars recorded in the United States in recent decades. This overview des…

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…

This overview surveys Panthera gombaszoegensis, an extinct big cat of the Pleistocene of Europe and western Asia often nicknamed the European jaguar because of similarities to the living jaguar. Known…

Expanding agricultural frontiers, soy and cattle in South America, oil palm in Southeast Asia, smallholder farming in Africa and Asia, are among the largest drivers of habitat loss for wild cats. This…

The jaguar is the largest American cat and a powerful solitary predator whose behaviour is studied through camera traps, telemetry, and acoustic monitoring. This overview surveys research on jaguar sp…

As apex predators, big cats can exert top-down control that ripples through ecosystems via trophic cascades. This overview synthesizes evidence that lions, tigers, leopards, pumas, and jaguars influen…

Big cats are often used as umbrella species, whose large area requirements mean that protecting them also protects many co-occurring species, and as flagship species, whose charisma mobilizes public s…

Jaguars are powerful, semi-aquatic, wide-ranging cats whose captive welfare has been studied through behaviour and non-invasive stress physiology. This overview surveys research on captive jaguars: th…

This overview surveys how the Great American Biotic Interchange, triggered by the rise of the Panamanian land bridge, allowed cats to spread between North and South America. Following this connection,…

Across much of the jaguar's range, cattle ranching both fragments habitat and fuels retaliatory killing when jaguars prey on livestock, a conflict that climate and land-use change can intensify. This…

The Pantanal wetland supports one of the densest known jaguar populations, and its future hinges on the flood-drought cycle that climate change is disrupting. This overview surveys how altered rainfal…

Circuit theory, which models animal movement as electrical current flowing across a resistance surface, has become a standard tool for mapping connectivity for wide-ranging cats. This overview surveys…

Climate refugia, places relatively buffered from climate change where species can persist, are an increasingly central organizing idea in conservation planning. This overview surveys the typology of r…

This overview synthesises comparative studies that contrast successful and unsuccessful big-cat coexistence efforts to distil transferable lessons. It reviews analyses spanning lion, snow leopard, tig…

Identifying individual cats from their unique stripe, spot, or rosette patterns is the cornerstone of capture-recapture, and software increasingly assists this once wholly manual task. This overview s…

This overview examines why reconstructing the relationships among the living big cats has proven difficult, with different genes and analyses sometimes yielding conflicting trees. The lion, leopard, a…

This overview examines the evolutionary relationships of Miracinonyx and the now well-supported conclusion that its cheetah-like form arose through convergence rather than common ancestry with the tru…

This overview synthesises how habitat corridors and connectivity shape big-cat conflict, focusing on the tension between maintaining predator movement and the conflict that arises where corridors pass…

Measuring whether a conservation intervention actually helped requires comparing outcomes against a credible counterfactual of what would have happened otherwise. This overview surveys quasi-experimen…

Emerging deep-learning methods aim to automate not just species classification but individual identification, re-identifying specific cats from their coat patterns to build capture histories for captu…

This overview synthesises the theory and practice of compensating farmers for livestock killed by big cats as a tolerance-building tool. It reviews recurring design challenges: verifying claims to pre…

Jaguars have one of the most diverse diets of any big cat, recorded preying on dozens of species. This overview synthesizes scat and kill studies documenting how jaguar diet ranges from large mammals…

Jaguars and other Neotropical cats inhabit diverse tropical ecosystems where they encounter a wide array of pathogens and parasites, though their disease ecology remains less studied than that of Afri…

Unlike most small Neotropical cats, the jaguarundi is frequently active during daylight, a trait that shapes its interactions with people and other felids in shared landscapes. This overview synthesis…

Like tigers, jaguars are individually identifiable by their rosette patterns, making camera-trap capture-recapture a key tool for estimating their density. This overview synthesizes how researchers ac…

The presence of cats in South America results from the Great American Biotic Interchange, when the Isthmus of Panama connected the Americas and allowed northern mammals to disperse south. This overvie…

A survey of how the teeth, jaws and bite mechanics of cats are adapted for killing prey and how these features scale with prey size. Felids dispatch prey with a precise canine bite to the neck or skul…

GPS collars do not always acquire a position, and crucially, the probability of failure is not random: dense canopy, steep terrain, and an animal resting in a cave or thicket all suppress fixes. This…

This overview synthesises emerging priorities and frontiers in human-big cat conflict and coexistence research. It reviews calls for more rigorous impact evaluation, greater integration of social scie…

Wildlife corridors aim to reconnect fragmented cat populations, and genetics provides a direct test of whether they actually restore gene flow. This overview surveys how landscape and population genet…