🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

The Jaguar Corridor Initiative proposed a range-wide network of corridors linking jaguar populations from Mexico to Argentina, and this overview examines the ongoing effort to verify and refine those…

This overview synthesises evidence on why deterrents, lights, sirens, scent, and visual scarecrows, often lose effectiveness as predators habituate. It examines the behavioural ecology of neophobia an…

Historically the jaguar was divided into many subspecies, but molecular evidence supports treating it as essentially one continuous species. This overview reviews the debate, explaining that phylogeog…

Across much of Latin America jaguars and pumas occur together, and their coexistence is mediated by differences in prey, habitat, and behavior. This overview synthesizes research showing that jaguars…

This overview reviews human-felid conflict involving both jaguars and pumas across smallholder and indigenous landscapes of Central America, where the two cats overlap and complicate attribution of li…

The jaguar has the most powerful bite relative to size among big cats, and this overview synthesizes research linking its robust skull and jaw musculature to a distinctive killing style. Unlike most l…

This overview examines coexistence dynamics in the Pantanal, where high jaguar densities, extensive cattle ranching, and a booming jaguar-tourism industry intersect. It synthesises research on depreda…

This overview examines human-jaguar conflict around the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve and the broader Selva Maya of southern Mexico, a critical node in the jaguar's northern range and the Mesoamerican co…

This overview reviews human-jaguar conflict across Brazil's Cerrado savanna, a rapidly converting agricultural frontier where soy, cattle, and croplands fragment jaguar habitat. It synthesises studies…

Jaguars are monitored across the Americas through camera-trap capture-recapture, and coordinated initiatives increasingly link local surveys into range-wide networks producing comparable density estim…

This overview reviews human-jaguar conflict in Belize, home to important jaguar populations and the Cockscomb Basin reserve, where small-scale ranchers and farmers experience cattle and occasionally o…

The Amazon basin holds the largest remaining expanse of jaguar habitat, and the cat's ecology there differs from open wetlands. This overview synthesizes research on jaguars in continuous rainforest,…

Jaguar populations historically formed a largely connected continental network, but deforestation and barriers are increasingly structuring their genetics. This overview surveys what molecular studies…

Jaguar home ranges vary widely with habitat productivity and prey availability, from compact territories in rich wetlands to vast ranges in drier or less productive forests. This overview synthesizes…

This overview synthesizes telemetry research on jaguars across the contrasting landscapes of the Brazilian Pantanal wetlands and the Amazon forest, where GPS collars have revealed how home-range size,…