🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This overview synthesises research on how individual big cats develop man-eating behaviour, integrating evidence from Tsavo lions, Sundarbans and Champawat tigers, and Indian leopards. It reviews the…

Big cats not only compete for prey but kill one another, and intraguild predation shapes the structure of carnivore communities. This overview synthesizes research on how dominant cats such as lions a…

This overview synthesises studies identifying which landscape and management variables predict where big cats kill livestock, a recurring quantitative question across conflict research. It reviews con…

Leopards are among the most frequently camera-trapped big cats, their rosette patterns enabling robust individual identification across an enormous range spanning Africa and Asia. This overview survey…

An overview of how leopards coexist with dominant tigers in Asian forests by partitioning prey size, space and activity. Where tigers are abundant, leopards tend to take smaller prey, shift toward are…

This overview synthesises research using spatial analysis to identify hotspots where big-cat attacks on livestock or people concentrate, enabling targeted mitigation. It reviews methods, kernel densit…

This overview synthesises research on how news and social media portray big-cat attacks and conflict, and how that framing shapes public attitudes, fear, and policy. It reviews studies showing that se…

A survey of how leopards, as widespread mid-to-large felids, suppress smaller carnivores through killing, kleptoparasitism and fear. Across Africa and Asia leopards kill and displace jackals, caracals…

Estimating how many big cats occupy an area is a central and challenging task in their ecology and conservation. This overview reviews the main methods, from individual-identification camera-trap capt…

Where several large cats share a landscape, they coexist by partitioning resources along axes of prey size, habitat, and activity. This overview synthesizes research across continents showing how tige…

Potent opioids, including butorphanol and ultra-potent agents in some protocols, are incorporated into big-cat anesthesia to enhance analgesia and immobilization, often combined with dissociatives and…

A survey of the strong, general relationship between the abundance of prey and the density of the carnivores that depend on them, a cornerstone of predator ecology. Across species and systems, predato…

An overview of the behavioral defenses ungulates and other prey deploy against felid predators, from vigilance scanning to alarm signaling and habitat avoidance. Because cats are stealthy ambush hunte…

This overview examines how religious beliefs, sacred associations, and cultural traditions foster, or sometimes undermine, tolerance for big cats. It synthesises cases such as reverence for tigers and…

This overview examines the persistent gap between perceived and actual risk in human-big cat conflict, a theme cutting across lion, tiger, leopard, puma, and jaguar systems. It synthesises research sh…

Infanticide by males is documented or inferred across many felid species, from lions to tigers, leopards, pumas, and others, wherever killing dependent young can hasten a female's next conception. Thi…

This overview reviews how wire snaring set for bushmeat indirectly drives big-cat conflict and mortality, a growing threat across Africa and Asia. It synthesises evidence that snares intended for ante…

Felid sociality varies from the solitary tiger and most small cats to the group-living lion, and captive social management must respect these differences. This overview surveys research on housing cat…

This overview synthesises research showing that much apparent human-carnivore conflict is in fact conflict between human groups, communities versus conservation authorities, locals versus outsiders, e…

An overview of how ambush felids select hunting habitat to minimize the distance over which they must close on prey undetected. Because capture success drops sharply with the length of the final rush,…

Leopards are traded for their skins, bones, claws, and teeth across both Asia and Africa, driven by demand for fashion, status, traditional medicine, and ceremonial use. This overview surveys research…

Across much of Asia tigers and leopards occur together, and their coexistence is mediated by differences in prey size and behavior. This overview synthesizes research showing that leopards shift towar…

This overview reviews human-tiger and human-leopard conflict in Nepal's Terai Arc, where recovering tiger populations in and around Chitwan and Bardia overlap with dense rural settlement and buffer-zo…

In many Asian forests tigers share the landscape with leopards and packs of dholes, the Asiatic wild dog, forming a guild that partitions prey and space. This overview synthesizes research on how thes…

This overview synthesises studies analysing who is attacked by tigers and leopards and under what circumstances, drawing on incident records across South Asia. It reviews patterns by age, sex, occupat…

Private ownership of tigers, lions and other big cats, historically widespread in some countries, raises acute welfare and public-safety concerns. This overview surveys the issues: inadequate enclosur…

Black panthers are melanistic leopards (or jaguars), and their existence is often misunderstood as indicating a separate species or subspecies. This overview explains the genetics of leopard melanism,…

This influential review synthesized the global status of the largest carnivores, including big cats such as lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars, documenting widespread range contraction and populatio…

Ripple, W.J., Estes, J.A., Beschta, R.L., Wilmers, C.C., Ritchie, E.G., Hebblewhite, M., et al. · Science · 2014

Mason's review synthesised decades of work on stereotypic behaviour across captive species, defining stereotypies as repetitive, invariant movements with no obvious goal. She argued they arise from fr…

Mason GJ · Animal Behaviour · 1991

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