🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

When GPS collars replaced VHF on snow leopards, they revealed home ranges dramatically larger than earlier studies had suggested, and this overview examines why. VHF tracking in such rugged, remote te…

Beyond mapping where snow leopards go, collar-mounted activity sensors and fix-timing data reveal when they are active, and this overview synthesizes what telemetry shows about their diel and seasonal…

Predator movement is often shaped by the movements of prey, and this overview examines how snow leopard ranging relates to the distribution and movements of wild ungulates such as ibex, argali, and bl…

Snow leopards are strongly associated with broken, cliffy terrain, and this overview examines how their fine-scale movement follows ridgelines, cliff bases, and rugged features that provide stalking c…

This overview synthesizes telemetry evidence on how snow leopards disperse across the vast, rugged mountain systems of Central and South Asia. GPS-collared individuals, especially subadults, have unde…

Applying the GPS-cluster method developed for pumas to snow leopards has begun to quantify how often these cats kill and what they eat, central questions for both ecology and conflict management. This…

Snow leopards inhabit steep mountain landscapes where conditions and prey shift markedly with elevation and season, and this overview examines how their movements track these changes. GPS telemetry ha…

Snow leopards range across roughly a dozen countries in the mountains of Central and South Asia, and their movements routinely cross international borders, making transboundary connectivity essential…

Across most of their range, snow leopards share the landscape with pastoralist communities and their livestock rather than occupying pristine wilderness, and this overview examines what movement resea…

Initiatives to receive signals from very small animal tags via satellites or the International Space Station, such as the ICARUS effort, promise to shrink trackers and broaden which species can be fol…

This overview compares the main architectures of modern GPS collars and their consequences for felid fieldwork. Store-on-board units log positions to internal memory and require recapture or a timed d…

The snow leopard's relationships within the big cats were long uncertain, with some classifications isolating it in its own genus, Uncia. This overview explains how molecular phylogenetics resolved it…

Sequencing the snow leopard genome alongside those of the tiger and lion advanced both big cat phylogenetics and the study of high-altitude adaptation. This overview surveys how the snow leopard genom…

This overview surveys how the presence and behaviour of visitors specifically affect captive cats, a group that frequently responds to crowds with vigilance, hiding or altered activity. It examines st…

Felid species span tropical jungles, deserts and high mountains, so meeting their thermal needs in captivity, often in non-native climates, is a real welfare challenge. This overview surveys thermal w…

Standard home ranges flatten an animal's world onto a two-dimensional map, but cats in mountainous terrain move through strongly three-dimensional space, and their ranges shift across seasons. This ov…

Snow leopards routinely move across international borders, and this overview examines the practical and political challenges of tracking a cat whose range spans roughly a dozen countries with varying…

Non-invasive cortisol metabolite monitoring lets keepers test whether husbandry changes actually reduce physiological stress, moving welfare management from intuition to evidence. This overview survey…

After SARS-CoV-2 reached zoo animals, some facilities vaccinated captive carnivores, including big cats, using animal-specific vaccines to reduce the risk of severe disease. This overview surveys the…

Cats are arboreal-capable, climbing predators that value height, and research consistently shows captive felids prefer and benefit from elevated resting platforms, climbing structures and visually com…

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

This study produced the first reference genome for the tiger and compared it with newly sequenced lion and snow leopard genomes to investigate big cat evolution and adaptation. The authors identified…

Cho YS, Hu L, Hou H, et al. · Nature Communications · 2013

Sherwen and Hemsworth reviewed and reframed the visitor effect, drawing on human-animal interaction science from farm animals to argue that visitors are a salient and often underestimated feature of t…

Sherwen SL, Hemsworth PH · Animals · 2019