🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Mammals can generate heat without shivering, and this overview reviews the role of brown adipose tissue in feline heat production. Brown fat produces heat directly through specialised metabolism rathe…

In ecosystems like Kruger, African buffalo serve as the maintenance host for bovine tuberculosis, and lions acquire infection chiefly by feeding on diseased buffalo. This overview surveys the transmis…

Before spatially explicit methods became standard, camera-trap density estimation relied on converting capture-recapture abundance into density by buffering the camera polygon with a strip, often half…

This overview synthesises how buffer-zone management and community forestry mediate human-tiger and human-leopard conflict around protected areas in Nepal and India. It reviews programs that share par…

Buprenorphine, a partial opioid agonist, became a widely used analgesic in cats, valued for its efficacy, duration, and the practical feature that it can be absorbed through the oral mucosa, allowing…

An overview of how solitary cats protect and prolong access to their kills by caching them. Pumas cover carcasses with vegetation and soil and revisit them over several days, while leopards famously h…

Conventional small single-compartment shelter cages force cats to eat, sleep and eliminate in close quarters, raising stress and disease. This overview surveys research on improved housing, especially…

Feline calicivirus has been associated with caudal stomatitis, inflammation in the back of the mouth that is a hallmark of chronic gingivostomatitis, leading researchers to investigate the virus's rol…

How a camera is mounted, its height above ground, vertical and horizontal angle, and orientation relative to expected animal paths, strongly shapes which animals trigger it and how well they are photo…

Camera traps placed in accessible areas face theft, vandalism, and damage by people and animals, a chronic problem that can devastate data collection and budgets, especially in human-frequented or con…

Modern tracking technologies have transformed how disease is studied in elusive wild cats. This overview surveys the use of camera traps and GPS telemetry to investigate felid disease ecology, from de…

An overview of how camera-trap arrays and occupancy modeling are used to study the spatial and temporal relationships between pumas and their prey. By recording where and when cats and prey are detect…

Estimating snow leopard density relies heavily on camera trapping combined with capture-recapture, exploiting the unique rosette and spot patterns that allow individual identification. This overview s…

This overview reviews the application of camera-trap surveys and spatially explicit capture-recapture methods to estimate big-cat density in human-dominated and conflict-prone landscapes. It synthesis…

Camera-trap distance sampling adapts classical distance-sampling theory to estimate density of unmarked animals from the distances at which they are detected within the camera's field of view. This ov…

Camera traps, often paired with individual identification by coat patterns and spatial capture-recapture models, are a cornerstone method for studying secretive felids in human-dominated landscapes. T…

Camera trapping has revolutionized how tiger populations are counted and studied. This overview synthesizes the methods built on individual stripe identification and capture-recapture statistics, incl…

Long-term camera-trap monitoring underpins knowledge of the Amur leopard, allowing researchers to identify every individual in the population by its unique rosette pattern and to track numbers, surviv…

Camera trapping has become the primary method for studying snow leopards, exploiting their habit of traveling and marking along ridgelines. This overview synthesizes how researchers place cameras at s…

Monitoring the Asiatic cheetah depends on camera trapping across the remote arid reserves of central Iran, where the animals occur at extremely low density over enormous areas. This overview surveys r…

Camera trapping has transformed the study of small wildcats, and this overview reviews how the method is applied and its limitations. Remote cameras detect cryptic, nocturnal cats without direct obser…

Cat coats are often patterned for concealment, and this overview reviews the function and development of spots, stripes, and rosettes. Patterns such as the tiger stripes and leopard rosettes break up…

Engineered canals with steep concrete sides, common in urbanised wetlands, can trap and drown fishing cats and impede their movement, an underappreciated hazard distinct from road mortality. This over…

Canine distemper virus (CDV) is a morbillivirus closely related to measles and rinderpest that has expanded its host range far beyond dogs to infect lions, tigers, leopards, hyenas, seals and many oth…

Canine distemper has emerged as a documented threat to the endangered Amur (Siberian) tiger, with several tigers exhibiting abnormal, fearless behavior, neurological signs and death attributable to CD…

A canine distemper virus outbreak caused substantial mortality in the lions of the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem in the mid-1990s, a landmark event in wildlife disease ecology that demonstrated how a virus…

This overview reviews studies of how the famous sabre canines of Smilodon grew and erupted during an individual's life. Using La Brea specimens spanning juveniles to adults, and incremental growth lin…

Growing a pair of enormous canines posed developmental challenges, and this overview reviews what is known about sabertooth canine eruption and the implications for young animals. Studies of Smilodon…

This overview surveys studies of how strong, or how vulnerable, the elongated canines of sabertooths actually were. Because the long, blade-like teeth are relatively narrow from side to side, they are…

Felids kill primarily with their canine teeth, and this overview reviews how canine form and the killing bite are matched to prey. Many cats deliver a precise nape or throat bite, the slender, sharp c…