🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

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…

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…

An overview of how the kills of large felids redistribute energy and nutrients through ecosystems. Carcasses and the cats' partly eaten remains create nutrient hotspots that fertilize soils and vegeta…

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…

The Sundarbans support both tigers and dense human populations dependent on the forest for fishing, honey collection, and wood, a coexistence stressed by climate change. This overview surveys how habi…

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…

Tigers vary in ground color, stripe density, and body size across their range, and these traits were historically used to distinguish subspecies. This overview examines how reliable coat characters ar…

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…

Felid species differ in their vocal repertoires, and comparative bioacoustics has sought to map these differences onto phylogeny and ecology. This overview surveys work cataloguing call types across s…

How tigers are classified directly affects how they are conserved. This overview explains the practical stakes of the subspecies debate: subspecies define studbook management, set boundaries for trans…

The Amur or Siberian tiger of the Russian Far East recovered from perhaps a few dozen animals in the mid-twentieth century to several hundred today, making it a natural experiment in bottleneck and re…

Cooperative care trains animals through positive reinforcement to participate voluntarily in medical procedures, replacing the stress and risk of immobilisation. This overview surveys how big cats are…

Captive tigers are managed cooperatively across institutions to maintain genetically healthy, self-sustaining populations as insurance against wild declines. This overview surveys how tiger breeding p…

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…

The most realistic forecasts of cat futures combine climate change with land-use change, since for many forest cats habitat conversion is the faster, larger threat. This overview surveys how integrate…

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…

This overview reviews the array of measures tested to reduce tiger attacks on people in the Sundarbans, including the famous face-masks worn on the back of the head to exploit tigers' reluctance to at…

A survey of the three-way interactions among tigers, leopards and dholes, the dominant predators of South and Southeast Asian forests. These species partition a shared ungulate community by prey size…

Captive big cats have become subjects of cognitive testing that reveals their learning abilities and informs enrichment. This overview surveys research using touchscreen and apparatus-based discrimina…

For tiny, isolated felid populations, infectious disease can pose an extinction-level threat that compounds genetic and demographic vulnerabilities. This overview surveys how disease drives extinction…

The endangered Amur (Siberian) tiger has been the subject of disease surveillance that uncovered cases of canine distemper virus infection causing neurologic disease and abnormal behavior in wild tige…

Tigers, reduced to small, fragmented populations, face disease as one of several extinction pressures, most notably canine distemper documented in Amur tigers. This overview surveys the spectrum of di…

How young tigers leave their natal areas and establish their own territories determines the structure and persistence of populations. This overview synthesizes studies showing that subadult females of…

This overview synthesises the widely replicated finding that proximity to forest or natural cover strongly predicts big-cat depredation on livestock, with attacks declining as distance from the forest…

This overview reviews technological and community early-warning systems designed to alert people to the presence of big cats before conflict occurs. It synthesises approaches including GPS- and geofen…

Tigers occupy an extraordinary range of environments, from tropical mangroves and rainforests to temperate snow forests, and their ecology varies accordingly. This overview synthesizes how body size,…

Conserving big cats in a human-dominated world depends on applying their ecology to the challenge of coexistence. This overview synthesizes how understanding prey requirements, ranging, dispersal, and…

With lowland forest largely converted, Sumatran tigers increasingly persist in hill and montane forest, raising questions about how warming will reshape these upland habitats. This overview surveys ho…