🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

When some individuals in a group reproduce while others are suppressed, the resulting asymmetry reflects social and physiological mechanisms regulating reproduction. This overview surveys asymmetric r…

Managing captive felid populations requires balancing genetic goals, such as retaining diversity, against demographic goals, such as maintaining stable numbers and age structure. This overview surveys…

Successful reproduction in captivity depends not only on physiology but on appropriate behavior, including mate recognition, courtship, and competent maternal care. This overview surveys how behaviora…

Behaviour offers a rich, non-invasive window into felid welfare, but interpreting it requires care. This overview surveys the behavioural signs used to assess captive cats: stereotypic pacing and rout…

Climate change can shift the balance between grassland, savanna, shrubland, and forest, transforming the habitat templates that different cats require. This overview surveys how projected biome shifts…

African carnivores, including lions, leopards and cheetahs, host a rich diversity of blood-borne parasites that molecular surveys continue to uncover. This overview surveys the diversity of hemoparasi…

Captive cats fed soft, processed diets commonly develop dental disease such as gingivitis, calculus and tooth fractures, whereas chewing on bone, hide and connective tissue provides natural abrasion a…

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…

Given the critically small wild population, captive breeding has been considered and attempted as a potential safeguard for the Asiatic cheetah, though with significant difficulty. This overview surve…

Capture myopathy, a potentially fatal syndrome of muscle damage arising from the stress, exertion, and physiologic derangement of capture and restraint, is a recognized risk when immobilizing wild fel…

An overview of the quantitative tools used to predict how many large predators a reserve can sustain from its prey base, building on the prey-preference and prey-biomass approaches. These models estim…

Cheetahs carry distinctive spot patterns that allow individual identification, but their low densities, wide ranging, and preference for open habitats pose particular challenges for camera trapping. T…

Cheetah social and spatial organization is unusual among cats: males often form lifelong coalitions, frequently of brothers, while females range solitarily over large areas, and this overview examines…

This overview synthesises human-cheetah conflict across East African rangelands, where cheetahs overlap with pastoralist livestock outside protected areas. It reviews patterns of depredation, mostly o…

Cheetah cubs suffer extremely high mortality in the wild, and understanding its causes has been central to assessing the species' resilience. This overview surveys research, much of it from long-term…

Cheetah cubs suffer extremely high mortality, much of it inflicted by lions and spotted hyenas. This overview synthesizes research documenting that on the open plains the majority of cheetah cubs die…

A survey of the heavy toll that lions and spotted hyenas take on cheetah cubs, a key demographic constraint on cheetah populations. Studies in the Serengeti and elsewhere have recorded that a large fr…

The illegal trade in live cheetah cubs for the exotic pet market follows established routes from the Horn of Africa across to the Arabian Peninsula, and this overview surveys research mapping and quan…

An overview of the extreme anatomical and physiological specializations that make the cheetah the fastest land predator and how they shape its predation ecology. Adaptations including a flexible spine…

The cheetah's celebrated speed is the centerpiece of a hunting strategy built on daytime pursuit of fleet prey. This overview synthesizes research on how cheetahs stalk to within range before launchin…

Cheetahs are notoriously difficult to keep and breed well in captivity, and their welfare has been intensively studied. This overview surveys the cheetah's particular vulnerabilities: evidence of chro…

One of the most striking early demonstrations of the cheetah's genetic depletion was that skin grafts exchanged between unrelated cheetahs were accepted rather than rejected, indicating near-identical…

Cheetahs specialize on small to medium antelope, with gazelles forming the dietary core across much of their range. This overview synthesizes kill and scat studies showing that cheetahs favor prey the…

Cheetahs range over very large areas at low density, a trait central to understanding why they are so hard to conserve. This overview surveys telemetry and movement research documenting cheetah home r…

Namibia holds one of the largest cheetah populations, much of it on commercial and communal farmland outside protected areas, and this overview synthesizes telemetry research on how cheetahs range acr…

Efforts to restore cheetahs to parts of their former range, including the introduction of African cheetahs to India, have raised ecological questions about translocation. This overview synthesizes the…

India, which lost its native Asiatic cheetahs to extinction in the mid-twentieth century, has undertaken a project to reintroduce cheetahs using animals sourced from Africa, released at Kuno National…

Namibia holds one of the world's largest cheetah populations, the majority living on commercial and communal farmland where conflict with livestock and game farmers is a primary threat. This overview…

Because cheetahs occur at naturally low densities and avoid areas with high lion and hyena numbers, most cheetahs live outside formal protected areas on farmland and communal rangelands. This overview…

Much of the world's remaining cheetah population lives outside protected areas on farmland, particularly in Namibia, where the ecology differs from the famous plains populations. This overview synthes…