🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Parks, greenbelts, riparian corridors, vacant lots and vegetated drainage form a network of green infrastructure that urban felids exploit for shelter, hunting and movement. This overview synthesises…

Concentrated, predictable food in cities allows carnivores to meet their needs over smaller areas, contributing to the strikingly compressed home ranges documented in urban felids from leopards to pum…

Cats are hosts to feline immunodeficiency virus, feline leukemia virus, and other pathogens whose long association has left marks on both host and viral genomes. This overview surveys how these viruse…

For much of the twentieth century, cat classification rested on coat patterns, skull morphology, and geography, producing many poorly supported species and subspecies. This overview surveys how molecu…

Successful coexistence with urban felids depends as much on human attitudes, institutions and behaviour as on animal ecology. This overview synthesises social-science research on tolerance, risk perce…

Reducing conflict between people and big cats is essential for coexistence, and a wide range of interventions has been developed and tested. This overview surveys research evaluating these measures, w…

Hybridization between cat species, both in captivity and occasionally in the wild, has played a larger role in felid evolution than once appreciated. This overview surveys the spectrum from ancient in…

Small or isolated cat populations frequently show the hallmarks of inbreeding depression, including reduced fertility, abnormal sperm, congenital defects, weakened immunity, and elevated juvenile mort…

Because modern cats radiated rapidly, different genes often disagree about the branching order of species, a phenomenon known as incomplete lineage sorting that arises when ancestral polymorphisms per…

Indigenous and local communities hold deep knowledge of big cats and their environments, and increasingly conservation recognizes the value of this knowledge and the rights of these communities as ste…

Consistent individual differences in boldness, exploration and risk tolerance, often termed animal personality, may determine which individuals successfully colonise and persist in urban environments.…

Direct provisioning, whether intentional feeding of wildlife or unintentional access to pet food, livestock and garbage, can habituate felids to people and escalate conflict. This overview synthesises…

The global distribution of cats was shaped by repeated intercontinental migrations across land bridges as sea levels fluctuated. This overview surveys how molecular phylogenies reconstructed at least…

Decisions about where and how cities expand profoundly shape whether large and small carnivores can persist alongside people. This overview synthesises research and practice on integrating carnivore n…

Before SMART became widespread, systems such as MIST and the CITES MIKE program pioneered structured monitoring of law-enforcement effort and illegal killing, and these frameworks remain important to…

Conservation planners model wildlife corridors using methods such as least-cost path analysis and circuit theory, which translate landscapes into surfaces of movement resistance to predict where anima…

Cats are famously indifferent to sweetness, and genetics revealed why: they carry a pseudogenized sweet-taste receptor gene that no longer produces a functional receptor. This overview surveys the dis…

The major histocompatibility complex encodes immune-recognition molecules whose diversity is crucial for resisting pathogens, and its depletion is a key concern in inbred cat populations. This overvie…

Securing the attractants that draw felids toward people, including garbage, pet food, accessible livestock and the rodent and dog populations these support, is a frontline coexistence measure. This ov…

Before genome sequencing became routine, microsatellites, short tandem repeats scattered through the genome, were the workhorse markers of felid population and forensic genetics. This overview surveys…

Mitochondrial DNA, with its maternal inheritance, high copy number, and relatively fast evolution, was central to the first molecular phylogenies and phylogeographic studies of cats. This overview sur…

Estimating when cat lineages diverged requires calibrating molecular substitution rates against the fossil record, a process fraught with uncertainty when fossils are sparse. This overview surveys how…

Natural history museum collections preserve specimens spanning centuries, providing a genetic archive of felid populations as they existed before recent declines. This overview surveys how museum geno…

The rate at which new mutations arise sets the pace of evolution and the recovery of diversity in small populations, yet it has been difficult to measure directly in cats. This overview surveys effort…

Many felids become more strictly nocturnal as human activity increases, a pattern documented from Indian leopards to Californian bobcats and pumas. This overview synthesises camera-trap and telemetry…

Chronic exposure to anthropogenic noise can elevate stress hormones and impair health and reproduction in wildlife, a pathway potentially affecting urban-edge carnivores. This overview synthesises phy…

Protecting livestock and poultry from felid predation through non-lethal means is central to reducing conflict and retaliatory killing at the urban and agricultural edge. This overview synthesises res…

Because most wild cats are elusive and difficult to capture, conservation geneticists increasingly rely on noninvasive samples such as scat, hair, and shed cells to obtain DNA without handling the ani…

While genetic rescue can revive inbred populations, mixing divergent populations carries a theoretical risk of outbreeding depression, where hybrids are less fit due to disrupted local adaptation or g…

Many protected areas exist on maps but lack the staff, funding, and enforcement to deliver real protection, a phenomenon known as paper parks. This overview surveys research using tools such as the Ma…