🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Serological and molecular surveys of wild felid populations have documented widespread infection with species-specific lentiviruses related to FIV, often at high prevalence in lions and pumas, general…

The Felis lineage contains the domestic cat and its closest wild relatives, including the European wildcat, the African and Near Eastern wildcat, the sand cat, the jungle cat, the black-footed cat, an…

One of the most robust axes of feline personality is a bold-to-shy or confident-to-fearful continuum that shapes how cats respond to novelty, strangers, and handling. This overview surveys research on…

Roughly two-thirds of domestic cats display a stereotyped response to catnip, sniffing, licking, rolling, and rubbing, triggered by the compound nepetalactone acting through the olfactory and vomerona…

The tabby patterns of cats, mackerel stripes versus blotched swirls, arise from the interaction of genes that establish a prepattern in the developing skin and then translate it into dark and light ha…

The cat first digit, carried high on the inner foreleg as the dewclaw, does not touch the ground in walking but plays a role in grasping. This overview reviews its anatomy and function: a mobile, claw…

The domestic cat harbors more than two hundred inherited disorders, many of which mirror human genetic diseases, making it a valuable biomedical model. This overview surveys how feline genetics has il…

Most domestic cats are random-bred, but a few dozen recognized breeds have been developed over the past century, providing a resource for genetic study. This overview surveys research using genome-wid…

Adult cats rarely meow at one another but meow frequently at people, leading to the hypothesis that the meow has been shaped by life alongside humans. This overview surveys research comparing the call…

Adult cats rarely meow at one another but meow frequently at people, leading to the hypothesis that the meow is largely a product of life with humans. This overview surveys evidence that domestic cats…

The vertical tail-up posture is one of the most studied visual signals in domestic cats and is widely interpreted as a friendly intention signal that precedes approach, allorubbing, and amicable inter…

The raised, vertical tail is one of the clearest visual signals in cat social behaviour, and this overview surveys research establishing it as a friendly, affiliative display. It examines studies, inc…

Domestic cats produce a diverse set of vocalisations that researchers have grouped into categories such as murmurs made with a closed mouth, including purrs and trills, vowel-pattern calls such as the…

Cats are often noted for an exceptionally large ratio between their fully constricted and fully dilated pupil areas, a consequence of the slit geometry. This overview surveys measurements and discussi…

The combination of the dissociative anesthetic tiletamine with the benzodiazepine zolazepam, marketed as Telazol or Zoletil, is widely used for chemical restraint and anesthesia of felids ranging from…

Recovering sperm by urethral catheterization after pharmacological stimulation offers an alternative to electroejaculation for collecting felid semen. This overview surveys the use of this technique i…

Although domestic cats have vertical-slit pupils, large felids such as lions and tigers have round pupils, a contrast that has attracted scientific attention. This overview surveys the explanation tie…

This study tested how domestic cats respond to four plant materials known to elicit olfactory-driven reactions: silver vine, Tatarian honeysuckle, valerian root, and catnip. By presenting these materi…

Sebastiaan Bol, Jana Caspers, Lauren Buckingham, et al. · BMC Veterinary Research · 2017

This detailed developmental study described how kittens in litters engage in social play, cataloguing motor patterns such as the belly-up, stand-up, pounce, and chase, and charting how their frequency…

Meredith West · American Zoologist · 1974

This study identified the gene responsible for the dramatic blotched coat of the king cheetah and the related variation between mackerel and blotched tabby patterns in domestic cats. The authors mappe…

Christopher B. Kaelin, Gregory S. Barsh, et al. · Science · 2012

Kaelin and colleagues uncovered the genetic and developmental basis of the tabby coat patterns that adorn domestic cats and their wild relatives. They identified the gene Taqpep, encoding a protease,…

Christopher B. Kaelin, Xiao Xu, Lewis Z. Hong, et al. · Science · 2012

Surveying owners of over two thousand pet cats, researchers used questionnaire ratings to identify five reliable personality dimensions, dubbed the Feline Five: neuroticism, extraversion, dominance, i…

Carla Litchfield and colleagues · PLOS ONE · 2017

This study traced the ancestry of the domestic cat by sampling wildcats across their range and comparing mitochondrial DNA from hundreds of wild and domestic individuals. The authors showed that all d…

Carlos A. Driscoll, Marilyn Menotti-Raymond, Stephen J. O'Brien, et al. · Science · 2007

Driscoll and colleagues sampled mitochondrial DNA from nearly 1,000 wildcats and domestic cats across Europe, Asia and Africa to resolve where the house cat came from. The analysis showed all domestic…

Carlos A. Driscoll, Marilyn Menotti-Raymond, Alfred L. Roca, et al. · Science · 2007

This landmark study investigated why cats rub and roll on silver vine and catnip, and uncovered a surprising functional benefit beyond apparent pleasure. The researchers identified nepetalactol as a p…

Reiko Uenoyama, Tamako Miyazaki, Jane L. Hurst, Robert J. Beynon, et al. · Science Advances · 2021

This widely cited quantitative synthesis estimated that free-ranging domestic cats in the contiguous United States kill billions of birds and tens of billions of mammals annually, with unowned cats re…

Scott Loss, Tom Will, Peter Marra · Nature Communications · 2013

Loss, Will and Marra produced a landmark quantitative estimate of how many wild animals free-ranging cats kill in the United States. Synthesizing data from predation studies through a systematic revie…

Scott R. Loss, Tom Will, Peter P. Marra · Nature Communications · 2013

This study established a quantitative baseline for cheetah reproductive physiology by electroejaculating wild-caught males and comparing their semen to that of domestic cats. The cheetahs produced eja…

Wildt DE, Bush M, Howard JG, O'Brien SJ, Meltzer D, van Dyk A, Ebedes H, Brand DJ · Biology of Reproduction · 1983

Miklosi and colleagues compared how cats and dogs use and respond to human visual communicative signals, particularly pointing gestures indicating hidden food. Both species could follow human pointing…

Adam Miklosi, Peter Pongracz, Gabriella Lakatos, Jozsef Topal, Vilmos Csanyi · Journal of Comparative Psychology · 2005

Saito and Shinozuka used a habituation-dishabituation design to ask whether cats distinguish their owner's voice from strangers' voices. Cats heard recordings of three strangers calling the cat's name…

Atsuko Saito, Kazutaka Shinozuka · Animal Cognition · 2013