🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Pumas living near major cities, such as those in the Santa Monica and Santa Ana Mountains of California, are increasingly hemmed in by freeways and development, fragmenting their populations and restr…

When urban felid populations become severely inbred, genetic rescue, the introduction of individuals or gene flow from other populations, can restore diversity and demographic vigour. This overview sy…

The Florida panther, a population of puma isolated in the southeastern United States, became a landmark case of inbreeding and genetic rescue. This overview synthesizes how the small, isolated populat…

The Florida panther, a small isolated puma population, suffered severe inbreeding manifesting in physical defects such as kinked tails, undescended testicles, and heart abnormalities, prompting a land…

The jaguarundi is an unusually shaped small cat of the Americas, with an elongated body and uniform coat, whose molecular placement revealed it as a close relative of the puma and cheetah within the p…

Gestation in felids scales broadly with body size, ranging from roughly two months in small cats to around three and a half months in the largest species. This overview compiles comparative data on pr…

Vehicle collisions are a leading direct cause of death for felids in human-dominated landscapes worldwide, from pumas on Los Angeles freeways to leopard cats on Taiwan rural roads and fishing cats in…

Documented first in southern California felids and later in Cape Town caracals, anticoagulant-rodenticide exposure in wild cats has emerged as a global phenomenon wherever predators hunt poisoned rode…

This overview reviews the use of guardian animals other than dogs, notably donkeys and llamas, to deter big cats and other predators from livestock herds. It synthesises evidence that aggressive donke…

An overview of how the spatial scale at which predators and prey use the landscape, their habitat domains, determines the strength and form of fear effects. When an ambush felid has a narrow, predicta…

This overview synthesises evidence on why deterrents, lights, sirens, scent, and visual scarecrows, often lose effectiveness as predators habituate. It examines the behavioural ecology of neophobia an…

Hemotropic mycoplasmas, formerly called Haemobartonella, attach to red blood cells and can cause infectious anemia in felids, with wild cats carrying these bacteria across many populations. This overv…

Living near people may force cats to expend energy differently, and this overview synthesizes research linking human-modified landscapes to the energetics of felid movement. Building on biologging stu…

Small, isolated cat populations risk inbreeding depression, and genetic rescue, introducing individuals from other populations, has been used to counter it. This overview surveys the concept and its f…

A survey of the lethal interactions between cats and dogs that share prey and space, a major structuring force in carnivore communities. Lions and hyenas kill wild dogs and cheetahs; pumas and coyotes…

In freeway-bounded puma populations around Los Angeles, killing of pumas by other pumas is an unusually frequent cause of death, a pattern biologists link to compressed home ranges and the inability o…

Across much of Latin America jaguars and pumas occur together, and their coexistence is mediated by differences in prey, habitat, and behavior. This overview synthesizes research showing that jaguars…

This overview reviews human-felid conflict involving both jaguars and pumas across smallholder and indigenous landscapes of Central America, where the two cats overlap and complicate attribution of li…

A survey of how jaguars and pumas, the two large cats of the Neotropics, coexist across much of their shared range by partitioning prey, space and time. Jaguars generally take larger prey, including p…

This overview synthesises studies identifying which landscape and management variables predict where big cats kill livestock, a recurring quantitative question across conflict research. It reviews con…

Landscape genetics links genetic patterns to the features of the terrain between populations, a toolkit central to studying fragmentation in cats. This overview surveys the methods, from microsatellit…

Landscape genetics, combining molecular markers with spatial models, has become essential for detecting how roads and development fragment felid populations and for prioritising connectivity. This ove…

This overview surveys the global evidence on livestock-guarding dogs (LGDs), breeds such as Anatolian shepherds, Kangals, and Maremmas, bonded to herds to deter predators through presence, barking, an…

How urban felids are portrayed in media and perceived by the public strongly influences tolerance, policy and conservation outcomes. This overview synthesises social-science research on news framing o…

This overview synthesises research on how news and social media portray big-cat attacks and conflict, and how that framing shapes public attitudes, fear, and policy. It reviews studies showing that se…

An overview of how the loss of large cats such as lions, tigers and pumas can unleash smaller predators with cascading consequences for biodiversity. When apex felids decline, the intermediate carnivo…

High-throughput sequencing has opened a new era of virus discovery, allowing researchers to catalog the viromes of wild felids without prior knowledge of which pathogens to seek. This overview surveys…

This overview synthesises evidence linking the depletion of natural prey, peccaries, deer, capybara, guanaco, to increased jaguar and puma depredation on livestock across the Americas. It reviews stud…

Where pumas and jaguars overlap in the Neotropics, the puma often shifts its niche in response to the larger cat. This overview synthesizes research showing that in sympatry pumas tend to take smaller…

This overview synthesises evidence on nonlethal tools, secure night penning, fladry (flagged lines), turbo-fladry, motion-activated lights and sound, and guard animals, used to protect livestock from…