🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

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…

Emerging deep-learning methods aim to automate not just species classification but individual identification, re-identifying specific cats from their coat patterns to build capture histories for captu…

Conservation managers must decide which populations to treat as separate units for protection, breeding, and translocation, and genetics provides the primary evidence. This overview surveys the concep…

Because enforcement alone struggles to stop trade driven by persistent consumer demand, conservationists increasingly invest in demand-reduction interventions aimed at changing the behavior of people…

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…

Leopards have perhaps the broadest diet of any large cat, recorded eating a vast array of species from large antelope to rodents, birds, reptiles, and invertebrates. This overview synthesizes scat and…

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…

Effective population size, the number of individuals genetically contributing to the next generation, is often far smaller than the census count and is a key predictor of how quickly a population lose…

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…

In the mountains of Asia, common leopards, snow leopards, and tigers can occur along elevational gradients, partitioning the landscape by altitude and habitat. This overview synthesizes research on ho…

Environmental DNA, the genetic material that animals shed into their surroundings, offers a powerful new way to detect elusive cats without observing them directly. This overview surveys how environme…

Like tigers, jaguars are individually identifiable by their rosette patterns, making camera-trap capture-recapture a key tool for estimating their density. This overview synthesizes how researchers ac…

Counting lions reliably is surprisingly difficult, and methodological choices strongly affect the numbers that drive conservation decisions. This overview surveys techniques used to estimate lion abun…

Tigresses come into estrus periodically and advertise receptivity to males through scent marking, vocalizations, and increased movement within their range, leading to brief but intense mating associat…

Several reserves have demonstrated that tigers can recover when prey is restored and protection is rigorous. This overview synthesizes case studies in which intensified anti-poaching, recovery of ungu…

A survey of the conditions under which big cats switch from hunting to scavenging, and what this means for their ecology. Although large felids lack the scavenging specializations of hyenas and vultur…

Tigress reproduction is shaped by the energetic challenge of raising cubs alone over nearly two years. This overview synthesizes studies on litter size, cub survival, the long period of maternal depen…