🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

As a cat moves, it tends to hold its head steady, stabilizing the platform on which its eyes and inner ears sit. This overview surveys head stabilization during locomotion, in which vestibular and vis…

The margay, a small Neotropical cat, can descend trees head-first, a rare ability among cats enabled by unusually mobile ankle joints that rotate the hindfeet outward to grip behind the animal. This o…

This overview focuses on a specific line of argument about sabertooth behaviour: that severely injured Smilodon individuals survived long enough for their wounds to heal, which some researchers read a…

Translocating wild felids for conservation, conflict mitigation, or population management involves significant veterinary considerations, including pre-release health screening, disease risk assessmen…

Many white cats, especially blue-eyed ones, are deaf, and this overview reviews the link between coat colour genetics and hearing. The dominant white gene can disrupt the development of pigment cells…

A well-known link in feline sensory biology connects white coat color, blue eyes, and congenital deafness. This overview surveys the association between the dominant white gene and inner-ear degenerat…

The cheetah's high-speed hunting strategy raises questions about how heat and energy constrain its foraging. This overview synthesizes research on the physiology of cheetah pursuit, including the rapi…

Wild cats host a diverse array of helminths, including roundworms such as Toxocara and Toxascaris, tapeworms like Spirometra and Taenia, hookworms and lungworms, acquired largely through their prey. T…

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…

Not all cats respond to catnip, and the trait appears to be inherited. This overview surveys evidence that responsiveness to catnip is governed by genetics, with roughly two-thirds of cats showing the…

A cat's friendliness toward people is shaped by both genes and early experience, and this overview surveys research disentangling these influences. It covers classic studies showing that bold, friendl…

Animals differ in how likely they are to be photographed, due to home-range placement, behavior, sex, age, or trail use, and this heterogeneity in capture probability, if unmodeled, biases abundance e…

Hidden Markov models infer an animal's unobserved behavioral state, such as resting, foraging, or directed travel, from the statistical signatures of its movement, typically step lengths and turning a…

The ability to hide and break line of sight is a core feline coping mechanism, and a recurring finding across both small wild cats and domestic cats is that providing refuges reduces stress hormones a…

Cats need more dietary protein than many mammals, and this overview reviews the metabolic basis. Feline liver enzymes that break down amino acids for energy operate at a relatively high, less adjustab…

Research at a heavily industrialised and agricultural site in South Africa documented unexpectedly high serval densities, challenging assumptions that intensively modified land cannot support felids.…

Cats sometimes fall from windows and balconies, and veterinary observations of these incidents, sometimes called high-rise syndrome, have produced counterintuitive findings. This overview surveys repo…

GPS and accelerometer studies of wild cheetahs have transformed understanding of how the fastest land animal actually hunts. This overview surveys findings that hunting success depends less on top spe…

The power for a jump comes largely from the hindlimb extensors, and this overview reviews how their architecture supports explosive movement. Large muscles crossing the hip, knee, and ankle, with fibr…

Lions once ranged across Africa, southeast Europe, the Middle East, and into India, but have lost the overwhelming majority of that historical distribution. This overview surveys research reconstructi…

The development of FeLV vaccines in the 1980s, combined with reliable testing and test-and-removal programs, produced one of veterinary medicine's clearest prevention success stories, sharply reducing…

Preventing dental disease in cats involves home care strategies such as tooth brushing, dental diets, treats, and water additives designed to reduce plaque accumulation, though many cats resist brushi…

Understanding how feral cats use space is central to managing them and assessing their impact, and this overview surveys research on feral cat home ranges and movements. It examines tracking studies s…

Most big cats organize their use of space through a land-tenure system in which residents hold home ranges advertised by scent and maintained partly through avoidance. This overview synthesizes the ge…

Free-ranging domestic cats maintain home ranges whose size and overlap depend on sex, reproductive status, food distribution, and population density. This overview surveys tracking studies showing tha…

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 can cover impressive horizontal distances in a single bound, and this overview reviews the biomechanics of the broad jump. Achieving distance requires a takeoff that balances upward and forward v…

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…

House soiling is among the most common behaviour problems leading to relinquishment of cats, and this overview surveys its causes and management. It distinguishes urine marking, a communicative sprayi…

This overview synthesises research quantifying the economic burden of big-cat depredation on rural households, emphasising that losses small in aggregate can be devastating to individual families. It…