🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Researchers sometimes attract animals to cameras using food bait, scent lures, visual attractants, or scratching posts to increase detection rates and obtain better-posed, identifiable images. This ov…

Managing captive felid populations requires balancing genetic goals, such as retaining diversity, against demographic goals, such as maintaining stable numbers and age structure. This overview surveys…

Successful reproduction in captivity depends not only on physiology but on appropriate behavior, including mate recognition, courtship, and competent maternal care. This overview surveys how behaviora…

Camera traps are intended to observe wildlife unobtrusively, but white flashes, audible shutter or focus sounds, and infrared glow can be detected by animals and alter their behavior, raising both dat…

Behaviour offers a rich, non-invasive window into felid welfare, but interpreting it requires care. This overview surveys the behavioural signs used to assess captive cats: stereotypic pacing and rout…

Across the felid family, the capacity to flexibly adjust activity timing, space use, diet and risk responses largely determines which species can live near people. This overview synthesises evidence t…

A central question in urban ecology is whether animals cope with cities through flexible behaviour within a generation or through heritable evolutionary change over generations. This overview synthesi…

This overview examines the evolutionary geography of the cheetah lineage and its New World relatives. Molecular and fossil evidence indicate that the cheetah-puma group has a complex transatlantic his…

African carnivores, including lions, leopards and cheetahs, host a rich diversity of blood-borne parasites that molecular surveys continue to uncover. This overview surveys the diversity of hemoparasi…

Bobcats and Canada lynx are widespread North American felids studied extensively with camera traps, though their relatively subtle coat patterns complicate reliable individual identification. This ove…

A survey of the broad, adaptable diet of the bobcat, which lets this mid-sized felid thrive across diverse North American habitats. Bobcats specialize on lagomorphs such as cottontails and jackrabbits…

Bobcats are among the most adaptable felids at the urban edge, persisting in suburbs and exurban developments across North America by exploiting greenbelts, washes, golf courses and remnant natural pa…

Bobcats are a generalist felid whose northern range limit appears constrained by deep snow and severe winters, conditions that warming is relaxing. This overview surveys evidence and projections for b…

Sedentary captive cats fed energy-dense diets are prone to obesity, which carries serious welfare and health consequences. This overview surveys body-condition management in felids: the prevalence and…

This overview examines how body size influenced which carnivores survived the end-Pleistocene extinctions and which, like the great cats, did not. Large predators tend to have smaller populations, low…

Captive cats fed soft, processed diets commonly develop dental disease such as gingivitis, calculus and tooth fractures, whereas chewing on bone, hide and connective tissue provides natural abrasion a…

In ecosystems like Kruger, African buffalo serve as the maintenance host for bovine tuberculosis, and lions acquire infection chiefly by feeding on diseased buffalo. This overview surveys the transmis…

Camera-trap distance sampling adapts classical distance-sampling theory to estimate density of unmarked animals from the distances at which they are detected within the camera's field of view. This ov…

Camera traps, often paired with individual identification by coat patterns and spatial capture-recapture models, are a cornerstone method for studying secretive felids in human-dominated landscapes. T…

Canine distemper virus (CDV) is a morbillivirus closely related to measles and rinderpest that has expanded its host range far beyond dogs to infect lions, tigers, leopards, hyenas, seals and many oth…

Felids kill primarily with their canine teeth, and this overview reviews how canine form and the killing bite are matched to prey. Many cats deliver a precise nape or throat bite, the slender, sharp c…

Capture myopathy, a potentially fatal syndrome of muscle damage arising from the stress, exertion, and physiologic derangement of capture and restraint, is a recognized risk when immobilizing wild fel…

An overview of how the kills of large felids redistribute energy and nutrients through ecosystems. Carcasses and the cats' partly eaten remains create nutrient hotspots that fertilize soils and vegeta…

The catnip response, a heritable reaction to nepetalactone causing sniffing, rubbing, rolling and a euphoric-seeming state, occurs in many domestic cats and some non-domestic felids. This overview sur…

Long-term studies that radio-collar wild felids provide rare opportunities to determine causes of death, including disease, with precision. This overview surveys how telemetry-based monitoring quantif…

Beyond the mechanics of the flehmen response, felids use vomeronasal sampling to extract social information from scent marks. This overview surveys research on how cats assess reproductive status, ind…

Chronic activation of the stress axis can suppress immunity, impair reproduction and contribute to disease, and several captive cat species show evidence of such chronic stress. This overview surveys…

Artificial light at night can disrupt the internal circadian clocks that govern activity, hormone cycles and reproduction in animals, with potential consequences for nocturnal carnivores. This overvie…

Citizen science, from sighting and roadkill reporting to camera-trap and tracking projects, has become a powerful tool for monitoring urban felids and engaging the public in coexistence. This overview…

The degree of curvature in a claw correlates with how an animal uses it, and this overview reviews that relationship in cats. Strongly recurved claws favour gripping bark and branches and hooking into…