🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Where multiple cat species coexist, smaller felids often adjust their use of space and time to avoid larger, dominant competitors, and camera-trap data are a primary means of detecting these interacti…

The grain and extent at which a habitat model is built strongly influence its conclusions, a key consideration for wide-ranging cats. This overview surveys how the choice of spatial resolution, from c…

This overview reviews how spatial zoning, separating core predator habitat, buffer zones, and human-use areas, and broader land-use planning can structure coexistence with big cats. It synthesises app…

Different cat species carry different natural marks, tiger stripes, leopard and jaguar rosettes, ocelot chains, cheetah spots, and pattern-matching software exploits these to identify individuals semi…

The Jaguar Corridor Initiative is a range-wide effort to maintain a connected network of habitat allowing jaguars to move between core populations from Mexico to Argentina. This overview surveys resea…

The Jaguar Corridor Initiative aims to keep jaguar populations connected from Mexico to Argentina by conserving linkages between core areas. This overview surveys how the initiative's corridor framewo…

This overview examines the long-running debate over what the American lion, Panthera atrox, actually was. Since its description from Pleistocene North America, researchers have variously regarded it a…

Modern cats are divided into eight monophyletic lineages: the Panthera lineage (lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, snow leopards, clouded leopards), the bay cat lineage, the caracal lineage, the ocelot…

In floodplain strongholds such as the Pantanal, the annual flood pulse governs jaguar ecology. This overview synthesizes how rising and falling waters concentrate prey on shrinking patches of dry land…

This overview surveys the fossil record of the jaguar lineage and its spread into the Americas. The jaguar, Panthera onca, traces its origins to Old World pantherines whose descendants crossed into No…

This overview surveys the fossil history of the leopard, Panthera pardus, one of the most widely distributed living big cats. Fossils document the leopard's presence across Africa and Eurasia through…

This overview surveys the fossil history of the puma lineage, the New World group that includes the living puma and jaguarundi and is closely tied to the extinct American cheetah-like cat Miracinonyx.…

Black jaguars, often called black panthers, occur naturally within jaguar populations and result from a dominant mutation in the melanocortin-1 receptor gene, distinct from the recessive melanism of t…

Closed-population capture-recapture models assume the population neither gains nor loses individuals during the survey, through births, deaths, immigration, or emigration, an assumption central to est…

The jaguar, the only Panthera species in the Americas, occupies an informative position in big cat phylogeny. This overview explains how molecular data place the jaguar within the genus Panthera, clos…

The jaguarundi is an unusual, weasel-like small cat of the Americas whose taxonomy was clarified by molecular phylogenetics. This overview explains how genetic data placed the jaguarundi in the puma l…

This overview surveys evidence on where and when the Panthera lineage, the genus that includes lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, and snow leopards, first arose. Molecular phylogenies place the diverge…

Clouded leopards occupy a pivotal position as the sister group to the other big cats within the subfamily Pantherinae. This overview explains how molecular phylogenies consistently place the genus Neo…

The puma has the largest latitudinal range of any wild land mammal in the Western Hemisphere, occupying habitats from boreal forest and western mountains to deserts, grasslands, swamps, and tropical j…

One of the eight felid lineages groups three superficially different cats: the puma, the cheetah, and the jaguarundi. This overview explains how molecular phylogenetics revealed this surprising relati…

One of the most counterintuitive results of felid molecular phylogenetics was that the cheetah, long treated as a unique outlier, belongs to a New World puma lineage alongside the puma and the jaguaru…

This overview synthesises research on whether wildlife-tourism revenue increases local tolerance for big cats by offsetting conflict costs. It reviews cases from jaguar tourism in the Pantanal, lion t…

This overview reviews husbandry interventions promoted to reduce jaguar and puma depredation on cattle in the Venezuelan llanos and elsewhere, including the use of water buffalo, which form defensive…

Unlike most cats, tigers readily enter water and swim, and providing pools is considered an important welfare and enrichment feature for the species. This overview surveys evidence and practice around…

Camera traps illuminate night scenes either with a bright white (xenon or LED) flash that yields full-color images or with infrared illumination that produces monochrome photos invisible to most anima…

Black panthers are melanistic leopards (or jaguars), and their existence is often misunderstood as indicating a separate species or subspecies. This overview explains the genetics of leopard melanism,…

This synthesis reviews the conservation standing of the jaguarundi, broadly assessed as lower risk across its extensive range owing to ecological flexibility, while flagging serious concern for periph…

Using GPS telemetry on jaguars in the seasonally flooded Pantanal of Brazil, this study quantified home ranges, movements, and the degree of spatial overlap among individuals. It revealed that jaguar…

Cavalcanti, S. M. C., Gese, E. M. · Journal of Mammalogy · 2009

Borchers and Efford provided the rigorous likelihood-based foundation for spatially explicit capture-recapture, formalizing how to estimate density when detectors such as camera stations have fixed lo…

David L. Borchers, Murray G. Efford · Biometrics · 2008

This influential review synthesized the global status of the largest carnivores, including big cats such as lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars, documenting widespread range contraction and populatio…

Ripple, W.J., Estes, J.A., Beschta, R.L., Wilmers, C.C., Ritchie, E.G., Hebblewhite, M., et al. · Science · 2014