🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Clouded leopards have a difficult captive breeding history marked by severe, sometimes fatal aggression by males toward females during pairing. This overview surveys the welfare and management science…

This overview synthesises evidence that fortified, predator-proof livestock enclosures deliver benefits beyond stopping depredation, including improved livestock health, reduced theft, and easier mana…

Some cats endure cold climates, and this overview reviews how they tolerate low temperatures. Cold-climate cats rely on dense, insulating fur, including seasonal thickening, on conserving core heat th…

Cities support large populations of commensal rodents fed by human waste, and these rodents form a critical prey subsidy for small and medium urban felids from bobcats to leopard cats and jungle cats.…

Snow leopards inhabit vast, rugged ranges where direct contact is rare, making indirect communication essential. This overview surveys research on snow leopard signalling, including scrape marks, scen…

Because snow leopards live among pastoralist communities across remote mountains, community-based programs are central to their conservation. This overview surveys research on initiatives that align l…

This overview reviews community-managed livestock insurance schemes for snow leopard depredation in the mountains of northern Pakistan, where herders contribute premiums to village funds that compensa…

This overview examines community-run insurance schemes in which herders pay premiums into a locally managed fund that pays out for verified predator kills, an alternative to state or NGO compensation.…

This overview synthesises comparative studies that contrast successful and unsuccessful big-cat coexistence efforts to distil transferable lessons. It reviews analyses spanning lion, snow leopard, tig…

The sequencing of cat genomes, beginning with the domestic cat and extending to tiger, lion, snow leopard, cheetah, and others, transformed felid systematics. This overview surveys how whole-genome da…

Felid species differ in their vocal repertoires, and comparative bioacoustics has sought to map these differences onto phylogeny and ecology. This overview surveys work cataloguing call types across s…

From leopards in Mumbai to pumas in Los Angeles, caracals in Cape Town and fishing cats in Colombo, a remarkable diversity of felids inhabits the worlds cities, offering a comparative window on urban…

Compensation and insurance schemes aim to offset the costs that big cats impose on livestock owners, reducing the incentive for retaliatory killing. This overview surveys research evaluating these fin…

Identifying individual cats from their unique stripe, spot, or rosette patterns is the cornerstone of capture-recapture, and software increasingly assists this once wholly manual task. This overview s…

This overview examines why reconstructing the relationships among the living big cats has proven difficult, with different genes and analyses sometimes yielding conflicting trees. The lion, leopard, a…

As climate change shifts the distribution of suitable habitat, connectivity must allow species to track those changes by moving to newly suitable areas, adding a dynamic dimension to corridor planning…

As climate change shifts the distribution of suitable habitat, corridors that connect populations today may not align with where animals need to move tomorrow, and this overview examines how researche…

Recognizing two clouded leopard species reshaped conservation planning across Southeast Asia. This overview explains how the split meant that the Sunda clouded leopard, confined to Borneo and Sumatra,…

Genetic tools have become central to small-cat conservation, and this overview reviews their applications. Non-invasive sampling of scats and hair allows researchers to confirm the presence of cryptic…

The Amur leopard, surviving in the Russian Far East and adjacent China, is one of the rarest cats, having dropped to a few dozen individuals. This overview surveys genetic studies documenting its very…

The fishing cat is a wetland specialist of South and Southeast Asia, increasingly threatened by the loss and fragmentation of marshes and mangroves. This overview surveys the limited but growing genet…

This overview reviews performance-payment models that reward communities for conservation outcomes, such as the documented presence of breeding snow leopards or the absence of retaliatory killing, rat…

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…

Clouded leopards have remarkable skulls and the longest canine teeth relative to body size of any living cat, and cranial characters contributed to recognizing two species. This overview discusses how…

Long-term coexistence between people and leopards in human-dominated India rests partly on social, cultural and religious dimensions that shape tolerance. This overview surveys social-science research…

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…

Recognizing two leopard cat species raises the practical question of where the boundary between them lies. This overview examines how the mainland leopard cat, Prionailurus bengalensis, and the Sunda…

Female cats select sheltered den sites to give birth and protect altricial young during their most vulnerable weeks. This overview surveys how felid mothers choose dens that provide concealment and th…

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…

A core prediction of climate change is that mountain species will shift upslope, and detecting such shifts in elusive cats is a methodological challenge. This overview surveys the evidence and approac…