🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Zooniverse hosts citizen-science projects, such as Snapshot Serengeti and its successors, where volunteers worldwide classify camera-trap images, collectively processing millions of photos that would…

A survey of how cats do not take prey at random but select particular age and sex classes, with consequences for prey populations. Felids frequently kill disproportionately young, old or otherwise vul…

Unlike many viruses spread by casual contact, feline immunodeficiency virus is transmitted chiefly through biting during fights, tying its epidemiology to felid social behavior. This overview surveys…

Allonursing, the nursing of non-offspring, is best documented in lions but reported in other group-living or colonial felid contexts, including domestic cat colonies. This overview surveys research on…

The Barbary lion of North Africa, extinct in the wild by the mid-twentieth century, was long thought to be a uniquely large and dark-maned subspecies. This overview surveys genetic work on museum spec…

Recovering DNA from extinct cats and historical museum specimens requires specialized techniques to cope with degraded, fragmented, and contaminated genetic material. This overview surveys how researc…

The cave lion, Panthera spelaea, ranged across Ice Age Eurasia and Beringia and is known from abundant remains and even mummified cubs preserved in permafrost. This overview surveys ancient-DNA studie…

Anthrax, caused by the spore-forming bacterium Bacillus anthracis, periodically kills wildlife in African ecosystems, and lions and other scavenging felids become exposed by feeding on infected herbiv…

A growing body of work links sublethal anticoagulant rodenticide exposure to severe mange in urban bobcats and mountain lions, implicating chemical immunosuppression as the hidden driver. This overvie…

A survey of how restoring large cats to systems where they were lost can rekindle anti-predator behavior in prey and reinstate top-down effects. Where prey have lived without predators, they may becom…

Babesia are tick-transmitted protozoa that infect red blood cells and can cause anemia, and they have featured prominently in felid disease, most dramatically in the drought-linked mortality of Sereng…

As apex predators, big cats can exert top-down control that ripples through ecosystems via trophic cascades. This overview synthesizes evidence that lions, tigers, leopards, pumas, and jaguars influen…

Big cats are often used as umbrella species, whose large area requirements mean that protecting them also protects many co-occurring species, and as flagship species, whose charisma mobilizes public s…

This overview surveys the disappearance of numerous large cats, including Smilodon, Homotherium, the American lion, the cave lion, and Miracinonyx, as part of the broader late Quaternary megafaunal ex…

The caracal ranges widely across Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and into India, and this broad distribution has produced named subspecies and biogeographic questions. This overview surveys car…

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…

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…

This overview surveys what skeletal evidence reveals about the body size of the cave lion and the degree of size difference between the sexes. Panthera spelaea was a large cat, generally exceeding the…

This overview examines the body size of Panthera atrox, frequently cited as one of the largest cats ever to have lived. Reconstructions based on its robust skeleton suggest it exceeded the modern Afri…

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…

Bovine tuberculosis, caused by Mycobacterium bovis, established itself in some African lion populations, notably in Kruger National Park, after spreading through prey species such as buffalo, raising…

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…

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…

A canine distemper virus outbreak caused substantial mortality in the lions of the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem in the mid-1990s, a landmark event in wildlife disease ecology that demonstrated how a virus…

Intensive captive lion breeding, associated in some regions with cub petting, walking-with-lions tourism, canned or captive hunting and the bone trade, has drawn extensive welfare and ethical scrutiny…

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…

An overview of the quantitative tools used to predict how many large predators a reserve can sustain from its prey base, building on the prey-preference and prey-biomass approaches. These models estim…

This overview surveys efforts to reconstruct the coat colour and appearance of the cave lion using frozen cubs and ancient DNA. The preserved fur of permafrost specimens provides direct evidence of pe…

This overview examines studies of genetic diversity and population structure within the cave lion, based on ancient DNA from specimens spanning the species' range and time depth. Such analyses have re…

This overview examines depictions of cave lions in Upper Paleolithic art, most famously the powerful panel of lions at Chauvet Cave in France, along with engravings and figurines from across Ice Age E…