🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

A survey of the conditions under which big cats switch from hunting to scavenging, and what this means for their ecology. Although large felids lack the scavenging specializations of hyenas and vultur…

The presence of cats in South America results from the Great American Biotic Interchange, when the Isthmus of Panama connected the Americas and allowed northern mammals to disperse south. This overvie…

An overview of how predation by cats can influence the spread and prevalence of disease in their prey populations. By selectively removing sick, weak or behaviorally abnormal individuals, predators ma…

Cats, both domestic and wild, are the only definitive hosts in which Toxoplasma gondii completes sexual reproduction and sheds environmentally resistant oocysts. This overview surveys the ecology of t…

Beyond the pathogenic FIV and FeLV, felids carry feline foamy virus, a generally apathogenic retrovirus that nonetheless offers a useful marker of contact and transmission. This overview surveys felin…

Because feline immunodeficiency virus evolves rapidly and is transmitted through fighting, its genetic signal can reveal how pumas move across fragmented landscapes. This overview surveys studies that…

A wildlife crossing works only if animals are guided to it, and this overview examines the critical role of fencing in funneling wildlife toward structures while keeping them off the road. Exclusion f…

The wildland-urban interface, where development meets wildland vegetation, is expanding and is the zone where climate-driven fire most directly intersects with cat populations like urban-edge pumas an…

Studying how fire affects cats requires methods to map burns, track animal responses, and disentangle fire from other drivers. This overview surveys the toolkit, satellite burn-severity mapping, GPS t…

Climate change can alter fire regimes, frequency, intensity, seasonality, and extent, pushing ecosystems toward new states that differ from historical conditions. This overview surveys how shifting fi…

Animals searching for patchy resources often slow down and turn more when they encounter good habitat, a behavior called area-restricted search, and first-passage time is a classic metric for detectin…

This overview examines research on forecasting big-cat attacks and translating risk maps into operational decisions, bridging prediction and action. It synthesises work modelling environmental and beh…

The puma population of the Santa Monica Mountains is hemmed in by freeways and the Pacific Ocean, producing one of the most acute cases of urban carnivore genetic isolation on record. This overview sy…

A survey of how Holling's functional-response framework is applied to cats to describe how their per-capita kill rate changes with prey density. Most felids are thought to show a saturating Type II re…

This overview synthesises emerging priorities and frontiers in human-big cat conflict and coexistence research. It reviews calls for more rigorous impact evaluation, greater integration of social scie…

Surveys of the gut parasites of wild cats, typically based on fecal examination, provide a window into felid health, diet and environmental exposure. This overview surveys the common gastrointestinal…

Movement and gene flow are related but not identical, and this overview examines how the two lines of evidence complement each other in assessing felid connectivity. Telemetry captures the movements o…

Pumas living near major cities, such as those in the Santa Monica and Santa Ana Mountains of California, are increasingly hemmed in by freeways and development, fragmenting their populations and restr…

Genetic rescue refers to deliberately introducing individuals from another population to boost the fitness of a small, inbred population through new genetic variation. This overview surveys the concep…

When urban felid populations become severely inbred, genetic rescue, the introduction of individuals or gene flow from other populations, can restore diversity and demographic vigour. This overview sy…

The Florida panther, a population of puma isolated in the southeastern United States, became a landmark case of inbreeding and genetic rescue. This overview synthesizes how the small, isolated populat…

The Florida panther, a small isolated puma population, suffered severe inbreeding manifesting in physical defects such as kinked tails, undescended testicles, and heart abnormalities, prompting a land…

The jaguarundi is an unusually shaped small cat of the Americas, with an elongated body and uniform coat, whose molecular placement revealed it as a close relative of the puma and cheetah within the p…

Gestation in felids scales broadly with body size, ranging from roughly two months in small cats to around three and a half months in the largest species. This overview compiles comparative data on pr…

A survey of how giving-up density experiments quantify the fear that cats and other predators instill in their prey. By offering prey artificial food patches and measuring how much food they leave bef…

Vehicle collisions are a leading direct cause of death for felids in human-dominated landscapes worldwide, from pumas on Los Angeles freeways to leopard cats on Taiwan rural roads and fishing cats in…

Documented first in southern California felids and later in Cape Town caracals, anticoagulant-rodenticide exposure in wild cats has emerged as a global phenomenon wherever predators hunt poisoned rode…

This overview reviews the use of guardian animals other than dogs, notably donkeys and llamas, to deter big cats and other predators from livestock herds. It synthesises evidence that aggressive donke…

An overview of how the spatial scale at which predators and prey use the landscape, their habitat domains, determines the strength and form of fear effects. When an ambush felid has a narrow, predicta…

This overview synthesises evidence on why deterrents, lights, sirens, scent, and visual scarecrows, often lose effectiveness as predators habituate. It examines the behavioural ecology of neophobia an…