🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

When a whisker touches an object, the contact bends the shaft and concentrates mechanical stress at its base, where the follicle receptors sit. This overview surveys the biomechanics of whisker deflec…

Toxoplasma gondii famously dampens rodents’ innate fear of cats, plausibly steering infected prey toward the parasite’s definitive host. This overview surveys proposed mechanisms behind the manipulati…

Most felid distribution models are correlative, fitting statistical relationships between occurrence and environment, but mechanistic models built from physiology and energetics offer a complementary…

Combinations of the alpha-2 agonist medetomidine (or dexmedetomidine) with the dissociative ketamine are a mainstay for immobilizing large felids, valued because the alpha-2 component provides sedatio…

How urban felids are portrayed in media and perceived by the public strongly influences tolerance, policy and conservation outcomes. This overview synthesises social-science research on news framing o…

This overview synthesises research on how news and social media portray big-cat attacks and conflict, and how that framing shapes public attitudes, fear, and policy. It reviews studies showing that se…

Climate change is driving larger, more intense wildfires in many regions, and the extreme fire seasons in Australia, California, and elsewhere have reshaped how ecologists study fire and wildlife. Thi…

Black jaguars, often called black panthers, are melanistic individuals of the same species, and their occurrence carries ecological interest. This overview synthesizes research on the genetics of mela…

Black, or melanistic, coats appear repeatedly in wild cats, and this overview reviews this phenomenon and its causes. Melanism, seen famously in black leopards and jaguars, results from genetic varian…

Melanism, the occurrence of all-black individuals, is relatively common in Geoffroys cat, and this overview reviews the phenomenon and its study. Dark color morphs appear at notable frequencies in som…

Animals do not move at random or solely in response to immediate cues; they remember productive sites, dangerous areas, and routes, and this overview examines how memory shapes felid movement. Evidenc…

An overview of how the loss of large cats such as lions, tigers and pumas can unleash smaller predators with cascading consequences for biodiversity. When apex felids decline, the intermediate carnivo…

A survey of how leopards, as widespread mid-to-large felids, suppress smaller carnivores through killing, kleptoparasitism and fear. Across Africa and Asia leopards kill and displace jackals, caracals…

This overview examines mesowear and other gross tooth-wear approaches as applied to extinct cats, which assess the cumulative shape and rounding of cusps to infer long-term dietary abrasiveness and ca…

A survey of how a cat's metabolic needs and prey size determine how often it must kill. Larger felids require more total energy but extract it from larger carcasses, so kill frequency scales with the…

Animals generate water internally when they metabolise food, and this overview reviews the role of metabolic water for desert cats. Oxidising the fat and protein in prey yields water as a by-product,…

High-throughput sequencing has opened a new era of virus discovery, allowing researchers to catalog the viromes of wild felids without prior knowledge of which pathogens to seek. This overview surveys…

Iberian lynx recovery has relied on metapopulation thinking, managing a set of connected subpopulations to spread risk and sustain gene flow. This overview surveys how population viability analyses in…

Methimazole, and its prodrug carbimazole, block thyroid hormone synthesis and remain the most common medical treatment for feline hyperthyroidism, available in oral and transdermal forms. Medical ther…

Bite-force figures for cats are often estimates rather than direct measurements, and this overview reviews how they are derived and where they can mislead. Researchers reconstruct muscle forces from a…

Estimating how many big cats occupy an area is a central and challenging task in their ecology and conservation. This overview reviews the main methods, from individual-identification camera-trap capt…

This overview reviews the quantitative methods palaeontologists use to estimate the body mass of extinct cats such as Smilodon, Homotherium, and Panthera atrox. Because soft tissue is not preserved, r…

Before genome sequencing became routine, microsatellites, short tandem repeats scattered through the genome, were the workhorse markers of felid population and forensic genetics. This overview surveys…

Microsatellite genetic markers have made it possible to assign parentage in wild and captive cats, resolving questions about mating systems that behavior alone cannot answer. This overview surveys the…

The cat middle ear transmits airborne sound to the fluid-filled inner ear, and this overview reviews how its three tiny ossicles accomplish this efficiently. The ossicular chain and the area differenc…

The composition of cat milk supports the rapid early growth of altricial young and changes over the course of lactation. This overview surveys what is known about the fat, protein, and energy content…

Mitochondrial DNA, with its maternal inheritance, high copy number, and relatively fast evolution, was central to the first molecular phylogenies and phylogeographic studies of cats. This overview sur…

This overview surveys the recovery and analysis of complete mitochondrial genomes from cave lion fossils, which have helped pin down the position of Panthera spelaea within the lion radiation. Mitogen…

A recurring complication in felid systematics is that trees built from mitochondrial DNA often disagree with those from nuclear DNA. This overview explains why: the maternally inherited mitochondrion…

This overview examines portable predator-resistant enclosures, often canvas, mesh, or beaded vinyl walls on movable frames, deployed to protect livestock at night while distributing manure to regenera…