🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This overview reviews human-tiger and human-leopard conflict in Nepal's Terai Arc, where recovering tiger populations in and around Chitwan and Bardia overlap with dense rural settlement and buffer-zo…

In many Asian forests tigers share the landscape with leopards and packs of dholes, the Asiatic wild dog, forming a guild that partitions prey and space. This overview synthesizes research on how thes…

Leopards famously haul their kills into trees, a behavior with clear ecological logic. This overview synthesizes research showing that caching prey in trees protects it from kleptoparasitism by lions,…

A survey of the leopard's distinctive habit of hauling kills, sometimes heavier than itself, into trees, and the ecological drivers behind it. Tree caching is most pronounced where lions and spotted h…

This overview synthesises studies analysing who is attacked by tigers and leopards and under what circumstances, drawing on incident records across South Asia. It reviews patterns by age, sex, occupat…

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,…

Controlling rabies in its wildlife and domestic reservoirs indirectly protects wild felids that are spillover victims of the disease. This overview surveys rabies control strategies relevant to felid…

This comprehensive study screened thousands of samples from many felid species plus hyenas for feline immunodeficiency virus and sequenced isolates to map viral diversity. The authors confirmed that F…

J. L. Troyer, J. Pecon-Slattery, M. E. Roelke, et al. · Journal of Virology · 2005

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

Mason's review synthesised decades of work on stereotypic behaviour across captive species, defining stereotypies as repetitive, invariant movements with no obvious goal. She argued they arise from fr…

Mason GJ · Animal Behaviour · 1991

The big cats of the genus Panthera proved historically difficult to resolve because of rapid speciation and conflicting gene trees. This study assembled a large multilocus supermatrix and applied both…

Brian W. Davis, Gang Li, William J. Murphy · Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution · 2010

Relationships among the big cats long resisted resolution because of short internal branches and conflicting markers. This study assembled a large multi-gene dataset and applied both concatenated supe…

Davis BW, Li G, Murphy WJ · Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution · 2010

Kruuk documented and analyzed cases where carnivores kill far more prey than they can consume, challenging the assumption that predators only take what they need. Drawing on spotted hyena and other ca…

Kruuk, H. · Journal of Zoology · 1972

Schaller's monograph is the foundational field study of lion ecology and one of the most thorough predator-prey investigations ever conducted. Over years in the Serengeti, he documented lion social st…

Schaller, G.B. · University of Chicago Press · 1972

Periquet, Fritz and Revilla reviewed the full breadth of interactions between lions and spotted hyenas, the two dominant large carnivores of African savannas. They synthesized evidence on kleptoparasi…

Periquet, S., Fritz, H. & Revilla, E. · Biological Reviews · 2015

Analyzing records of leopards captured and released far from capture sites across India, this study challenged translocation as a standard response to conflict. Translocated leopards frequently attemp…

Athreya V, Odden M, Linnell JDC, Karanth KU · Conservation Biology · 2011

Athreya and colleagues analysed the outcomes of capturing leopards from conflict situations and releasing them elsewhere in Maharashtra, a common management response in India. Using records of leopard…

Vidya Athreya, Morten Odden, John D. C. Linnell, K. Ullas Karanth · Conservation Biology · 2011

Estes and a large group of coauthors synthesized evidence that the loss of apex consumers, including big cats, is among humanity's most pervasive influences on nature. The review marshaled cases acros…

Estes, J.A., Terborgh, J., Brashares, J.S. et al. · Science · 2011

This comprehensive reference compiled the biology, ecology, and conservation status of all the world's wild cat species, from the great roaring cats to the smallest felids. Drawing together field stud…

Sunquist, M. E., Sunquist, F. C. · University of Chicago Press · 2002