🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

In fragmented and urbanizing landscapes, vehicle collisions rank among the foremost causes of death for pumas, and this overview synthesizes telemetry-based survival studies documenting the toll. GPS…

This overview reviews research on how roads and urbanisation fragment puma populations and elevate human-puma conflict through roadkill, genetic isolation, and forced movement near people. It synthesi…

During his time in Griffith Park, the Los Angeles puma P-22 developed notoedric mange and was found to have been exposed to anticoagulant rodenticides, mirroring a pattern documented in regional bobca…

An overview of how much carrion features in the diets of cats traditionally viewed as pure hunters. While felids are generally more reliant on fresh kills than canids or hyaenids, many will scavenge o…

An overview of how the prey cats select shifts through the year with prey vulnerability, migration, birth pulses and weather. Many felids exploit seasonal ungulate calving and fawning peaks, when abun…

Serological surveys, which detect antibodies as evidence of past or present infection, are a workhorse of wildlife disease epidemiology. This overview surveys how serosurveys reveal pathogen exposure…

The effectiveness of wildlife crossings depends partly on shielding animals from the light and noise of adjacent traffic, factors that can deter wary felids from using overpasses and underpasses. This…

Across the western United States, puma populations range from large and connected to small and isolated, and genetics reveals how habitat configuration creates source and sink dynamics. This overview…

This overview reviews how spatial zoning, separating core predator habitat, buffer zones, and human-use areas, and broader land-use planning can structure coexistence with big cats. It synthesises app…

This overview synthesises the contested evidence on whether sport hunting of pumas reduces or paradoxically increases conflict with people and livestock. It reviews studies suggesting that heavy hunti…

An overview of how ambush felids select hunting habitat to minimize the distance over which they must close on prey undetected. Because capture success drops sharply with the length of the final rush,…

Young pumas leave their natal range as subadults to seek territories of their own, with males typically dispersing farther than females. This overview surveys telemetry-based studies of puma dispersal…

An overview of documented cases in which cats kill more prey than they can eat, extending Kruuk's classic analysis to felids. Surplus killing in cats typically occurs when normal prey escape responses…

Serological and molecular surveys of wild felid populations have documented widespread infection with species-specific lentiviruses related to FIV, often at high prevalence in lions and pumas, general…

Beyond domestic cats, wild felids such as bobcats and pumas sustain natural sylvatic cycles of Toxoplasma, shedding oocysts that infect wild prey and contribute to environmental contamination. This ov…

The Black Hills of South Dakota host a recovering cougar population that has become a documented source of long-distance dispersers spreading eastward across the Great Plains. This overview synthesize…

In 2011 a young male cougar was struck and killed on a Connecticut parkway, far outside any known breeding population in the eastern United States. This overview describes how genetic analysis and a t…

The Florida panther is an isolated, endangered puma population whose taxonomy and management illustrate how classification interacts with conservation genetics. This overview explains how the Florida…

The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, under construction over US Highway 101 at Liberty Canyon near Los Angeles, is among the largest wildlife crossings in the world and was conceived largely to res…

The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is among the largest wildlife overpasses in the world, built to span a major multi-lane freeway northwest of Los Angeles and reconnect puma and other wildlife po…

This overview surveys the fossil history of the puma lineage, the New World group that includes the living puma and jaguarundi and is closely tied to the extinct American cheetah-like cat Miracinonyx.…

Beyond killing prey, big cats shape ecosystems through the fear they inspire, altering where and how prey forage. This overview synthesizes research on the landscape of fear, in which the risk of pred…

The puma has the largest latitudinal range of any wild land mammal in the Western Hemisphere, occupying habitats from boreal forest and western mountains to deserts, grasslands, swamps, and tropical j…

One of the eight felid lineages groups three superficially different cats: the puma, the cheetah, and the jaguarundi. This overview explains how molecular phylogenetics revealed this surprising relati…

One of the most counterintuitive results of felid molecular phylogenetics was that the cheetah, long treated as a unique outlier, belongs to a New World puma lineage alongside the puma and the jaguaru…

Pumas are solitary cats with large, overlapping ranges in which males associate with females only briefly during estrus. This overview surveys what telemetry and field studies reveal about puma reprod…

The puma once carried more than thirty named subspecies across its vast range, but molecular work drastically reduced this count. This overview explains how genetic analysis revealed that North Americ…

Standard home ranges flatten an animal's world onto a two-dimensional map, but cats in mountainous terrain move through strongly three-dimensional space, and their ranges shift across seasons. This ov…

This overview synthesises research on whether wildlife-tourism revenue increases local tolerance for big cats by offsetting conflict costs. It reviews cases from jaguar tourism in the Pantanal, lion t…

An overview of how large cats can structure ecosystems from the top down, with effects rippling through herbivores to vegetation and beyond. By killing and frightening herbivores, apex felids such as…