🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Wild cats host a diverse array of helminths, including roundworms such as Toxocara and Toxascaris, tapeworms like Spirometra and Taenia, hookworms and lungworms, acquired largely through their prey. T…

Hemotropic mycoplasmas, formerly called Haemobartonella, attach to red blood cells and can cause infectious anemia in felids, with wild cats carrying these bacteria across many populations. This overv…

Hidden Markov models infer an animal's unobserved behavioral state, such as resting, foraging, or directed travel, from the statistical signatures of its movement, typically step lengths and turning a…

Most big cats organize their use of space through a land-tenure system in which residents hold home ranges advertised by scent and maintained partly through avoidance. This overview synthesizes the ge…

The advent of GPS collars and biologging sensors has revolutionized the study of big-cat movement, hunting, and energetics. This overview synthesizes how high-resolution location data revealed kill si…

Living near people may force cats to expend energy differently, and this overview synthesizes research linking human-modified landscapes to the energetics of felid movement. Building on biologging stu…

This overview synthesises research on the concept of problem individuals, specific big cats responsible for repeated attacks on livestock or people, and how to identify and manage them. It reviews evi…

Sex-biased dispersal is widely interpreted as a mechanism that reduces the chance of mating with close relatives, helping felids avoid the fitness costs of inbreeding. This overview surveys evidence t…

Small, isolated cat populations risk inbreeding depression, and genetic rescue, introducing individuals from other populations, has been used to counter it. This overview surveys the concept and its f…

A survey of the lethal interactions between cats and dogs that share prey and space, a major structuring force in carnivore communities. Lions and hyenas kill wild dogs and cheetahs; pumas and coyotes…

In freeway-bounded puma populations around Los Angeles, killing of pumas by other pumas is an unusually frequent cause of death, a pattern biologists link to compressed home ranges and the inability o…

Across much of Latin America jaguars and pumas occur together, and their coexistence is mediated by differences in prey, habitat, and behavior. This overview synthesizes research showing that jaguars…

This overview reviews human-felid conflict involving both jaguars and pumas across smallholder and indigenous landscapes of Central America, where the two cats overlap and complicate attribution of li…

A survey of how jaguars and pumas, the two large cats of the Neotropics, coexist across much of their shared range by partitioning prey, space and time. Jaguars generally take larger prey, including p…

This overview synthesizes how GPS cluster methods have been applied across felid species to estimate how often cats kill and what they eat, turning location data into quantitative diet and predation-r…

A survey of how researchers locate and interpret felid kill sites and the biases that affect the resulting estimates of kill rate and prey composition. Field investigation of GPS clusters, snow-tracki…

This overview synthesises studies identifying which landscape and management variables predict where big cats kill livestock, a recurring quantitative question across conflict research. It reviews con…

Landscape genetics links genetic patterns to the features of the terrain between populations, a toolkit central to studying fragmentation in cats. This overview surveys the methods, from microsatellit…

Landscape genetics, combining molecular markers with spatial models, has become essential for detecting how roads and development fragment felid populations and for prioritising connectivity. This ove…

This overview examines how the ecological concept of the landscape of fear, the spatial distribution of perceived predation risk, has been applied to human-carnivore conflict. It synthesises work expl…

Two dominant modeling frameworks translate landscape resistance into predicted movement corridors, and this overview compares them. Least-cost path analysis finds the single cheapest route between hab…

Beyond habitat loss, human landscapes emit pervasive light and noise, and this overview examines their effects on the movement and activity of cats. Artificial light at night can alter the cover-depen…

Southern California's cougars persist in mountain ranges increasingly isolated by freeways and development, and this overview examines the science of designing functional linkages between blocks such…

This overview surveys the global evidence on livestock-guarding dogs (LGDs), breeds such as Anatolian shepherds, Kangals, and Maremmas, bonded to herds to deter predators through presence, barking, an…

A survey of how darkness and the lunar cycle influence the hunting success and behavior of largely nocturnal cats. Many felids hunt more successfully on dark nights when reduced visibility favors the…

Combining magnetometers with accelerometers gives biologgers both the orientation and the dynamic motion of an animal's body, enabling unusually detailed reconstruction of hunting behavior. This overv…

Many urban felid populations centre on protected areas embedded in or abutting cities, from Sanjay Gandhi National Park to Griffith Park and Table Mountain National Park, making the park-city interfac…

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…