🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

The interior of the cat's nose contains intricate scrolled bones called turbinates that are covered with olfactory and respiratory tissue. This overview surveys how the feline turbinates increase the…

Natal dispersal, the movement of young animals from their birth area to where they will breed, varies in distance and sex bias across cat species. This overview compiles comparative data on dispersal…

India's periodic all-India tiger estimation is among the largest wildlife surveys on Earth, combining sign-based occupancy across vast landscapes with camera-trap capture-recapture at intensively samp…

Where the ranges of the bobcat and the Canada lynx overlap along the southern edge of the lynx distribution, the two species occasionally hybridize, producing animals sometimes called blynx. This over…

This overview synthesises evidence linking the depletion of natural prey, peccaries, deer, capybara, guanaco, to increased jaguar and puma depredation on livestock across the Americas. It reviews stud…

Modern exhibit design aims to provide not just naturalistic appearance for visitors but genuine behavioural opportunity for animals. This overview surveys principles of felid exhibit design: complex,…

Cats navigate complex home ranges and occasionally return home over surprising distances, prompting interest in their spatial abilities. This overview surveys research and historical experiments on fe…

This overview examines how the neck and skull anatomy of Smilodon and other sabertooths reveal the mechanics of the killing bite. Because the jaw muscles alone produced a comparatively weak bite, much…

Driving long canines into prey is thought to have required powerful neck muscles in sabertoothed cats, and this overview reviews the evidence for enhanced head-depression musculature. Enlarged attachm…

Careful necropsy and pathological examination underpin much of what is known about causes of death and disease in wild felids. This overview surveys the role of standardized post-mortem investigation…

Kittens are born altricial, with eyes and ears closed and limited mobility, and undergo rapid sensory and motor development over the first weeks of life. This overview surveys the milestones of neonat…

Newborn kittens are blind and deaf, so smell and touch guide their earliest survival behaviors, especially locating the mother's nipple to nurse. This overview surveys how neonatal kittens rely on olf…

Newborn kittens cannot regulate their own temperature well, and this overview reviews how they stay warm. With limited ability to generate and conserve heat, neonatal kittens depend on the warmth of t…

The classic catnip reaction is driven by nepetalactone, a volatile iridoid compound in the catnip plant that cats detect through smell. This overview surveys how nepetalactone is thought to act, bindi…

Mother cats choose concealed, defensible nest sites and may relocate kittens repeatedly during the early weeks, carrying them by the scruff. This overview surveys research on maternal care, including…

Net squared displacement, the squared straight-line distance from a starting point over time, provides a simple but powerful way to classify whole-trajectory movement strategies. This overview describ…

Cats require dietary niacin because, although many animals can synthesize niacin from the amino acid tryptophan, cats divert tryptophan down a competing metabolic pathway so efficiently that little is…

Beyond taurine and arginine, cats depend on several other nutrients in preformed, animal-derived forms, and this overview reviews them. Cats have a limited ability to synthesise niacin from tryptophan…

Whether species can evolve or behaviorally adjust their climate niche fast enough to keep pace with change is central to predicting their fate. This overview surveys the concept of niche conservatism,…

Many landscapes host several small cats at once, and this overview reviews how they coexist through niche partitioning. Studies of Neotropical and Asian cat assemblages show that sympatric species div…

Where several large cats share a landscape, they coexist by partitioning resources along axes of prey size, habitat, and activity. This overview synthesizes research across continents showing how tige…

Where pumas and jaguars overlap in the Neotropics, the puma often shifts its niche in response to the larger cat. This overview synthesizes research showing that in sympatry pumas tend to take smaller…

This overview synthesises evidence on nonlethal tools, secure night penning, fladry (flagged lines), turbo-fladry, motion-activated lights and sound, and guard animals, used to protect livestock from…

Most mammals, including cats, have less elaborate color vision than birds, reptiles, or many fish, a pattern often traced to a nocturnal phase early in mammalian evolution. This overview surveys the h…

Leopards sharing space with dense human populations frequently become more strictly nocturnal, compressing their activity into the hours when people are least active. This overview surveys telemetry a…

Many felids become more strictly nocturnal as human activity increases, a pattern documented from Indian leopards to Californian bobcats and pumas. This overview synthesises camera-trap and telemetry…

Chronic exposure to anthropogenic noise can elevate stress hormones and impair health and reproduction in wildlife, a pathway potentially affecting urban-edge carnivores. This overview synthesises phy…

Whether snow leopards maintain stable home ranges or wander nomadically is a genuine and consequential question, and this overview examines the evidence telemetry has brought to bear. Resident adults…

Capturing and sampling wild felids is costly and risky, so researchers increasingly turn to non-invasive methods, especially analysis of feces, to detect pathogens and parasites. This overview surveys…

Protecting livestock and poultry from felid predation through non-lethal means is central to reducing conflict and retaliatory killing at the urban and agricultural edge. This overview synthesises res…