🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Measuring whether a conservation intervention actually helped requires comparing outcomes against a credible counterfactual of what would have happened otherwise. This overview surveys quasi-experimen…

The most realistic forecasts of cat futures combine climate change with land-use change, since for many forest cats habitat conversion is the faster, larger threat. This overview surveys how integrate…

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed a web of animal infections, with cats among the susceptible species alongside mink, ferrets and others. This overview surveys cross-species SARS-CoV-2 dynamics relevant…

Wildlife crossings are often designed with large mammals in mind, but smaller felids such as bobcats have distinct preferences, and this overview examines how they use such structures. Monitoring show…

As awareness of light pollution grows, planners increasingly consider wildlife-sensitive lighting and the preservation of dark corridors to maintain connectivity for nocturnal animals. This overview s…

While remote darting is essential for immobilizing dangerous felids, the dart itself can cause injury, including muscle trauma, infection at the injection site, bone impact, or, rarely, penetration of…

Declawing of big cats, performed in some private and entertainment settings to reduce injury risk to handlers, removes the last bone of each toe and has lasting welfare consequences. This overview sur…

Emerging deep-learning methods aim to automate not just species classification but individual identification, re-identifying specific cats from their coat patterns to build capture histories for captu…

Conservation managers must decide which populations to treat as separate units for protection, breeding, and translocation, and genetics provides the primary evidence. This overview surveys the concep…

Home ranges are often summarized by isopleths, contours of the utilization distribution enclosing a chosen percentage of use, with the full range commonly set at 95 percent and the core at 50 percent.…

Demodex mites live in the skin of many mammals, usually harmlessly, but can proliferate to cause demodectic mange when host immunity falters. This overview surveys reports of demodicosis in wild and c…

Beyond individual illness, bovine tuberculosis may reshape lion populations and social behavior over time. This overview synthesizes research and modeling on how chronic TB reduces survival and reprod…

Reliable anthropogenic food can boost carnivore survival and reproduction, producing higher densities and altered population dynamics in subsidised urban environments. This overview synthesises resear…

Female cats select sheltered den sites to give birth and protect altricial young during their most vulnerable weeks. This overview surveys how felid mothers choose dens that provide concealment and th…

This overview surveys dental microwear texture analysis, a method that examines microscopic wear features on tooth surfaces to infer what an animal ate shortly before death. In fossil cats, the techni…

This overview examines one of the defining trends in felid evolution: the progressive loss and simplification of teeth from the relatively full dentition of Proailurus to the highly reduced tooth row…

A core prediction of climate change is that mountain species will shift upslope, and detecting such shifts in elusive cats is a methodological challenge. This overview surveys the evidence and approac…

Detecting Mycobacterium bovis and related mycobacteria in wild carnivores is notoriously difficult, complicating both research and management. This overview surveys the diagnostic toolkit applied to f…

Wild cats span a spectrum of daily activity, from strongly nocturnal to crepuscular, diurnal, or flexibly cathemeral, and camera-trap timestamps are the primary tool for documenting these patterns at…

Studies of leopard diet around Mumbai and across rural Maharashtra consistently find heavy reliance on domestic animals, particularly free-ranging dogs, alongside livestock, feral pigs, rodents and sm…

An overview of how co-occurring small felids divide prey to coexist, a less-studied counterpart to big-cat guild ecology. Where species such as ocelots, margays, oncillas, jungle cats, leopard cats an…

Cats walk on their toes, a digitigrade posture that lengthens the effective limb and changes the geometry of force transmission. This overview reviews how toe-walking affects stride length, speed pote…

Captive big cats have become subjects of cognitive testing that reveals their learning abilities and informs enrichment. This overview surveys research using touchscreen and apparatus-based discrimina…

Jaguars and other Neotropical cats inhabit diverse tropical ecosystems where they encounter a wide array of pathogens and parasites, though their disease ecology remains less studied than that of Afri…

As conservation efforts seek to rewild felids and support natural range expansion, disease becomes a critical consideration. This overview surveys the disease dimensions of rewilding and range recover…

Small wild felids such as the Pallas cat, sand cat and various others have distinctive disease ecologies that are often poorly studied yet conservation-relevant. This overview surveys disease in small…

Felids living at the edges of cities, such as bobcats and mountain lions in California, face a distinctive disease landscape shaped by human activity. This overview surveys the disease ecology of urba…

Captive felids in zoos and sanctuaries require systematic disease surveillance both for their own health and as sentinels for emerging threats. This overview surveys health monitoring in captive cat c…

Captive cheetahs experience a striking array of diseases rarely seen at such rates in other felids, including Helicobacter gastritis, kidney disease, and severe coronavirus outbreaks. This overview su…

Lions are unusually social among cats, and their pride structure shapes how pathogens spread through populations. This overview surveys the interplay between lion social organization and disease trans…