🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

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…

Whole-genome sequencing reveals long stretches where an individual inherited identical segments from both parents, called runs of homozygosity, which accumulate with inbreeding and small population si…

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…

Felids scratch trees and other surfaces and create ground scrapes that combine visual marks with scent from glands in the paws. This overview surveys research on the marking function of scratching acr…

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…

Infanticide by males is documented or inferred across many felid species, from lions to tigers, leopards, pumas, and others, wherever killing dependent young can hasten a female's next conception. Thi…

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…

Applying the GPS-cluster method developed for pumas to snow leopards has begun to quantify how often these cats kill and what they eat, central questions for both ecology and conflict management. 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…

Where multiple cat species coexist, smaller felids often adjust their use of space and time to avoid larger, dominant competitors, and camera-trap data are a primary means of detecting these interacti…

Building on spatially explicit capture-recapture, spatial mark-resight and unmarked SECR methods estimate density when few or no animals can be individually identified, exploiting the spatial pattern…

Pumas, also called cougars or mountain lions, are solitary felids whose social lives revolve around spatial organisation maintained largely through scent communication. This overview surveys GPS and f…

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 Asian golden cat, Catopuma temminckii, ranges across South and Southeast Asia and shows considerable variation in coat color and pattern, from plain golden to spotted and grey forms. This overview…

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…

The bay cat lineage is one of the eight major felid lineages and comprises three Southeast Asian cats: the bay cat, the Asian golden cat, and the marbled cat. This overview surveys the lineage, placin…

Molecular phylogenetics partitions all living cats into eight monophyletic lineages, a framework that now organizes felid taxonomy. This overview names and characterizes them: the Panthera lineage (bi…

Modern cats are divided into eight monophyletic lineages: the Panthera lineage (lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, snow leopards, clouded leopards), the bay cat lineage, the caracal lineage, the ocelot…