🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Solitary tigers coordinate spacing and reproduction largely through scent. This overview synthesizes research on how tigers spray scent on trees, scrape the ground, rub cheeks, and deposit feces and u…

Wild cats communicate through scent-marking, spraying, scraping, cheek-rubbing, and clawing, leaving signals at conspicuous sites that they revisit, behavior that camera traps are uniquely positioned…

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…

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…

Before and alongside molecular work, tiger subspecies were assessed by measuring skulls and body proportions. This overview explains how craniometric analyses, comparing dimensions across museum speci…

Wire snares are among the most pervasive and indiscriminate threats to big cats, killing or maiming tigers, leopards, lions, and other predators directly and decimating the prey populations they depen…

This overview reviews how wire snaring set for bushmeat indirectly drives big-cat conflict and mortality, a growing threat across Africa and Asia. It synthesises evidence that snares intended for ante…

Across Sumatra, widespread snaring depletes both tigers and their prey, hollowing out forests that still appear intact on satellite imagery. This overview surveys how indiscriminate wire snares set fo…

Snow leopards are killed and traded for their thick pelts and their bones, the latter increasingly drawn into the same markets that consume tiger and lion bone. This overview surveys research on snow…

Snow leopards depend primarily on wild mountain ungulates such as blue sheep, ibex, argali, and marmots, and the health of these prey populations governs snow leopard numbers. This overview surveys re…

Felid sociality varies from the solitary tiger and most small cats to the group-living lion, and captive social management must respect these differences. This overview surveys research on housing cat…

This overview synthesises research showing that much apparent human-carnivore conflict is in fact conflict between human groups, communities versus conservation authorities, locals versus outsiders, e…

The tiger is a powerful solitary ambush predator capable of taking prey far larger than itself. This overview surveys research on tiger hunting, including the reliance on dense cover for close approac…

This overview surveys research treating tiger populations as networks of sources, where reproduction exceeds mortality, and sinks, where animals die faster than they breed but persist through immigrat…

Tiger persistence across Asia increasingly depends on networks of reserves connected by corridors. This overview synthesizes the source-sink framework, in which well-protected core reserves with abund…

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…

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…

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,…

In India and Southeast Asia, tigers move between protected areas through a matrix of forest fragments, plantations, and human settlements, and this overview examines the role of stepping-stone habitat…

Different cat species carry different natural marks, tiger stripes, leopard and jaguar rosettes, ocelot chains, cheetah spots, and pattern-matching software exploits these to identify individuals semi…

Although many cats avoid water, some are capable swimmers, and a few hunt in it. This overview surveys aquatic locomotion in felids, focusing on the fishing cat, whose partially webbed paws and water-…

Unlike most cats, tigers are strong swimmers and readily enter water, a trait with ecological significance in wet habitats. This overview synthesizes observations of tigers swimming between islands in…

Radio and GPS telemetry have revealed how young tigers leave their natal range, search for vacant territory, and establish themselves as breeders. This overview surveys telemetry-based findings on tig…

This overview revisits the historical record of man-eating tigers in the Himalayan foothills, centred on the Champawat tigress reputed to have killed hundreds before being shot by Jim Corbett in the e…

Adopted at the 2010 St. Petersburg summit, the Global Tiger Recovery Program coordinated commitments from the thirteen tiger range countries around the goal of doubling wild tigers. This overview surv…

The Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool, SMART, has become a global standard for making ranger patrols data-driven across big cat reserves. This overview surveys research on how SMART records patrol…

TX2 refers to the global commitment, adopted at the 2010 St. Petersburg Tiger Summit, to double the number of wild tigers by 2022. This overview surveys the science behind the target and how progress…

Attacks on humans by tigers, though rare relative to encounters, have a long and consequential history. This overview synthesizes what ecological research suggests about the circumstances that lead a…

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…

Cats span a remarkable size range, from the kilogram-scale rusty-spotted and black-footed cats to tigers weighing hundreds of kilograms, and body size has evolved repeatedly in different directions. T…