🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Roads, railways, dams, and energy infrastructure are expanding rapidly through tropical and montane cat habitat, fragmenting landscapes and opening forests to settlement and hunting. This overview sur…

No single indicator captures welfare reliably, so the field has moved toward integrated assessment combining multiple lines of evidence. This overview surveys how comprehensive welfare evaluation for…

Linking genome resource banks to studbook management ensures that banked genetics are tracked and deployed to maximize population diversity. This overview surveys how biobanked samples are recorded al…

The Sundarbans lie in a cyclone-prone delta where climate change may intensify storms and surge, with consequences for tigers, prey, and people. This overview surveys how major cyclones reshape the fo…

The response to catnip and related iridoids is not unique to domestic cats; various wild felids also react. This overview surveys reports that some big cats, such as lions and others, show interest in…

Tigers maintain a land-tenure system in which resident adults hold largely exclusive territories advertised and defended through scent marks, scrapes, and vocalisations. This overview surveys radio-te…

Projecting future habitat for cats requires anticipating not just climate but human land-use change, which is modeled with scenario-based simulation tools. This overview surveys approaches that foreca…

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…

Quantifying how habitat is broken apart requires landscape metrics that capture patch size, edge, isolation, and configuration. This overview surveys the metrics commonly applied to cat habitat, from…

Landscape genetics has become a powerful tool for assessing whether tiger corridors actually carry gene flow between reserves in central India. This overview surveys research that samples tiger DNA ac…

Body size affects how easily an animal gains or loses heat, and this overview reviews its thermoregulatory consequences for big cats. Because surface area grows more slowly than volume with size, larg…

Detecting how cats respond to climate and habitat change requires monitoring at scales that camera-trap networks increasingly provide. This overview surveys how coordinated camera-trap arrays generate…

An overview of how leopards coexist with dominant tigers in Asian forests by partitioning prey size, space and activity. Where tigers are abundant, leopards tend to take smaller prey, shift toward are…

Litter size in cats varies within and between species, influenced by maternal age and condition, resource availability, and species biology. This overview surveys typical litter sizes from small felid…

Captive cats often live longer than their wild counterparts, raising questions about how reproductive performance changes across an extended lifespan. This overview surveys data on longevity and repro…

This overview synthesises research on the Bengal tigers of the Sundarbans, the mangrove delta straddling India and Bangladesh, notorious for a comparatively high rate of fatal attacks on people. It re…

Conservation genetics distinguishes formal subspecies from management units and evolutionarily significant units, and this distinction is central to tiger planning. This overview explains how managers…

Degenerative joint disease is extremely common in older cats, both domestic and exotic, yet often under-recognised because cats mask pain. This overview surveys how osteoarthritis is detected and mana…

This overview synthesises research using spatial analysis to identify hotspots where big-cat attacks on livestock or people concentrate, enabling targeted mitigation. It reviews methods, kernel densit…

Tigress cubs depend on their mother for up to two years while acquiring the skills to hunt large prey alone. This overview surveys research on tiger maternal care, including den selection, the gradual…

Early-life experience profoundly shapes felid behaviour, and the routine hand-rearing and early maternal separation used in cub-petting and some breeding programs carry developmental risks. This overv…

Mean kinship is a central metric used to decide which captive cats should breed in order to preserve genetic diversity. This overview surveys how mean kinship, the average relatedness of an individual…

Combinations of the alpha-2 agonist medetomidine (or dexmedetomidine) with the dissociative ketamine are a mainstay for immobilizing large felids, valued because the alpha-2 component provides sedatio…

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…

An overview of how the loss of large cats such as lions, tigers and pumas can unleash smaller predators with cascading consequences for biodiversity. When apex felids decline, the intermediate carnivo…

Estimating how many big cats occupy an area is a central and challenging task in their ecology and conservation. This overview reviews the main methods, from individual-identification camera-trap capt…

Microsatellite genetic markers have made it possible to assign parentage in wild and captive cats, resolving questions about mating systems that behavior alone cannot answer. This overview surveys the…

Projecting a species into the future requires transferring a model into climate conditions that may not exist anywhere today, raising the risk of unreliable extrapolation. This overview surveys the pr…

Mathematical models help predict how diseases spread through felid populations and whether outbreaks will fizzle or explode. This overview surveys epidemiological modeling applied to wild cats, from e…

As parts of the Sundarbans are projected to be lost to the sea, researchers ask which areas might persist as climate refugia and whether tigers could relocate within or beyond the delta. This overview…