🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

After poaching wiped out tigers in two Indian reserves, Sariska and Panna, conservationists attempted to rebuild populations by translocating wild tigers from source reserves. This overview surveys th…

Tiger reserves, especially in India, embody a particular protected-area model built around strictly protected cores surrounded by multiple-use buffer zones, often combined with voluntary relocation of…

Faced with range-wide decline, tiger conservation has emphasized protecting a network of source sites, well-managed core areas capable of producing surplus animals to repopulate surrounding land. This…

Monitoring the illegal trade in tiger parts relies heavily on analyzing seizures of skins, bones, claws, and other products intercepted by authorities. This overview surveys research, much of it compi…

Where tigers and people share landscapes, conflict over livestock and occasional attacks on humans shapes both tiger survival and local attitudes. This overview synthesizes studies on the circumstance…

The tall-grass and riverine forest mosaic of the Terai along the Himalayan foothills supports some of the highest tiger densities on Earth. This overview reviews how the exceptional productivity of th…

Tigers occasionally range to the edges of villages, towns and agricultural land bordering reserves such as the Sundarbans and central Indian parks, creating acute conflict in densely populated South A…

The Sundarbans, a vast tidal mangrove forest straddling India and Bangladesh, hosts a tiger population unlike any other. This overview reviews how these tigers swim between islands, drink brackish or…

In many Asian forests tigers share the landscape with leopards and packs of dholes, the Asiatic wild dog, forming a guild that partitions prey and space. This overview synthesizes research on how thes…

The combination of the dissociative anesthetic tiletamine with the benzodiazepine zolazepam, marketed as Telazol or Zoletil, is widely used for chemical restraint and anesthesia of felids ranging from…

Owners often note that cats anticipate feeding times and other daily events, raising questions about feline timing abilities. This overview surveys research and theory on how cats track time, includin…

Beyond static home ranges, researchers increasingly analyze how often and how regularly an animal returns to particular places, using revisitation and residence-time metrics. This overview describes t…

Time-to-event, space-to-event, and instantaneous-sampling estimators are recognition-free methods that infer animal abundance from how long, or across how much sampled space, one waits until an animal…

Programmable drop-off mechanisms release a collar from the animal at a scheduled time, sparing researchers a second risky capture and ensuring the device does not burden the cat indefinitely. This ove…

Newborn cats are born with sealed eyelids and closed ear canals, and the timing of their opening marks early developmental progress used to age young animals. This overview surveys data on when eyes a…

The cat auditory cortex has been a foundational model for understanding how the brain represents sound. This overview surveys its tonotopic organization, in which neurons are arranged according to the…

True tool use is essentially absent in cats, but felids display tool-adjacent behaviours that involve manipulating objects and environments to achieve goals. This overview surveys examples such as usi…

For cats with chronic gingivostomatitis refractory to medical management, full-mouth or partial-mouth tooth extraction has emerged as the most effective treatment, with many cats showing substantial o…

A predator teeth are subjected to repeated high loads, and this overview surveys patterns of tooth fracture and wear in wild felids and what they reveal. Broken canines and worn carnassials accumulate…

Rugged terrain creates a mosaic of microclimates, with cool, shaded, or moist pockets that can buffer species against regional warming, a key idea for montane cats. This overview surveys how topograph…

This overview synthesises research on whether wildlife-tourism revenue increases local tolerance for big cats by offsetting conflict costs. It reviews cases from jaguar tourism in the Pantanal, lion t…

Wildlife tourism, much of it built around charismatic big cats, generates revenue that can fund conservation and provide community benefits, but the distribution of those benefits strongly affects con…

While cats typically host Toxoplasma without illness, immunocompromise can unleash severe, even fatal toxoplasmosis in felids. This overview surveys the conditions under which the parasite causes clin…

Demand for big cat parts in traditional medicine, particularly bones believed to treat ailments, is a primary driver of poaching and trade affecting tigers, leopards, lions, and others. This overview…

Roads impede wildlife not only by the physical danger of traffic but through sensory disturbance, and this overview examines how noise and artificial light can deter felids from approaching or crossin…

Cats can be trained using positive reinforcement, and this overview surveys research and practice in feline training and cognitive enrichment. It examines the use of clicker and reward-based methods t…

Machine-learning classifiers trained on camera-trap images often perform poorly when applied to new locations, a failure rooted in training-data bias and domain shift, the mismatch between the backgro…

Beyond distribution models, conservationists use structured climate vulnerability assessments that combine a species' exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity into an overall risk rating. This ove…

The Amur leopard's range straddles the border between the Russian Far East and northeast China, making transboundary cooperation essential to its conservation. This overview surveys research and polic…

The snow leopard's range spans a dozen countries across the mountains of Asia, making transboundary cooperation essential. This overview synthesizes how conservation has shifted toward large, connecte…