🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

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…

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…

An overview of the long-debated tendency of cats to kill the young, old, sick and injured disproportionately, and what it implies for predation impact. If predators chiefly remove individuals with low…

Interpreting antibody tests in wild felids is complicated by cross-reactivity, where antibodies to one pathogen react with tests for a related agent, blurring diagnoses. This overview surveys the diag…

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…

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…

An overview comparing the hunting effectiveness of solitary felids with the cooperative hunting of lions, addressing why most cats hunt alone. Solitary ambush hunting suits stalking predators that tar…

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…

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,…

Where continuous corridors are impossible, smaller patches of habitat can act as stepping stones that let animals move across otherwise inhospitable terrain. This overview surveys the role of stepping…

This overview compares the main architectures of modern GPS collars and their consequences for felid fieldwork. Store-on-board units log positions to internal memory and require recapture or a timed d…

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…

Mountain lion exposure to plague is tied to the disease ecology of their rodent and lagomorph prey, which serve as the reservoir and amplifier of Yersinia pestis. This overview surveys how sylvatic pl…

Functional connectivity, whether animals actually move between habitat patches, is best assessed with movement data from collared cats. This overview surveys how GPS telemetry, step-selection function…

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 wildlife crossings along the Trans-Canada Highway through Banff National Park constitute one of the longest-running, most comprehensively monitored road-mitigation programs in the world, and this…

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 COVID-19 lockdowns created an unprecedented, sudden reduction in human activity dubbed the anthropause, and this overview examines what it revealed and may yet reveal about how cats respond to hum…

This overview reviews frameworks that array human-carnivore relationships along a continuum from acute conflict through coexistence to active stewardship, and that match interventions to a situation's…

This overview synthesises the contested evidence on translocating conflict big cats, capturing and releasing them elsewhere, as a management response. It reviews studies, prominently from Indian leopa…

This overview surveys the fossil history of the puma lineage, the New World group that includes the living puma and jaguarundi and is closely tied to the extinct American cheetah-like cat Miracinonyx.…

This overview synthesises the full toolbox of measures used to mitigate big-cat conflict, organising them into prevention (husbandry, fortified enclosures, guard animals, deterrents, fencing, zoning),…