🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Zimmermann, Walpole, and Leader-Williams surveyed cattle ranchers across the Brazilian Pantanal to understand attitudes toward jaguars and pumas amid livestock depredation. They found that ranchers fr…

Alexandra Zimmermann, Matthew J. Walpole, Nigel Leader-Williams · Oryx · 2005

Harmsen and colleagues documented how different mammal species use trails versus off-trail forest to varying degrees, and showed that this differential trail use biases camera-trap data when stations…

Bart J. Harmsen, Rebecca J. Foster, Scott C. Silver, Linde E. T. Ostro, C. Patrick Doncaster · Biotropica · 2010

Terborgh and colleagues exploited a natural experiment created by a Venezuelan hydroelectric reservoir that isolated land-bridge islands lacking large predators such as jaguars and pumas. On predator-…

Terborgh, J., Lopez, L., Nunez, P. et al. · Science · 2001

Kelly and colleagues estimated puma densities at multiple Latin American sites using camera-trap capture-recapture, confronting the challenge that pumas, unlike jaguars, have relatively uniform coats…

Marcella J. Kelly, Andrew J. Noss, Marcelo S. Di Bitetti, Leonardo Maffei, Rosario L. Arispe, et al. · Journal of Mammalogy · 2008

Foster and colleagues compared the diets of jaguars and pumas in Belize using scat analysis along a gradient of human disturbance. They found the two big cats partition prey to some degree, with jagua…

Foster, R.J., Harmsen, B.J., Valkenburgh, B., Doncaster, C.P. · Journal of Zoology · 2010

Inskip and Zimmermann produced a comprehensive global review of conflict between people and wild cats, synthesising the geography, drivers, and severity of conflict across all felid species. They iden…

Chloe Inskip, Alexandra Zimmermann · Oryx · 2009

As apex predators, big cats can exert top-down control that ripples through ecosystems via trophic cascades. This overview synthesizes evidence that lions, tigers, leopards, pumas, and jaguars influen…

Circuit theory, which models animal movement as electrical current flowing across a resistance surface, has become a standard tool for mapping connectivity for wide-ranging cats. This overview surveys…

This overview examines the evolutionary relationships of Miracinonyx and the now well-supported conclusion that its cheetah-like form arose through convergence rather than common ancestry with the tru…

This overview synthesises how habitat corridors and connectivity shape big-cat conflict, focusing on the tension between maintaining predator movement and the conflict that arises where corridors pass…

The presence of cats in South America results from the Great American Biotic Interchange, when the Isthmus of Panama connected the Americas and allowed northern mammals to disperse south. This overvie…

This overview synthesises emerging priorities and frontiers in human-big cat conflict and coexistence research. It reviews calls for more rigorous impact evaluation, greater integration of social scie…

The jaguarundi is an unusually shaped small cat of the Americas, with an elongated body and uniform coat, whose molecular placement revealed it as a close relative of the puma and cheetah within the p…

This overview synthesises evidence on why deterrents, lights, sirens, scent, and visual scarecrows, often lose effectiveness as predators habituate. It examines the behavioural ecology of neophobia an…

Across much of Latin America jaguars and pumas occur together, and their coexistence is mediated by differences in prey, habitat, and behavior. This overview synthesizes research showing that jaguars…

This overview reviews human-felid conflict involving both jaguars and pumas across smallholder and indigenous landscapes of Central America, where the two cats overlap and complicate attribution of li…

A survey of how jaguars and pumas, the two large cats of the Neotropics, coexist across much of their shared range by partitioning prey, space and time. Jaguars generally take larger prey, including p…

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…

Landscape genetics links genetic patterns to the features of the terrain between populations, a toolkit central to studying fragmentation in cats. This overview surveys the methods, from microsatellit…

This overview synthesises evidence linking the depletion of natural prey, peccaries, deer, capybara, guanaco, to increased jaguar and puma depredation on livestock across the Americas. It reviews stud…

Where pumas and jaguars overlap in the Neotropics, the puma often shifts its niche in response to the larger cat. This overview synthesizes research showing that in sympatry pumas tend to take smaller…

This overview synthesises studies across Latin America comparing ranchers' perceived livestock losses to jaguars and pumas with verified depredation, a recurring theme in big-cat conflict. It reviews…

Range expansions often begin with a handful of pioneering individuals making improbable journeys into vacant habitat, and this overview examines how movement science documents these events for cats. W…

Rivers, streams, and the vegetated strips along them often serve as natural movement corridors for cats, offering cover, water, prey, and continuous habitat threading through otherwise open or develop…

This overview examines the persistent gap between perceived and actual risk in human-big cat conflict, a theme cutting across lion, tiger, leopard, puma, and jaguar systems. It synthesises research sh…

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 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.…

The puma has the largest latitudinal range of any wild land mammal in the Western Hemisphere, occupying habitats from boreal forest and western mountains to deserts, grasslands, swamps, and tropical j…

One of the eight felid lineages groups three superficially different cats: the puma, the cheetah, and the jaguarundi. This overview explains how molecular phylogenetics revealed this surprising relati…

One of the most counterintuitive results of felid molecular phylogenetics was that the cheetah, long treated as a unique outlier, belongs to a New World puma lineage alongside the puma and the jaguaru…