🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

The IUCN Cat Specialist Group convened a Cat Classification Task Force to reconcile decades of conflicting felid taxonomy with modern genetic and morphological evidence. The resulting consensus recogn…

Andrew C. Kitchener, Christiane Breitenmoser-Wursten, Eduardo Eizirik, et al. (Cat Classification Task Force) · Cat News Special Issue · 2017

This study recovered mitochondrial genomes from the extinct scimitar-toothed cat Homotherium using ancient DNA, including a specimen from the permafrost, to place the sabertooths relative to living ca…

Johanna L. A. Paijmans, Michael Hofreiter, Ross Barnett, et al. · Current Biology · 2017

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, CITES, governs cross-border trade in wildlife, and the world's big cats are listed on its Appendix I, banning commercial international trad…

Namibia's communal conservancy program, which devolves rights to manage and benefit from wildlife to local communities, is among the most studied community-based conservation models and is credited wi…

Complementing maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome markers trace paternal lineages and reveal male-specific patterns of dispersal and mating in cats. This overview surveys how feline Y…

Recovering DNA from extinct cats and historical museum specimens requires specialized techniques to cope with degraded, fragmented, and contaminated genetic material. This overview surveys how researc…

Big cats are often used as umbrella species, whose large area requirements mean that protecting them also protects many co-occurring species, and as flagship species, whose charisma mobilizes public s…

Compensation and insurance schemes aim to offset the costs that big cats impose on livestock owners, reducing the incentive for retaliatory killing. This overview surveys research evaluating these fin…

Conservation managers must decide which populations to treat as separate units for protection, breeding, and translocation, and genetics provides the primary evidence. This overview surveys the concep…

Because enforcement alone struggles to stop trade driven by persistent consumer demand, conservationists increasingly invest in demand-reduction interventions aimed at changing the behavior of people…

Forensic science has become a powerful tool against the illegal trade in big cat parts, allowing seized skins, bones, and other products to be identified to species, and sometimes to population or ind…

In many cats, one sex disperses farther than the other, with males typically moving while females remain near their natal range, a pattern that leaves distinct genetic footprints. This overview survey…

The end of the Pleistocene saw the loss of many large cats, including sabertooths, cave lions, American lions, and the American cheetah, as part of the broader megafaunal extinction. This overview sur…

Small or isolated cat populations frequently show the hallmarks of inbreeding depression, including reduced fertility, abnormal sperm, congenital defects, weakened immunity, and elevated juvenile mort…

The major histocompatibility complex encodes immune-recognition molecules whose diversity is crucial for resisting pathogens, and its depletion is a key concern in inbred cat populations. This overvie…

Before genome sequencing became routine, microsatellites, short tandem repeats scattered through the genome, were the workhorse markers of felid population and forensic genetics. This overview surveys…

Mitochondrial DNA, with its maternal inheritance, high copy number, and relatively fast evolution, was central to the first molecular phylogenies and phylogeographic studies of cats. This overview sur…

Estimating when cat lineages diverged requires calibrating molecular substitution rates against the fossil record, a process fraught with uncertainty when fossils are sparse. This overview surveys how…

Natural history museum collections preserve specimens spanning centuries, providing a genetic archive of felid populations as they existed before recent declines. This overview surveys how museum geno…

Many protected areas exist on maps but lack the staff, funding, and enforcement to deliver real protection, a phenomenon known as paper parks. This overview surveys research using tools such as the Ma…

Habitat loss and fragmentation increasingly isolate cat populations into small patches separated by inhospitable terrain, reducing effective population size and gene flow. This overview surveys how co…

Since the first lightly sequenced domestic cat genome, feline genomics has advanced to highly contiguous, chromosome-level assemblies for the domestic cat and an expanding set of wild species. This ov…

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…

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…

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 are obligate carnivores, physiologically dependent on a meat diet, and comparative genomics has uncovered the molecular underpinnings of this specialization. This overview surveys findings that f…

The modern cats diversified into roughly forty species within the last eleven million years, a relatively rapid radiation that left a tangled phylogeny marked by short internal branches. This overview…

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…

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…

Many large carnivore landscapes span international borders, prompting the creation of transboundary protected areas, sometimes called peace parks, that link reserves across countries into larger conse…