🧬 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

Carbone and Gittleman derived a simple, general rule linking carnivore population density to the productivity of the prey base, showing across species that roughly the same amount of prey biomass supp…

Carbone, C. & Gittleman, J.L. · Science · 2002

Cochran and Lord described one of the first practical VHF radio-tracking systems built for free-ranging wildlife, pairing miniaturized transmitters with directional receiving antennas to fix animal po…

William W. Cochran, Rexford D. Lord Jr. · The Journal of Wildlife Management · 1963

The landmark synthesis that re-anchored modern felid taxonomy. A 16-member IUCN Cat Specialist Group task force reviewed morphological, molecular, biogeographic, and behavioral evidence across all liv…

Kitchener AC, Breitenmoser-Wursten C, Eizirik E, et al. · Cat News Special Issue 11 · 2017

This morphological revision used skull measurements and pelage to assess variation among mainland Southeast Asian tigers and supported recognition of the Malayan tiger as distinct from the Indochinese…

Mazak JH, Groves CP · Mammalian Biology · 2006

This study moved camera-trap monitoring beyond single snapshots to open-population modeling, using repeated annual photographic surveys at Nagarahole to estimate survival, recruitment, and population…

K. Ullas Karanth, James D. Nichols, N. Samba Kumar, James E. Hines · Ecology · 2006

Royle, Karanth, Gopalaswamy, and Kumar developed a Bayesian implementation of spatially explicit capture-recapture tailored to camera-trap data, using data augmentation and Markov chain Monte Carlo to…

J. Andrew Royle, K. Ullas Karanth, Arjun M. Gopalaswamy, N. Samba Kumar · Ecology · 2009

A companion to their prey-selection study, Karanth and Sunquist examined how the hunting behavior, social organization and activity patterns of tigers, leopards and dholes in Nagarahole map onto their…

Karanth, K.U. & Sunquist, M.E. · Journal of Zoology · 2000

This study in Nagarahole, southern India, examined how three large predators, the tiger, leopard, and dhole, partition a shared prey community. By analyzing kills and prey availability, the authors sh…

Karanth, K. U., Sunquist, M. E. · Journal of Animal Ecology · 2000

This influential comparative study estimated bite forces across a broad range of living and extinct mammalian carnivores using dry-skull dissection methods and lever modelling, then scaled the results…

Wroe, S.; McHenry, C.; Thomason, J. · Proceedings of the Royal Society B · 2005

This study estimated body mass across the species of Smilodon using regression relationships between skeletal dimensions and body weight in living felids. The analysis confirmed that the South America…

Per Christiansen, John M. Harris · Journal of Morphology · 2005

This influential analysis argued that wild tigers persist at meaningful densities across only a small fraction of their range, with the great majority of remaining animals concentrated in a limited se…

Walston J, Robinson JG, Bennett EL, et al. · PLoS Biology · 2010

Wang and Macdonald applied camera-trap capture-recapture to tigers and leopards in the high-altitude mountains of Bhutan, documenting the surprising presence of tigers at unusually high elevations and…

Sherub Wang, David W. Macdonald · Biological Conservation · 2009

Clubb and Mason analysed comparative data across 35 carnivore species to ask why some thrive in zoos while others pace and breed poorly. They found that wide-ranging species with large natural home ra…

Clubb R, Mason G · Nature · 2003

Nyhus and Tilson analysed records of human-tiger conflict around Sumatran protected areas, characterising attacks on people and livestock and the killing of tigers. They linked conflict to habitat con…

Philip J. Nyhus, Ronald Tilson · Oryx · 2004

This study advanced earlier sea-level work by combining climate-change projections with sea-level rise to model future Bengal tiger habitat in the Bangladesh Sundarbans. Using species distribution mod…

Mukul, S.A., Alamgir, M., Sohel, M.S.I., Pert, P.L., Herbohn, J., Turton, S.M., Khan, M.S.I., Munim, S.A., Reza, A.H.M.A., Laurance, W.F. · Science of the Total Environment · 2019

This review compiled what was known about reproductive hormone patterns across the cat family, drawing heavily on noninvasive fecal and urinary steroid monitoring developed for zoo animals. The author…

Brown JL · Theriogenology · 2006

Andheria, Karanth and Kumar quantified the diets of tiger, leopard and dhole in southern India's Bandipur Tiger Reserve using scat analysis combined with prey-availability data. They documented how th…

Andheria, A.P., Karanth, K.U. & Kumar, N.S. · Journal of Zoology · 2007

Szokalski, Litchfield and Foster reviewed the published evidence on enrichment specifically for captive tigers, organising it by enrichment type and outcome. They covered feeding, sensory, structural,…

Szokalski MS, Litchfield CA, Foster WK · Applied Animal Behaviour Science · 2012

This paper argued that projections of species distributions under climate change carry large uncertainty arising from the choice of model, climate scenario, and other factors, and that ensemble foreca…

Araujo, M.B., New, M. · Trends in Ecology & Evolution · 2007

Ullas Karanth pioneered the use of camera traps to count tigers as individually identifiable animals, recognizing that each tiger's stripe pattern is a natural, permanent mark. Working in Nagarahole,…

K. Ullas Karanth · Biological Conservation · 1995

This methodological landmark established how camera traps combined with capture-recapture statistics could yield rigorous, repeatable estimates of tiger density. Because individual tigers carry unique…

Karanth KU, Nichols JD · Ecology · 1998

Trolle and Kery produced one of the early rigorous density estimates for ocelots, applying closed-population capture-recapture to camera-trap data from the Brazilian Pantanal. Ocelots are well suited…

Mogens Trolle, Marc Kery · Journal of Mammalogy · 2003

Karanth and Nichols extended camera-trap capture-recapture into a full density-estimation framework applied across multiple Indian reserves. They combined closed-population abundance estimates from ph…

K. Ullas Karanth, James D. Nichols · Ecology · 1998

This methodological breakthrough applied camera trapping and capture-recapture statistics to estimate tiger density from the unique stripe patterns that identify individuals. By treating photographs a…

Karanth, K. U., Nichols, J. D. · Ecology · 1998

This study documented the first confirmed natural SARS-CoV-2 infections in big cats, occurring in tigers and lions at the Bronx Zoo early in the COVID-19 pandemic. After several cats developed respira…

D. McAloose, M. Laverack, L. Wang, et al. · mBio · 2020

This study sequenced genomes from tigers representing multiple subspecies to reconstruct their demographic history and detect local adaptation. The authors found that tigers share a recent common ance…

Yue-Chen Liu, Shu-Jin Luo, et al. · Current Biology · 2018

This study sequenced whole genomes from tigers representing the major living populations and found strong genomic support for distinct subspecies despite the tiger's recent origin. The authors detecte…

Liu YC, Sun X, Driscoll C, et al. · Current Biology · 2018

This genomic study sequenced multiple Panthera species and found pervasive evidence that gene flow between lineages, not just simple branching, shaped big cat evolution. The authors detected introgres…

Figueiro HV, Li G, Trindade FJ, et al. · Science Advances · 2017

This study sequenced genomes of Bengal tigers from across India, home to most of the world's wild tigers, to assess genetic diversity, structure, and inbreeding among populations. The authors found th…

Anubhab Khan, Uma Ramakrishnan, et al. · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021