What each compared trait actually means

Body measurements

Head-body length

Measured from the tip of the nose to the base of the tail, along the back, on an adult animal. The tail is never included. This matters when comparing species such as the snow leopard, whose tail approaches ninety per cent of its head-body length and would badly distort any total-length figure.

Tail length

Measured separately, from the base to the last vertebra, excluding any hair extending beyond it. Tail proportion is a genuine ecological signal: canopy hunters such as the marbled cat and the margay carry proportionally long tails for balance, while the lynxes have almost none.

Shoulder height

The vertical distance from the ground to the top of the shoulder blade on a standing animal. It is the most useful single figure for picturing how large a cat looks in the field, and it is where the serval stands out: it is far taller than its modest weight suggests, because its legs are proportionally the longest of any cat.

Body weight

Given as a published range for adults rather than a single average, because body mass in wild cats varies more between regions than between individuals in one place. Tigers from Sumatra weigh roughly a third of what large mainland males weigh; leopards span a fivefold range. Where males and females differ substantially, a note records that.

Top recorded speed

This is the field most often misreported elsewhere. We publish a figure only where a credible measurement exists, and we say where it came from. For most small and medium-sized cats no such measurement has ever been taken, and the profile says so rather than repeating a number that has been copied between websites without a source.

Life span

We separate longevity in the wild from longevity under human care, because the two differ sharply. Wild figures reflect typical adult survival, not the maximum ever recorded, and they exclude the high mortality of the first year. Figures for managed care come from zoo and sanctuary records and are consistently higher, usually by several years.

Habitat and range

Habitat is recorded as a set of broad vegetation and terrain categories — savanna, montane forest, wetland, rocky alpine and so on — so that species can be filtered and compared consistently. The accompanying text adds the detail that categories cannot carry, such as altitude limits or seasonal movement.

Geographic range lists the continents where a species currently occurs, not where it occurred historically. That distinction matters: the lion once ranged across North Africa, the Middle East and south-eastern Europe, and the modern range is a small fraction of that.

Diet and hunting

Prey is grouped into broad classes — large ungulates, small mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and so on — with a text description of the main species taken. Hunting strategy describes the documented method: cooperative hunting in lions, acoustic location and vertical pouncing in servals, ambush from above in snow leopards, aquatic ambush in fishing cats.

Activity period

Cats are described as nocturnal, crepuscular, diurnal or cathemeral, the last meaning active at any hour. These patterns are not fixed. Many species become more nocturnal near people, and the jaguar hunts in daylight in undisturbed wetland and at night close to settlement. Where that flexibility is documented, the profile notes it.

Climbing and swimming

Both are graded on a five-point scale, from very limited to exceptional, and the grade reflects documented behaviour rather than a guess based on body shape. A cat is not marked down for being a poor swimmer if it lives in a desert; the grade simply records what has been observed.

• Very limited — the behaviour is essentially absent from the record.
• Limited — occurs occasionally, usually under compulsion.
• Capable — performed competently when useful, but not a defining trait.
• Strong — a regular and important part of the animal's behaviour.
• Exceptional — a defining specialisation, supported by anatomy.

Conservation fields

Each profile carries the current Red List category, the recorded population trend, and the year the assessment we consulted was published. The threats list contains pressures documented in assessments and field literature, not speculation. Our conservation overview explains what the categories mean in more depth.

Units

Measurements are shown in United States customary units first, with metric equivalents in parentheses. Conversions are calculated from the metric source figures, so rounding is applied only once, at the point of display.