September 24, 2010
Florida Panthers Helped by Texas Cats
A three-week-old Florida panther kitten (image copyright Science/AAAS)
Call them panthers, mountain lions, cougars or pumas, the Americas’ largest cat species has been dwindling in eastern North America for hundreds of years. They were extirpated from everywhere but some shrinking habitat in Florida between Naples and Miami. And even there, the panthers were not doing well. By the mid-1990s, the population consisted of just a couple dozen adult cats, and they were suffering from the problems of inbreeding: low reproduction rates, sperm quality and testosterone levels; heart defects; kinked tails; and high loads of parasites and pathogens. It wasn’t looking good for the Florida kitties.
A male Florida panther looks down from a tree (Image courtesy of Larry W. Richardson)
In 1995, conservationists tried to bolster the Florida population by introducing eight female panthers from Texas. The two subspecies used to intermingle, so transferring a few females would restore some of the natural gene flow. Fifteen years later, scientists are declaring the program a success. The addition of just a few new kitties to the gene pool resulted in a more diverse population that no longer suffered from the problems of inbreeding. And the population tripled in size. (The study appears in today’s issue of Science.)
Florida’s panthers, like so many cat species, still face serious challenges to their survival, including habitat loss and disease. But it’s heartening to see that relatively simple solutions—transferring a handful of cats combined with efforts to preserve habitat and reduce deaths from car accidents—can have such a positive effect on a population.
Earlier this week, the BBC announced the discovery of tigers in Bhutan living high above the treeline, far from where anyone had expected the cats could survive. Scientists hope to create a corridor connecting small, scattered tiger populations, such as this one in Bhutan, with others across much of Asia. The idea being that, like the Florida panthers, Asia’s tiger populations would get stronger from increased genetic diversity.
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Great news! This is the best thing I’ve heard in a long time.
Panther, mountain lion, cougar, panther…you left off “catamount.”
The first sentence in this article contains a serious error – “…pumas, the Americas’ largest cat species has been…”
Pumas are not the Americas’ largest cat species; jaguars are. Jaguars are of the Panthera genus, which also includes tigers, lions and leopards. Perhaps you meant to say North America’s largest cat species, but even then you’d be wrong as there are still populations of Jaguars living in Mexico. And even if you meant to say “America’s” as in the United States’ (rather than “the Americas’”), you’d still be wrong as there have been occasional sightings in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas and historically Jaguars lived as far north as the Grand Canyon and as far west as southern California. So any way you slice it, cougars are not the largest species of cats. They do, however, have the largest range of any large mammal in the Americas, historically ranging from the southern tip of South America all the way up into Canada. Good to see that they are starting to recover some in the East.