American cougars on the decline: 'We’re running against the clock,' says big cat expert

Morgan Erickson-Davis, MONGABAY.COM
January 17, 201

It holds the Guinness World Record for having the most names of any animal on the planet, with 40 in English alone. It's also the widest-ranging native land animal in the Americas, yet is declining throughout much of its range. Mongabay talks with big cat expert Dr. Howard Quigley about the status and research implications of the elusive, enigmatic, and unique cougar.

It is thought that the forebear of the cougar migrated from Asia into North America over the Bering land bridge approximately 8 million years ago, where it evolved into the different cat lineages present today. Cougars subsequently invaded South America three million years ago when the isthmus of Panama formed to connect the two continents. Genetic studies have shown that today's North American populations are all very similar, suggesting a population bottleneck contemporaneous with the megafauna extinction of approximately 10,000 years ago during which large North American mammals such as Smilodon went extinct. Researchers believe that during this time cougars were largely or entirely extirpated from the whole of the continent, with today's populations refounded by cougars from South American.

Although it can weigh up to 220 pounds, making it the second largest felid in the Americas (after the jaguar), the cougar is actually more related to smaller cat species such as ocelots and lynx than it is to lions and tigers. Originally, it was even grouped in the same genus as the domestic cat (Felis), but in 1993 was given its own genus, Puma, which it shares with its closest living relative, the jaguarundi.

Interestingly, even though they are in separate subfamilies, cougars and leopards are capable of hybridizing. In the 1890s and early 1900s, an animal park in Germany bred a female cougar with a male leopard while a Berlin zoo bred a male puma to a female leopard. The resulting "pumapards" had the long body of a cougar with the rosettes of a leopard on a tawny or grey coat. Most died while young, and those that did reach adulthood grew to be only half the size of their parents due to genetic dwarfism.

With habitat extending from the Yukon to the Andes, the cougar is the widest ranging land animal in the Americas due to their ability to live in virtually any environment. However, even with their vast range, there are estimated to be only 50,000 wild cougars in the world.

In South and Central America, laws enacted in 1996 outlawed the hunting of cougars in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. Cougars have no protection measures in place in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana.

In North America, cougars became extirpated from most of the Eastern U.S. and Canada after European colonization. The only resident eastern population is the critically endangered Florida panther which occupies only five percent of its historic range and numbers just 50-100 individuals. Many states and provinces in the western portions of the U.S. and Canada have resident cougar populations, and all except California and the Yukon allow hunting. However, most have enacted certain protection measures. The lone exception is Texas, where hunting of the cats in largely unregulated. The state groups cougars with ticks and pigeons as "nuisance wildlife", and allows anyone with a hunting or trapping permit to kill a cougar regardless of sex, size, or age.

Cougars are threatened by habitat loss and by direct persecution by humans. The latter is primarily caused by the perceived threat of cougars on livestock, although the risk of attacks on humans is sometimes used to justify the killing of a cougar near urban areas. In reality, cougars have a minuscule effect on livestock numbers. In Texas in 1990, for example, cougar kills amounted to 445 sheep (0.02 percent of a total of the state's total of 2.0 million sheep and lambs) and 86 calves (0.0006 percent of the state's total of 13.4 million cattle and calves).

Attacks on people are incredibly rare, but are increasing due to expansion of human populations into cougar habitat. In the hundred years spanning 1890 to 1990, there were only 53 confirmed attacks by cougars on humans, resulting in ten deaths. From 1990 to 2004, the number of attacks had climbed to 88 with a total of 20 deaths. Even though the frequency of attacks on humans is relatively small, those which do happen are heavily covered by the media, effectively maligning cougars in the public eye and drawing attention away from the critical roles they play in many ecosystems.

However, the main reason behind cougar decline in the U.S. is habitat loss through degradation and fragmentation. Research shows that cougars need at least 850 square miles of uninterrupted habitat in order to persist with only a low risk of extinction. With urban areas becoming more numerous, many scientists are calling for the expansion of protected habitat corridors so that cougar populations could exist and move without needing to traverse through civilization.

One of the major players in cougar conservation is Panthera, an organization whose mission is to ensure the future of wild cats through scientific leadership and global conservation action. Panthera is the world's largest dedicated funder of wild cat conservation, and in addition to cougars includes tigers, lions, cheetahs, leopards, snow leopards, and jaguars as its focal species. Panthera has sponsored many innovative conservation measures such as the Jaguar Corridor, a program that is working to connect jaguar habitats from the top of their range at the Mexican-American border all the way down to the end of their range in Northern Argentina, and the Snow Leopard Initiative which was launched in Beijing in 2008.

Panthera is currently conducting two projects which focus on cougar conservation: the California Cougar Project and the Teton Cougar Project. The Teton Cougar Project, a joint Panthera-Craighead Beringia South initiative in its ninth year, is working to gather data about the cougar population of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and the southern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem with the aim of increasing knowledge of cougar population dynamics and interactions with competing carnivores and humans.

Full article at: http://news.mongabay.com/2011/0117-morgan_cougar_quigley.html