Since Nat'l Geo Digital is subscription only access. And, t his is Caturday. I thought I'd share a very interesting article.
I posted the entire article incase the Twitter link below didn't allow access
https://t.co/02qKe4IfJf
How America’s most endangered cat could help save FloridaOnce nearly extinct, the Florida panther is expanding its range. Protecting wildlife corridors could save the cat—and humans—from sprawl.BYDOUGLAS MAIN
PHOTOGRAPHS BYCARLTON WARD JR.
20 MIN READ
“Welcome to panther country,” Brian Kelly says when I meet him at a busy intersection in East Naples, Florida, a stone’s throw from a gas station and an urgent care center.
Kelly, a state panther biologist, points east into the sprawling subdivision where he lives. A panther was caught on camera just a quarter mile away, he says, and another one made it across the six-lane road we’re standing beside.
Yet another panther, an eight-year-old female named FP224, lives nearby. She’s been hit by a car twice, breaking a leg each time. She was treated by veterinarians and released after both accidents. To look for signs of her, we drive to Kelly’s house, next to a patch of forest where she recently denned and birthed at least three kittens. It’s the wet season, when panther tracks typically are wiped out by rain, but we get lucky.
“There she is,” Kelly says, pointing to large paw prints, about the size of my fist, in the soft sand. We follow the prints through tall pines and sabal palms festooned with air plants. A check of a motion-triggered camera trap Kelly placed there reveals that FP224 walked by just before 9 p.m., two evenings earlier.
Her tracks are thrilling to see—a reminder that Florida still has wilderness and large cats, some of them resilient enough to live unseen along the fringes of the expanding suburbs.
Most Floridians will never see any signs of these predators, which weigh from 65 to 165 pounds as adults, depending on sex, and can leap more than 10 yards in a single bound. But the panther—known to the Cherokee as “lord of the forest”—depends on the millions of acres of swamps, forests, and fields in southwestern and central Florida, many of which are at imminent risk of development.
The Florida panther, classified as a subspecies of mountain lion, or cougar, once ranged throughout most of the southeastern United States. But the animals were hunted aggressively, and by the 1970s they were only found in Florida, and their numbers had fallen to fewer than 30, making them highly vulnerable to inbreeding. They were within a whisker of going extinct, says Kelly, a slim man often adorned in clothes bearing the insignia of his employer, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
Scientists back then hatched an unprecedented rescue plan: In the mid-1990s they hired Texan Roy McBride, arguably the world’s best mountain lion tracker, to capture eight of the cats in Texas, all females, then release them into South Florida. Five of them bred, and this infusion of genetic diversity reversed the panther’s downward spiral.
Populations grew slowly, and now there are about 200 individuals, most of them in a massive stretch of contiguous land south of the Caloosahatchee River, which stretches east from Fort Myers. “It’s one of the most dramatic conservation success stories in U.S. history,” says Carlton Ward, Jr., a conservationist and photographer whose work is supported by the National Geographic Society.
But a variety of threats cloud the panther’s future, including car collisions and panther-on-panther territorial spats, the two leading causes of death. About 25 of the cats are killed by vehicles each year, a reflection of how development and road construction threaten the species at a time when roughly 900 people are moving to Florida every day.
Additionally, a new debilitating neurological condition with an unknown cause has afflicted more than a dozen panthers, alarming conservationists.
There is also good news, however: Panthers are reclaiming some of their old territory. In 2016 scientists spotted a female north of the Caloosahatchee River for the first time since 1973.
“That was a milestone,” wildlife biologist Jennifer Korn says of the sighting in the Babcock Ranch Preserve. Unlike males, females don’t travel far from their mother’s home range, a major limiting factor in the animal’s expansion.
About a couple dozen panthers now live north of the Caloosahatchee, Kelly estimates, including a few females.
The northward expansion is necessary for panthers to survive long term, but it’s possible only if the Florida Wildlife Corridor, a patchwork of public and private lands that runs throughout the state, is preserved, Ward says. To make that possible, more conservation funding is needed to help landowners, mainly ranchers, prevent open spaces from becoming subdivisions, parking lots, and roads.
At the center of the panther’s northward recovery is a landscape known as the Everglades headwaters, part of the watershed that supplies nearly 10 million Floridians. Some of the water that originates here reaches swamps to the south, and investments in protecting this area will help the Everglades as well, conservationists say.
Many of the cats in Florida live on public lands, including Big Cypress National Preserve, Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park, and Picayune Strand State Forest, which make up about 1,420 square miles.
But these and nearby protected areas in South Florida cannot support a much larger population of these territorial animals, says state panther biologist Dave Onorato. Panthers may each need up to 200 square miles of territory in which to roam and hunt, he says. At the same time, populations of white-tailed deer, one of panthers’ primary food sources, have dropped in areas of Big Cypress. That may be partly because of invasive Burmese pythons, which devour deer and other panther prey.
As panthers strike out north of the Caloosahatchee River, they’ll encounter land dominated by large ranches and farms. Roads cut through many of these areas, and the region is dotted with small, often expanding towns. One of the better-known cattle operations in south-central Florida is the 10,500-acre Buck Island Ranch, run by Gene Lollis, a sixth-generation Floridian.
