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| Mountain Lion Photo Courtesy Fish and Game |
The Mountain Lion
SUSAN CLOKE
Columnist, Santa Monica Mirror
June 22, 2012
June 22, 2012
A
young mountain lion was shot and killed in Santa Monica on May 22, 2012.
It was hard to believe he was on 2nd Street. What happened to bring him
here? Did the authorities do what they had to do to protect public safety
or could the mountain lion have been saved and safely relocated?
The Santa Monica Police Department, Fish and
Game, and the National Park Service, among others, will be meeting on Monday,
June 25 as part of an official investigation into the tragedy and to develop a
protocol on the chance that this could happen again.
I am a regular hiker in the Santa Monica
Mountains, but I don’t know very much about the mountain lions that call those
mountains home. So I turned to the scientists studying the mountain lions
and want to share what I learned from them in the hope that it will help both
us as a city and the mountain lions.
Seth Riley, Wildlife Ecologist, and Jeff Sikich,
Biologist, are with the National Park Service and track and monitor mountain
lion populations in the Santa Monica Mountains. Riley said, “We
don’t know exactly how many mountain lions live adjacent to our urban
area. Currently five are radio collared and we are following them.
Two are in the Santa Monica Mountains; two are in the Santa Susana Mountains.
And one, known as P-22, is in Griffith Park. We expect he will stay
there, without causing any problems, and will not leave until he goes looking
for a female mountain lion.”
The original range of the mountain lions, also
called pumas, cougars and in Florida, panthers, was from South America to
Canada and from coast to coast in the United States.
Except for the Florida panthers, who were
declining due to a lack of genetic diversity but are coming back due to conservation
actions, these animals no longer exist east of the Rockies. They were
eliminated in years past by hunters, ranchers, and farmers. A law banning
hunting of mountain lions was not passed in California until 1990.
“Because mountain lions need so much space they
are among the first animals to be affected by urbanization and habitat
fragmentation,” said Riley.
The range of an adult male mountain lion is
about 300 square kilometers. They are solitary animals. The adult
female mountain lion keeps her kittens with her until they are 1 or 1½ and
needs a range of about 100 square kilometers. This allows enough room to have
sufficient prey to hunt. They eat mostly deer.
The area of the Santa Monica Mountains totals
approximately 650 square kilometers and could support a population of up to 6
to 8 mountain lions. Not enough to be genetically or demographically
viable.
The Mountain Lion Project of the National Park
Service began in the Santa Monica Mountains in 2002 as an outgrowth of The
Carnivore Study in the Santa Monica Mountains, done by Ray Sauvagot.
Riley and Sauvagot were both graduate students at UC Davis and Riley sees
“Davis as having one of the best programs in ecology anywhere and especially in
the United States where urban ecology is a relatively young field.”
Since 2002 Riley and Sikich have radio tagged 22
mountain lions. The goals of the Project are to study the mountain lions,
their behavior, their habitat, threats to mountain lions, and to propose
solutions to protect the future of the mountain lions.
Of the 22 mountain lions identified over the
last decade they are still tracking five. Some died of natural causes.
One of the mountain lions was on the 405 freeway and was hit by a car and one,
known as P-9, was hit by a car in Malibu Canyon. But the most common
source of mortality comes from fights between male lions over scarce
territory.
The original mountain lion in the study, P-1,
was tagged in 2002. They lost contact with him in 2009 when his collar
came off in a fight. The scientists went to the site where the collar
came off and typed the blood they found, which enabled them to establish P-1's
identity. They know he survived as they found his scat later in 2009.
Urbanization creates problems for the
mountain lions as development cuts off their access to natural pathways. When
built, the 101 freeway, the 118 freeway and the 126 freeway blocked the natural
movement of the mountain lions. At
the time, it seemed, no one was thinking about the effects on wildlife of
building freeways. As development tends to follow freeways the habitat
area for mountain lions was reduced on both sides of the freeway. And the
freeways were themselves barriers.
The natural pathways that connected the animals
to the Simi Valley, to the Santa Susana Mountains and even to Los Padres
National Forest, which goes all the way to Big Sur, were no longer available
for the mountain lions.
With young males, who start to become
independent at about 1½ trying to find their own territory and with more adult
males competing for the same range, existence became more difficult for the
mountain lions.
As part of the study the mountain lions are
tranquilized and given radio collars. Riley and Sikich bait a cage with deer
meat, the preferred diet of the mountain lion. When the mountain lion is
inside the cage they can get right up next to the animal and use a blowgun to
shoot a tranquilizing dart. The
dart can also be administered from a distance using a special rifle.
The mountain lions are anesthetized with
ketamine, which causes disassociation, and medetomidine, which is an
analgesic. They use a blowpipe – a long tube with a dart containing the
medications. Dosage is administered in direct proportion to weight.
Generally four or five minutes elapse from when the dart is administered to the
mountain lion being tranquilized. It could take longer in a different
environment. Once tranquilized,
the mountain lions are out for 45 – 60 minutes and then the effects wear off
completely.
Riley said, “None of the animals we have radio
tracked has ever behaved aggressively toward people. The Griffith park
mountain lion is in a natural area doing his natural thing and being
monitored. If we saw a change in his behavior our response would change.
"Attacks against people are
rare." Riley says, “Clearly the mountain lions don’t consider people
to be prey. They are right next to us and yet they are elusive and run
away.”
However there have been serious and deadly
attacks, one in 2004 in Orange County where a mountain biker was killed.
Riley’s advice is: “Be aware that mountain
lions are around, although it is incredibly unusual to encounter one.
They know we’re here and they are elusive and keep away from us. If you
do encounter one, stand tall, make yourself look as big as possible, make a lot
of loud noise, don’t turn and run, back away slowly and deliberately. Don’t act
like a deer! Don’t run as if you were the prey. Remember, they want
to get away from you.”
The National Park Service was created on August
25, 1916 by President Woodrow Wilson “to promote and regulate the use of
Federal areas known as national parks, monuments and reservations . . . by such
means and measures as conform to the fundamental purpose of the said parks,
monuments and reservations, which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the
natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the
enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them
unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."
In 2012 don’t we have the same mission?
links
http://www.urbancarnivores.com/
Http://www.nps.gov/samo/index.htm
http://www.scwildlands.org/index.aspx
