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Mountain Lions: A Bridge Out of Extinction
Why the urgent need wildlife crossings across Los Angeles and Southern California, affects us as much as mountain lions.
The Cat That’s Lost The Cream
Stuck in a habitat ghetto fenced in by freeways on which hundreds of thousands of cars roar past every day, Santa Monica mountain lions find themselves on the brink of extinction.
Fewer than 15 mountain lions currently pace around just 275 square miles in and around the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, an area which is bordered by the Pacific Ocean, the 405 and 101 freeways, farms, and Los Angeles’s massive urban sprawl.
Conducted by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles and University of California, Davis in conjunction with the National Park Service, a 2019 study paints a bleak picture. Habitat loss and fragmentation have driven mountain lion populations to dangerously low levels of genetic diversity, without urgent action, one of southern California’s last big cats will become extinct in as little as 15 years.
Lead by Dr. John Benson, a wildlife ecologist with the La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science at UCLA; the study specifically looked at the mountain lion populations in the Santa Monica and Santa Ana mountains. They documented the lowest genetic diversity for American mountain lions, aside from Florida panthers (despite the different common names, panthers, cougars and mountain lions are the same species).
“We can look to what happened to Florida panthers as a cautionary tale. When their genetic diversity reached very low levels in the 1990s, panthers nearly went extinct due to factors associated with inbreeding depression,” Benson said.
The biologically dire phenomenon known as “inbreeding depression” happens when a lack of gene diversity begins to negatively affect the ability of mountain lions to survive and reproduce healthy offspring.
Roadkill is another decimating factor in the survival of Santa Monica mountain lions. The US-101 freeway is a deadly adversary to mountain lions. Its original construction in 1926 transformed a previously continuous habitat range into isolated islands. Since their biologists began researching mountain lions in the Santa Monica…
