The future is looking increasingly bleak for some Southern California mountain lions. Research suggests there’s an almost one-in-four chance the charismatic cats could become extinct in the Santa Monica and Santa Ana mountains within 50 years.
Cougars in the Santa Monica and Santa Ana mountains are poised to enter an"extinction vortex" and could disappear from those areas in the next 50 years, new research says. Here, an adult mountain lion leads three youths along a truck trail in the Santa Anas in 2014. Urban encroachment, inbreeding, vehicle strikes,
“Wildlife managers never want to be a shuttle service for wild animals,” said Justin Dellinger, senior environmental scientist with the Wildlife Investigations Laboratory at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “But translocation has potential merit in the short term — after all it helped bring the critically endangered Florida panther back from the brink.”
Study authors note also that wildfire and disease could result in “catastrophic mortality” and further hasten the animals’ disappearance. “It could be a slippery slope,” Dellinger said. “For instance, you can’t just turn a male mountain lion loose in new territory without making existent lions unhappy about it. There are also liability considerations, as well as the worrisome possibility that as soon as you let a mountain lion go on the far side of a freeway, it might try to cross back over.”
Because the bridge crosses the freeway, Caltrans will oversee design and construction — but the transportation agency is not providing funding. Instead, roughly 80% of the funds are expected to come from private philanthropy and corporate donations. Farther south however, conservationists are open to the idea of translocation, even as they work with the California Department of Transportation on a relatively low-cost plan to improve 15 Freeway underpasses that would allow cougars freedom to roam.
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