Florida Panthers Need a Habitat, Not Breeding Program, Critics Say

In partly cloudy skies over Florida’s Everglades, a cruising Cessna 172 suddenly turns and plunges to an altitude of less than a thousand feet.

Inside the plane, David Maehr listens to chirping in his headphones from one of 17 radio-collared Florida panthers roaming out of sight below.

“This is a female that probably had a litter about a week ago,” Maehr yells over the roar of the engine, as the pilot pulls up.

Maehr is a wildlife biologist with the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission. Three times a week, he or an assistant makes one of these reconnaissance flights as part of a 10-year study of the life and times of the Florida panther.

The panther, a tawny, muscled mountain lion that can weigh up to 150 pounds, may be the most endangered mammal in the United States. Only 30 to 50 adults remain, and they may not last much longer.

Ironically, their survival may now be threatened by the very people charged with protecting them.

State and federal authorities have proposed a crash program to trap panthers, breed them in captivity and release them in suitable areas.

Critics say the program calls for the capture of too many panthers too soon. They fear that it could make panthers extinct in the wild.

“We’re moving into this at a level that’s potentially going to put the natural population at risk,” said James Layne, a biologist at the Archbold Biological Station in Lake Placid, Fla., and a member of the Florida Panther Technical Advisory Committee. “It’s not at the critical level where we’ve got to pull all the animals in.”

Layne and other critics charge that the highly visible captive-breeding program is calculated to distract public attention from the panthers’ greatest need: the acquisition and protection of the land they live on.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will issue a final environmental assessment of the captive-breeding program shortly after Aug. 15, the deadline for public comments on the draft assessment. The capture of panthers could begin next winter.

“We feel this is the only alternative,” said Dennis Jordan, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s coordinator for the Florida panther project. “Otherwise, I don’t think there’s any question, it’s going to go extinct,” he said in a telephone interview from his Gainesville office.

The Florida panther, known scientifically as Felis concolor coryi , is a fierce, solitary hunter. It once roamed unfettered through the broad crescent made up of eastern Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, parts of Tennessee and South Carolina, and Florida.

The panther is now found only in the southern third of the Florida peninsula. It roams through mixed-swamp forests, hardwood hammocks and oak-pine forests. The area is crisscrossed with rivers and swamps that make it almost impenetrable.

“One of the reasons they survived is probably because the area is so remote,” Maehr said in an interview in his Naples office, near the western extent of the panther’s range. The wetlands offer no impediment to panthers, which are strong swimmers. They move freely in pursuit of deer, wild hogs, rabbits and other prey.

The panther recovery project was established in 1981. It has pointed to one overall conclusion. “The habitat loss is the most important problem facing panthers. Every problem the panther has is the result of habitat loss,” Maehr said.

About half of the 4 million acres of known panther habitat is on private land, where citrus and vegetable farming and urban development are a growing threat, Maehr said. “It’s directly related to population growth,” he said. Florida’s population increases by 8,000 every week, Maehr said.

The land-development grab and consequent deforestation of southern Florida is similar to what’s happening in the Amazon rain forest, Maehr said. “It’s the same thing--you cut the forest and you eliminate the places for these animals to live.”

In Brazil, the culprits are often subsistence farmers struggling to feed their families. In Florida, Maehr said, the forest is being destroyed by “corporations and ranchers, people who have money to begin with.”

Loss of the forest would mean more than loss of the panthers, he said. “The loss would make the area less suitable for people to live in. It’s important for air quality and water quality and as a buffer against so many people. If we save the panthers, we’ll be doing ourselves a favor.”

Despite the threats to the panthers, the population is currently holding steady, Maehr said.

That is why Layne and other critics oppose a large-scale captive-breeding program.

“This crash program is based on the assumption this present population is in serious decline,” Layne said. “If you look at the reports, you would have to conclude the population is increasing. And they’re kicking out young.”

Layne thinks a smaller captive-breeding program would be a good idea, in which only young panther kittens would be removed. “The thing that scares me about the present proposal is taking established adults out of the population. When you take them out of a social organization, you disrupt the organization. You disrupt the behavior.”

Earth First! activists have threatened the Fish and Wildlife Service with a lawsuit if it issues permits for capturing panthers. The Humane Society, the Fund for Animals and many other conservation groups have criticized the plan.

More than 300 organizations or individuals have commented on the plan, said Jordan of the Fish and Wildlife Service. “Most of the comments reflected concern about the program,” he said.

Jordan takes a dim view of the wild panthers’ prospects for survival. “You could have an outbreak of disease that could move within the population and render it extinct in a short period of time,” he said. “When you have a single population in one small area like that, you have no security against extinction whatsoever.”

Inbreeding among the animals makes it likely they will develop genetic abnormalities, he said, which could make them extinct in a few decades.

Under the captive-breeding proposal, up to 36 kittens and 14 adults could be captured over a six-year period. Capture of the older animals is necessary to assure that the captive group will share the same genetic variation as the wild group, Jordan said.

Where will the captive-bred animals be released? Researchers don’t yet know, but they will begin searching this year for sites, and Jordan is confident they’ll find them.

Texas cougars, which are close cousins of the panthers, will be released to determine the suitability of the sites. The one such test so far was not successful. The cougars had to be recaptured when one wandered into Jacksonville. It frightened the wits out of a woman who went into her back yard to hang her laundry and saw it crouched in a tree above her.