Los Angeles seems like a surprising home for a large wildlife predator.
In fact, LA is one of only two mega cities in the world to have big cats living within the city limits.
In LA, the freeways have sliced the mountain lion's habitat into ever-shrinking pieces.
And this isolates the populations from each other and causes problems with genetic diversity.
All leading to a risk of local extinction in as few as 12 years.
But there's hope in saving them by re-linking these lonely lions, even one at a time.
If one individual could come across every two or three years,
then the genetic makeup of the population would stay fairly stable.
Seriously, it only takes the introduction of one new mountain lion to renew genetic health for
the local species.
But before we get into that, let's explore how mountain lions got into this situation,
or more specifically, how we forced them into this situation in the first place.
Mountain lions live in a variety of habitats in Southern California.
So they are sort of everywhere that there is cover, habitat and deer.
We tend to attract some wildlife because of our lawns and our watered areas and our golf courses and things like that.
So mountain lions oftentimes live much closer to people than we think.
At the lower elevations and the passes and things where highways, have been built,
The freeways carve the area up, and they make it such that the animals
can't reach from one area to another very easily at all.
Either get killed trying to cross, or the highway itself is so noisy,
and there's so much light relating to cars that they just can't, they don't want to try it.
So, although there are quite a few mountain lions living in the Southern California mountain ranges,
and they've been there for thousands of years, the highways are now forcing individual mountain lions
to stay where they are, without roaming to new areas as they naturally would.
They tend to become inbred, they tend to keep breeding with each other,
they don't have new animals coming in to introduce new genetics and so that inbreeding phenomenon,
then leads to potentially health problems and susceptibility to disease, reproductive issues.
Then the population could go extinct or, in the models, actually did go extinct within that 12 or 13 year period.
So, it can happen quickly. If reproduction rates can't keep up with mortality rates.
Unfortunately, Dr. Vickers has seen this before.
The only mountain lion population we have as an example of what happens with inbreeding
is the the Florida Panther, and it was isolated and is isolated in the Everglades
and southern Florida.
And when its population became low because of all of these same factors, and by low I mean
less than 20 individuals in the entire state, they also were tending to just breed with each other.
They also started having physical abnormalities changes in their haircoats, kinked tails
were one thing that they saw.
Cleft palates, physical abnormalities that began to show up because of inbreeding.
Female mouth lions were brought in from Texas to breed with that population, and that was a successful
introduction of genetic material, and the kitten survival went up, and overall survival went up, and the population
has now expanded to between one and 200 animals.
In the case of the Southern California mountain lions, conservationists don't want to translocate the animal.
But what they really want is to enable the mountain lions to move themselves. And one of the best way to
mountain lions for genetic purposes, is to link one wild area to another, with a network
of well-disguised movement corridors and road crosses.
Wildlife corridors aren't a new idea. They've worked in many other areas with other animals,
a wildlife corridor could be anything from a fish ladder, a tunnel for toads, or a highway overpass.
Creating passageways across I-15 or improving the existing passageway can certainly allow animals to come
across the freeway more freely than they do now.
And that could be enough.
Overpasses allow the mountain lions to roam freely and mix their gene pools,
without ever having to dash across traffic.
Currently, two wildlife overpass projects are being proposed - one over the interstate 15
in Western Riverside County.
And another over the US-101 freeway in Los Angeles.
In 2011, one of the lions that successfully made it across without a bridge proves just how helpful mixing
individuals can be.
That was M86, a male mountain lion that found mates in the Santa Ana mountains, after migrating from a
genetically diverse population.
He had 11 detected offspring, adding the desperately needed unique genes into the inbred population.
So far we've only documented one in 15 years that was successful.
M86 was hit by a car and killed the next time he tried to cross.
And of course, having these mountain lions so close to humans poses its own challenges, even if the populations
are able to mix together.
Many locals worry about having large predators so close to their backyards, pets, and children.
As top predators they, like wolves and bears, tend to regulate the ecosystem through their prey behavior,
with their behavior toward prey.
So they reduce deer numbers, versus what would be present if they weren't there.
And that can help to downregulate things like vegetation types and browsing levels and things that affect other
animals down lower on the food chain.
There's been some work that suggests that their role regulating deer populations has not only promoted vegetation
balance, but also helps to reduce roadkill and collisions with cars, which endanger humans.
Of course, it really helps to preserve large spaces of wild land, before we build on it. Rather than trying to
put the pieces back together after the fact
I think the role of our populace of people who care about mountain lions is to become more and more
active in the conservation of land and the conservation of animals and in whatever way might be
suitable to them because local decisions, oftentimes really determine a lot of these habitat issues.