Elina Shatkin
The cougars of Los Angeles finally have online profiles (with photos!) to match their real world lives. But we're not talking about those kind of cougars or those kind of profiles.
Biologist Jeff Sikich, who has overseen the long-running mountain lion study since it launched in 2002, spends a good chunk of his time in the field, trying to track down these cats.
Once they're collared, he can follow their movements, hiking in to their kills and seeing what they're eating. The goal is to understand how mountain lions survive in such a fragmented urban landscape.
"Where are they going? What's their diet? Are they reproducing and successfully raising young? Are they crossing roads? Are the crossing freeways? What are they dying from?," Sikich asks.
Take, for example, P-12, a young male who was collared in the Simi Hills in 2008. According to Sikich, he's the only lion in the past 14 years to cross 101 freeway from north to south.
But the problem of inbreeding remains when you have an "island of habitat," in this case a roughly 275-square-mile area bounded by the 101 freeway to the north, the 405 freeway to the east, the Oxnard agricultural fields to the west and the ocean to the south. It can sustain 10 to 15 lions tops — two to four adult males, four to six adult females and some kittens and sub-adults.
Sikich is blunt: "In the future, that cannot genetically sustain a population."
After his semi-miraculous crossing and successful mating, P-12 has had no other options so he has been breeding with his daughters and granddaughters.
"We're really interested in how all these regions are connected," Sikich says. "We have these huge barriers in between a lot of these mountain ranges — freeways and developments."
Sikich says he's currently following 15 individuals not only in the Santa Monica Mountains but also in the Verdugo Mountains, the Santa Susana Mountains, one in the Los Padres Mountains and one in Griffith Park — the famous P-22.
Watching P-22, Southern California's most famous cougar, researchers have learned about the insidious effects of poisons as they work their way up the food chain.
P-22 was most likely born in the Santa Monica Mountains and crossed two major freeways to reach his current home, Griffith Park. A couple of years ago, when he was recaptured, he looked like he'd been through the wringer.
"We believe the likely mechanism of exposure is from the mountain lion killing and eating the coyote that killed and ate the ground squirrel that ate the poison that the golf course or apartment complex or homeowner put out," Sikich says.
Research conducted from 1996 to 2003 points to rat poison as the second leading cause of death for coyotes after roadkill.
When P-22 was recaptured this last December, he appeared healthy and seemed to have recovered, much to the delight of Angelenos. But nothing has changed in his environment and the problems faced by Southern California cougars — a tiny genetic pool, encroaching human developments, poisons — remain.
Sikich hopes that the Puma Profiles will raise awareness and interest about the big cats, enough that a wildlife bridge over the 101 freeway connecting the Santa Monica Mountains to the mountains in the north moves from long-held dream to reality. Until then, these big cats at least have a moment of online glory.
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