Though he had initially assumed the two animals were sisters, later study revealed them to be unrelated. “So many questions exploded in my head that I just had to pursue some answers,” Dr. Elbroch said.
It's great when you're wrong. It means you get to learn something new. That's why science is so fun and often surprising.
I'm sure puma sociality he observed and the questions it inspired were one of the high points in Dr. Elbroch's scientific career.
5
I'm surprised there's any left. How would the scientists like a tight bulky collar around their necks 24/7. That's just wrong.
4
You would be surprised how light the radio collars are now. Radio collars and other tracking devises have revolutionized our understanding animal movement patterns in the last 20 years. Much of that information has been essential in successful conservation efforts for endangered species and making informed decisions on managing everything from fish stocks to wildlife populations.
8
I have hundreds of videos of big male Mountain Lions hunting together.
https://www.youtube.com/user/VaderSpade/search?query=lion
1
Great footage.
I understand that the highest density of mountain lions in the world is on Vancouver Island - a place you did not note for them to even be present.
2
Hunting elk or moose makes sense. If you are lucky, you can fill your freezer with a big animal. But why shoot a big cat unless it's aggressively stalking humans at the suburban-wildland interface? You can't eat a cat.
8
Speak for yourself.
I once came across seven individual sets of lion tracks apparently loosely traveling together near my Montana home. It appeared to be two adults with two kittens each and a smaller sub-adult. They are cats, so who know what they'll do.
6
Pumas are the most widely distributed evolutionary fit carnivore in the Americas. Leopards are their African Asian ecological carnivore counterpart.
2
Perhaps hunters should have licensed open seasons on each other rather than on other creatures. This would satisfy their blood lust, make hunting more fair, and perhaps protect innocent creatures.
17
The sexism of the assumptions here bothers me.
So, a few females cooperate in reducing the prey lost to males by sharing one between, say, 3 to 5 females, and tolerating only the selected male's loping across their hunting lands. I don't see how that implies that the male is "structuring" anything.
As to hunting males, obviously about 4 in 5 male mountain lions are superfluous to the survival of the species, as the females refuse to have anything to do with about that share. Like loser lions, they are forced into lesser hunting lands, cooperate poorly, eat rarely and, the point, die young. They are just consuming scarce prey to no end.
So, I can't see why issuing hunting licenses for males only (Is it easy to be sure, from a distance, when hunting, of the gender of a mountain lion; this is the rub; with deer and elk the antlers are a clear signal.) would be a problem. The sport afforded only increases public support for the maintenance of the species.
1
A note to Douglas Quenqua.
As a Canadian reader of the NYT, I am always on the look-out for instances of Americans' disregard for the much larger country to the north of the 49th parallel. Once again I wish to point out that the North American continent does not end at the border between Canada and the USA (nor at the border between Mexico and the USA). The range of the puma extends across the whole region of continental Canada as far north as the Yukon in British Columbia. www.env.gov.bc.ca/wld/documents/cougar. In my area of the Okanagan Valley, cougar sightings are a regular occurrence.
9
It wasn't all that long ago that pet/feral/house cats were considered solitary as well. And sometimes they are. But in situations where they have the opportunity to interact with other cats--on farms, in households, at shelters--they do have a social structure and social lives. Some of it is kinship, but not all. Science went to the cats and discovered what some people have known for years.
11
North American lynx allegedly "shy and elusive" wild cats are also more social than the conventional wisdom often formed by what the popular media thinks makes the most emotional wildlife story line, and then communicates to the general public. Lynx are not shy or elusive - that's why they have been driven to extinction over large areas. I observed a male lynx hunting with a female and her cub months before the breeding season in Alaska in the late 1980's, and tracked adults traveling together on a number of occasions. Then two of my collared females took their female sub adults back, traveled with them for a second winter after losing their litters during a hare low. The simple math of wildcat populations also indicates a high probability of the evolutionary need to maintain genetics based sociability in cats, because such a high fraction of any population consists of females with cubs who usually have to tolerate them for 18 months or longer in species like cougar and leopard. It also makes evolutionary sense for females to invest more resources in sub-adult daughters and sons by hunting with them and sharing large kills in order to perpetuate more of their genes. Darwin simultaneously realized that sociability and cooperation have immense adaptive/survival value, are an equally powerful evolutionary force to the dramatic violent "competition" behaviors that the media like to report on, and abusive human elites tend to valorize in order to justify their crimes.
21
Hunting mountain lions is criminal. The same goes for wolves and bears. Use a camera and leave nature as you find it.
74
As a public school teacher I talked a young man out of hunting for bear this year thru repeated conversations with him. Not by attacking hunting, and while supporting him in deer hunting, but asking him to consider the fact that bear numbers in New Hampshire where we live are low compared to human numbers and that many people like to see bears and would be deprived of seeing the one he killed.
9
It's not criminal, but it is completely unnecessary.
1
Deer
Tick,Tick,Tick.
1
The video appears to shows aggression between the two female cats during the day time; and 'cooperative' feeding during the night. Is this truly a factor?
1
Moved from NY to the Pacific Northwest. We have cougars in the neighborhood.
The local social media lights up when there's a sighting. We say nothing, so as to give the animal a better chance at survival.
Also around here many locals let their pets run free. If the roads don't get them the coyotes and cougars do. How rustic.
28
My neighborhood roaming domestic cats get thinned out periodically. I've seen bobcats and coyotes nearby but I don't know which does the cat snacking.
1
In rural Indiana owls take cats at night. One afternoon when I was gardening and our old cat was a ways away, a large red-tailed hawk knocked him down and had him in his talons. Our recently acquired young dog, who had been with me, almost went airborne as he drove the hawk off.
Many years ago as a Marine Officer on Okinawa one of my additional duties (I volunteered for it) was Iriomoto Wildcat Control Officer. Considerable construction was going on to prepare for the World's Fair, so the Wildcats were often leaving where they had lived. When someone called to say that a pet dog or cat had been mauled, my Master Sergeant and I said it was probably not a Wildcat. When the pet had been let out briefly at night and all that was left was a bloody spot and maybe a paw, it was a Wildcat. They were surprisingly easy to catch for
release on a less populated island in the archipelago (typically Iriomoto),
but we did it very carefully.
8
Both do, along with owls.
1