Mountain lions displaced by bushfires take more risks
29 October 2022
Published by: https://www.globenewsinsider.com
USA – Mountain lions are not interested in people or the urban areas we enjoy. But after the wildfires in California in 2018, local lions took more risks. Cross roads more often and move around more during the dayscientists report October 20. biology todayThis is another way of putting pressure on wildlife vulnerable to human development impacts. In this case, you could push them towards the bumper.
The Woolsey Fires began near Los Angeles on November 8, 2018, burning more than 36,000 hectares of the Santa Monica Mountains. About 300,000 people were evacuated and three died. Animals, including the local puma, also fled the fire (same color as puma). Rachel Blakey, a global change biologist at UCLA, said the fire was a tragedy, but it was also a scientific opportunity. Many lions wear tracking collars, allowing scientists to study how fire changed their behavior.
Of the 11 collared cougars in the area at the time, 9 survived the fire. “They have such a large range that it’s not a big deal for them to be able to travel many kilometers in a day,” says Blakey.
The puma avoided people no matter how hard they moved. One collared cat, P-64, initially fled the fire until it approached the development area. Faced with a choice between fire and man, the lion returned to the burning area. “That’s where he stopped,” Blakey says. The Park Service then found the remains of his P-64. He had his legs burned, was unable to hunt and may have starved to death.
Scientists, using data from nine lions that survived the fire and others that were collared afterward, found that cats generally avoid badly burned areas of their territory. With the vegetation gone, the cats had little cover to stalk and ambush their prey.
Instead, the cougar continued to stick to non-burning spots and avoid people. But they took more risks with human infrastructure, increasing the number of road crossings he did from an average of about three a month to five.
These weren’t all two-lane country roads. The first collared lion to successfully cross Interstate 405 (10 lanes) after the Woolsey fire. The big cat used to cross Route 101 once every four months, but before the fire he only did it once every two years. Their territories overlapped more frequently, increasing the likelihood of fatal encounters among solitary cats. % to make lions more likely to hit humans.
Crosswalks are what Blakey calls a “risk mismatch.” Lions in populated areas seem to rate the risk of encountering humans as more dangerous. But “on the highway, it’s much more likely to be fatal,” she says. That risk, combined with the risk of running into other cats, can be deadly. A young man wearing a collar died on a highway months after a fire. He was running away from a fight with an older man who wasn’t wearing a collar.
Winston Vickers, a wildlife research veterinarian at the University of California, Davis, says severe burns like Wolsey Fire highlight the mountain lion’s resilience. “They have amazing mobility. They can almost always escape an impending fire and mostly survive,” he notes. Changes in risk-taking, he says, may reflect how the population is mountained and trapped by human development.
Wildlife crossings, such as the new Wallis-Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over 101, hope to give mountain lions a safe roaming option, but their primary purpose is to facilitate gene flow between lion populations. Blakey says it’s about facilitating (SN: May 31, 2016). It would be nice to have a place to run in a landscape where fire, people, and highways merge.
