Eastern cougar may be declared extinct
-
This 2006 photo shows the taxidermy of the eastern cougar said to have been the last cougar killed in Pennsylvania in 1874 by Thomas Anson.
Share with others:
Known by many names -- from mountain lion, puma and panther to ghost cat, catamount and Nittany lion -- the eastern cougar reigned for millennia at the top of the food chain from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean, from modern-day Canada to Tennessee. Revered by Indian tribes and decimated by bounty hunters, the ferocious carnivore remains the namesake of sports teams in Pittsburgh, State College and across the country.
Wednesday, as part of a court-ordered review of endangered and threatened species, federal researchers proposed that the eastern cougar finally be declared extinct. The species was about 12,000 years old.
But nobody's sending flowers. The proposal to remove the animal from the federal endangered list is merely academic. Many biologists, including those from the Pennsylvania Game Commission, agree that no wild, breeding populations of panthers have existed in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states for 100 years or more. Persistent reports of eastern cougar sightings throughout the Appalachian region have proven to be misidentifications, hoaxes or exotic pets that escaped captivity or were illegally set free.
In fact, new research, independent from the recent U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service review, proposes that all North American subspecies of Puma concolor are genetically identical. If that proves to be accurate, there never was a distinctly different "eastern cougar."
"Based on our three years of research, there has been no confirmed sighting of an eastern cougar, or forensic evidence of one, in a very long time," said Mark McCollough, an endangered species biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and leader of the team that will propose the agency remove the animal from the endangered list.
The Canadian Wildlife Service declared the eastern cougar extinct in 1998, and U.S. states including Pennsylvania report no confirmed sightings. Nevertheless, the federal Endangered Species Act mandates that the Fish and Wildlife Service review the status of all endangered and threatened species every five years.
First Published March 3, 2011 12:00 am
