By Susan Milius
Plenty of people hated the idea in 1995, but borrowing some genes from Texas has improved prospects for endangered Florida panthers, a new report says.
Hybrids of the Florida cats and cousins of the same species from a wild-caught Texas population have twice the genetic variety and far fewer of the genetic defects that were known in Floridian panthers before the introduction, says geneticist Warren Johnson of the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Md.
Now panthers of mixed-state background live about twice as long as the pure Floridians do. Thanks to the genetic infusion and other conservation measures, the adult panther population in Florida has tripled, Johnson and his colleagues report in a broad review of the effort published in the Sept. 24 Science. Wildlife managers now put adult panther numbers in the 90s, sometimes pushing into three digits during a banner year.
“This work can be a good model for other severely depleted populations of carnivores,” says longtime cat conservation biologist Howard Quigley, based in Bozeman, Mont. But Florida’s panthers are far from safe, he points out.
Among the big remaining questions is whether Florida will find enough habitat for a population to survive. A mere hundred Florida panthers don’t make a viable population in the long term.