This past January, the Eastern puma was declared extinct in the United States.
Once widespread in every state east of the Mississippi River, a living Eastern puma, commonly referred to as a mountain lion or cougar, hasn’t been spotted in the Eastern range since 1938. Now, eighty years since that last sighting, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has removed the Eastern cougar from their endangered species list:
“Given the period of time that has passed without verification of even a single Eastern puma, the Service concludes that the last remaining subspecies perished long ago.”
The species was abundant prior to the 19th century, National Geographic reports. However, early European settlers considered them a threat and began rounding them off and killing them in the northeast. Some states even went so far as to put a bounty on the animals with the goal of protecting livestock. Dr. McCollough, a wildlife biologist with the UFWS, told the New York Times:
“There was a general attitude back in the 1700s and early 1800s that any predator was a bad predator and some were created worse than others, and cougars were among the worst.”
While the USFWS acknowledges pumas may still be seen in the eastern territories, they believe sightings are wanderers from western ranges or escaped captives. They don’t believe breeding populations are present north of Florida.
But here’s where it gets strange: while the USFWS says the Eastern puma is extinct— it’s also kind of not.
The early classification of large wild cats was based on physical characteristics like fur and nuanced differences in size. Now that we have genetic testing, however, most biologists don’t think there’s a difference between Western and Eastern pumas at all.
Mark Elbroch, the lead scientist for the puma program at the big cat conservation group Panthera, says it’s really more accurate to say that only a certain population of the North American cougar species overall has vanished— and even then, there’s a good chance it may return to its western range.
According to McCollough, cougar populations in the West have slowly been moving eastward, following the migration pattern of the coyote. As far back as 2005, ESPN reported that young male cougars had been dispersing eastward to the Midwest from western states— and it was only a matter of time before females would follow and create breeding populations. Clay Neilsen, a wildlife ecologist, was quoted as saying:
“As a scientist, you very rarely get to document the natural return of a large predator to an area where it’s been gone for over 100 years.”
Looks like there may be hope for the “Eastern” puma after all!
Please SHARE this with your friends and family.
