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Living a Double Life p.4

'Anybody There Do Carnivores?'

Twenty years ago, only about 30 Florida panthers survived in the wild, and most carried genetic defects from inbreeding. Today, thanks to a controversial program that improved panther viability by crossbreeding them with their Texas cousins, the situation has improved. But the heated political atmosphere surrounding the panther made it impossible for local groups to do objective science. Who, then, could take years of data and write papers on the panther?

"Stuart Pimm's group had been in the Everglades doing bird research for over a decade," graduate student Luke Dollar explained. "So the Florida people called up and asked, 'Anybody there do carnivores?'"

Three days and 15,000 photocopies later, Dollar had all the Florida panther data in hand and was ready to start mining it for papers. He presented the first at Cambridge in March, and he says the panther data displays some parallels to the fossa that he is studying in Madagascar.

"The panther 20 years ago was in the shape that fossa will be in 20 years from now if we don't continue our work," he said. "I hope the fossa population never reaches those levels, but if it does, we have a road map."

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