As people sheltered in place at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, sightings of wildlife in urban areas helped spawn a meme, “Nature is healing,” that reflected an intuitive belief: Carnivores were stretching their legs, and their ranges, by expanding into long-lost territory.
As people sheltered in place at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, sightings of wildlife in urban areas helped spawn a meme, “Nature is healing,” that reflected an intuitive belief: Carnivores were stretching their legs, and their ranges, by expanding into long-lost territory.
But new research from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and National Park Service shows that mountain lions in Greater Los Angeles, when briefly spared the proximity of people, instead responded with an economy of movement that also reveals the costs of living near them.
“We saw a potential silver lining with COVID, which obviously has been generally a negative thing for everyone,” said John Benson, the study’s lead author and assistant professor of vertebrate ecology at Nebraska. “We saw an opportunity to get a better sense of how human disturbance and human activities influence animal behavior.”
Over a 43-day span that stretched from late March to early May of 2020, GPS-collared mountain lions in and around Los Angeles actually occupied smaller territories, and generally moved less, than they did before the pandemic. That span coincided with a statewide stay-at-home order and the closing of most parks around LA, including those favored by the famously reclusive species.
Read more at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Image: A mountain lion on a bluff overlooking Los Angeles. By tracking the whereabouts of 12 mountain lions before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, ecologists have found that the reclusive species, briefly freed of the need to avoid people, adopted an energy-efficient economy of movement during LA's shutdown in spring 2020. (Credit: National Park Service)
