FWC: Four panther deaths in 2 weeks, latest near proposed Kingston development
The numbers are mounting: four Florida panthers were killed in a two-week period this month.
The latest of the big cats to be killed by a car strike was found near the proposed site for the Kingston development, which is expected to cause up to 23 panther road kills per year.
The 10-year-old male was hit and killed by a car along the eastern stretches of Corkscrew Road, near the Corkscrew Regional Ecosystem Watershed.
This area is typically thick with panthers as this is how they get north and out of the core breeding range in Big Cypress National Preserve and Everglades National Park.
The panther recovery plan says the big cats need to move north of the Caloosahatchee River and Lake Okeechobee and expand into Central Florida.
Crossing Corkscrew Road is one way panthers disperse to the north and out of the core breeding range, which has a spatial limit as panthers need hundreds of acres for hunting and breeding.
But several developments threaten to severe giant swaths of agriculture land here, which is used by panthers as habitat despite having been converted from natural lands to farm fields.
Kingston is being fought by environmental groups, panther advocates and even the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida.
Dozens of panther advocates and concerned residents have flooded public meeting spaces in recent months to protest any FWS permit for the Kingston development.
Traffic a concern for panther advocates
That development alone is expected to add 94,000 vehicle trips per day to that area, which is now mostly used by farm and rock trucks and people traveling from Immokalee to the Fort Myers area.
This was the fourth panther to be hit and killed by a car between Jan. 9 and Jan. 22, according to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission records.
FWC is the state agency that tracks panthers and is partially responsible for executing the panther plan, which falls under the Endangered Species Act.
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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, or FWS, is the federal agency charged with protecting panthers.
Only 13 panther deaths were recorded in all of 2023, a number that some say suggests the population is dwindling.
That's less than half of the totals that were recorded in recent years.
By comparison, 27 panther deaths were documented in 2022, according to FWC records, and another 27 big cat deaths were tallied in 2021.
Neurological disease impacting panthers
Feline leukomyelopathy, or FLM, is a neurological disorder that was first detected in panthers and bobcats in Florida in 2017, and it seems to be having an impact on parts of the population as fewer cat deaths are being recorded.
For years FWC biologists and others said that an increased number of road deaths correlates to a growing population ― there are simply more panthers out there to be hit.
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Use that logic in reverse, and it would seem like the panther pollution is in decline as fewer overall deaths are being recorded by state biologists.
Connect with this reporter: Chad Gillis on Facebook.
This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: After only 13 deaths in all of 2023, 4 panther deaths in 2 weeks
