More Mountain Lions in cities. Its not clear as to whether this has anything to do with an impending Apocalypse.
Crouched in the darkness, two field technicians squint at a laptop, hoping to catch a glimpse of California's most elusive predator.
"Possum. Possum. Possum," Richard Pickens says, flipping through photos. "Oh—fox."
Pickens is studying images from a camera stashed a few miles east of San Jose, California, among bay trees and meadows of thistle and stinging nettle. Scientists guess that about a half dozen adult mountain lions, also called pumas or cougars, prowl these hills. But tonight, the golden animals are living up to one of their many nicknames and slipping through the forest like true ghost cats. (
Read about cougars in National Geographic magazine.)
That isn't always the case. As California's concrete jungles creep continually outward, more and more cats are finding themselves living on the edges of urban areas. Occasionally, they end up right in the middle of cities, like the mountain lion that
wandered into downtown Mountain View earlier this year, and
the Hollywood puma that lives in Los Angeles.
Those situations are rare, and often end badly for the cats—the Mountain View cat was later
killed by a car, the Hollywood puma suffered from rodenticide exposure—but the long-term effects of urbanization are much more insidious. Penned in by freeways and suburbs, local puma populations can be cut off from others. Isolated populations lose the ebb and flow of genes needed to keep groups healthy. ...
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141217-video-tracking-bay-area-california-puma/