Bad Science Led to Poor Panther Protection, Experts Say

Maryann Mott
for National Geographic News

October 21, 2005

The Florida panther—one of the world's most endangered
animals—is being shortchanged by established science, according to
a team of experts.

Fewer than a hundred of the large carnivores currently roam national and state parks and nearby private lands.

To bring the elusive cat back from the brink of extinction, biologists and policy makers have relied on the "best available science"—the term for the scientific basis behind decisions aimed at preserving natural habitat and preventing further species decline.

But now a team of researchers hailing from universities across the U.S. claim the best available science fails to take important data on the panther's range into account.

The team's findings are slated to appear in the Journal of Wildlife Management in January 2006.

Establishing Rules

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—the federal agency in charge of protecting the panther—asked the team to review more than 20 years and 3,000 pages of scientific literature on the panther (Puma concolor coryi).

The reviewers quickly identified a major oversight: A prominent panther researcher had collected only daytime activity data and failed to acknowledge the cat's nocturnal nature.

Team member Michael Vaughan, a wildlife science professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, says this inadequate data ultimately led to the conclusion that panthers wouldn't travel more than 295 feet (90 meters) outside of a forested area.

None of the other panther researchers believed this conclusion, said FWS biologist Chris Belden.

But Vaughan said decisions related to development and land use in Florida were nevertheless based on a 90-meter rule. The decision presents a problem, since shrinking habitat is one of the greatest threats to the panther's survival.

"We haven't gone back and checked to see how much land was developed based on these [erroneous] guidelines," Vaughan said. "But my guess is land was developed that was probably good panther habitat."

The team's work recently led FWS to revise the panther-related provisions in its Multi-Species Recovery Plan.

The plan, which has been in development since 1995, is a comprehensive strategy meant to help restore and maintain South Florida's ecosystem. A draft of the plan is now complete and should be available for public review in December.

FWS admitted it did not move quickly enough to correct some scientific information about the panther. But the agency believes it played an important role in identifying these concerns and supporting the investigation.

"The [FWS] used panther information that had been scientifically peer reviewed," FWS Deputy Directory Marshall Jones said in a March written statement.

"But we and others engaged in panther science and conservation identified significant limitations in its methodology and conclusions. However we should have moved more quickly … an oversight that we regret and are working to correct."

"Take It as Gospel"

Going back and reviewing decades' worth of research is not a common practice, Vaughan said.

"But the data that we found flaws with had gotten into peer-reviewed, published literature," he said. "And once it's in peer reviewed literature like this, people take it as gospel."

Paul Beier, another reviewer and a professor of conservation biology at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, said the two most fundamentally flawed papers appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Conservation Biology.

Other researchers subsequently cited those papers in their published studies, he said, creating a snowball effect.

The most serious error found was the selective data use in an influential paper on panther habitat.

Beier said the authors of that paper disregarded some 40 percent of the information they had collected on the movement of radio-collared panthers but didn't acknowledge doing so.

Beier—who serves on the board of governors for Conservation Biology—says he doesn't fully blame the journal for the errors.

"Some of these mistakes were deeply buried," he said. "They were not easy to detect."

To prevent future problems in the scientific review process, Beier would like to see the reviewer's identity—which is normally kept anonymous—included on published papers.

"This encourages you to do a very thorough job, because you know now if this paper is accepted, your name is down there," he said. "This would be a major shift in the way peer review is currently done."

Conservation Biology hasn't changed its anonymous peer-review policy, Beier said. But he plans on speaking to the editorial staff soon about making such an amendment.

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