The population of Florida panthers is on the rise, up to around 180 of the endangered animals from as few as 20 to 30 two decades ago, officials say.
The estimate comes from the research institute of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which surveyed the animals -- also known as cougars or pumas -- in the southwest of the state.
"The population increased steadily between 1995 and 2012, and the biggest thing that brought the population back is a 10 percent increase in kitten survival," institute director Gil McRae told a meeting of the commission in Fort Meyer.
That increase is down to the 1995 importation of eight female panthers from western Texas into Southwest Florida, with a subsequent reduction in the incidence of genetic faults that inbreeding in the small Florida population had been causing, he said.
Before then, the Florida population had been dropping by around three annually, he noted; but since the importation the numbers had seen an increase of about 4 percent each year.
That raises hopes the panthers might begin to move north out of Florida to reclaim some of their one-time seven-state range in the Southeastern United States.
As encouraging as the Florida population increase is, it could also bring new problems for the panthers, McRae said.
"As the population increases, they'll run into more conflicts with humans," he said.
Commission experts say they're exploring a number of proposals to convince private landowners to accept panthers on their properties, including a program that would reimburse them for any livestock losses.
"We want to work with private landowners until panthers are seen as an asset," commission biologist Thomas Eason said. "The biology on panthers is the easy part. The hard part is how can we merge that biology with human psychology?"
Educating the public about panthers will comprise the majority of the commission's efforts in the future, he said.
The Florida panther has been listed as an endangered species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The be upgraded from endangered status to threatened, would necessitate the confirmation of at least two distinct populations of 240 animals in the state, while a complete removal from the list would need three unconnected populations of that minimum size.
The present Florida panther population is south of the Caloosahatchee River in the southwest of the state.
"If there's any hope of getting panthers off the endangered list, we need to get them not just north of the river, but to other parts of the southeastern United States, too," Eason said.
