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Above: The Florida Everglades is a unique, fragile environment of water, tall grasses, and trees. So few Florida panthers are left in the Everglades that the animal would probably become extinct without help from wildlife biologists. |
Darrell Land's appreciation for nature started early. He grew up playing in the woods and watching birds and went on to study wildlife biology in college and graduate school. Today he heads up the field staff of the Florida Panther Recovery Project. He may spend as many as 6 days a week tracking panthers through the Florida Everglades as part of an effort to keep the Florida panther from becoming extinct. The story of the Everglades is a good example of what can happen when people change the environment without understanding what all the consequences might be. For the past century or so, people have been building on the edges of the Everglades, which is a giant wilderness of grass, trees, and shallow water. They've also constructed canals and dams throughout the Everglades in order to divert water to adjacent cities and farms. So much water used to flow into the Everglades that people thought that what they changed wouldn't make a difference. About 15 years ago, they began to realize how wrong they had been. |
Pollutants washing into the Everglades from farms and cities have killed native plants, and lack of water has killed fish and birds. In particular, pollutants and lack of habitat have been killing the Florida panther, a beautiful, tawny cat about 7 feet long from nose to tail, which has been on the endangered species list since 1967. Panthers used to live all over the Eastern United States, but today the 40 or 50 Florida panthers left in and around the Everglades aren't enough to continue to thrive unless they get help.
At last, help for the Everglades and for the panthers is on the way. Geologists and geochemists from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) are studying soil cores taken from the Everglades to understand what the water, plants, and animals there were like during the past 100 years. Computer and mapping experts are creating maps that show what vegetation, soil, and water levels are like today. Hydrologists (people who study water) are creating computer models to understand how water would flow through the Everglades in the future if there were no canals or dams.
Hope for the panthers is coming from a closely related animal, the Texas cougar. The Panther Recovery Project with the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission has imported eight female cougars into the Everglades to mate with male panthers in the hope that these matings will create a more genetically diverse and healthier panther population than the panthers can achieve on their own. The cougars wear collars with radio transmitters that enable the biologists to follow their movements, and Darrell Land and his staff track the animals several days a week. In 3 years, the cougars have given birth to 12 half-cougar/half-panther kittens, which is better than anyone hoped. To be a wildlife biologist, Land says, you need to have a good education, love your work, and be willing to work in remote and rough places.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
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Without Marjory Stoneman Douglas, there would be no problem with the Everglades because there probably wouldn't be any Everglades. When Douglas died in 1998 at the age of 108, she had been fighting for the Everglades for almost half her life. In 1947, when she was 57 and a journalist and children's book author in Florida, she wrote a book called The Everglades: River of Grass. At the time, most people considered the Everglades to be an evil swamp that should be drained of its water. Douglas's book told how beautiful, fragile, and environmentally important the Everglades was. She explained that the Everglades was really a stream of shallow water moving slowly through sturdy saw grass and was home to an enormous variety of animals from fish to panthers. Later in the year that her book was published, President Harry Truman created Everglades National Park at the southwestern end of Florida. Although the Everglades is still in danger from pollution and lack of water, thanks in large part to Marjorie Stoneman Douglas it remains an ecosystem that exists nowhere else on Earth. |
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