by mallen | Sep 13, 2015 | puma ecology, santa cruz pumas
A photo of a puma family above the night time lights of San Jose. This photo was captured with a motion-triggered camera by our field technician Chris Fust. The effects of urbanization and human activity are a focus of our project. We have found that human development...
by mallen | Sep 10, 2015 | puma ecology, santa cruz pumas, video
We have been using motion-triggered video cameras for over 4 years to study puma communication behaviors. Here is a video we captured of a mother puma and two of her playful yearling kittens. We suspect that the mother puma is 52f before we placed a collar on...
by jsmith | Feb 4, 2015 | field notes, puma bios, santa cruz pumas, Uncategorized
On February 3, puma project researcher Paul Houghtaling went looking for 25F again. In May 2012, 25F’s collar stopped sending GPS data, and we have been attempting to get her a new collar ever since. After many previous attempts to track down 25f, Paul went back...
by jsmith | Jan 22, 2015 | events and outreach, media, pumas in the news, santa cruz pumas, Uncategorized
This week, we published a paper on puma behavioral responses to human development and how they relate to kill rates in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We found that females spend less time at their deer kills when they are close to people, and therefore kill deer more often...
by jsmith | Nov 29, 2014 | media, pumas in the news, santa cruz pumas
A UCSC Cruz Alert was sent out on November 28 warning of two mountain lions spotted near the base of the UCSC campus. Mountain lions do occasionally move through campus property, due to the many preserved acres of land in Upper Campus and Pogonip, and the adjacency of...
by yiwei | Aug 22, 2014 | field notes, santa cruz pumas, technology
Every month, one of our biologists goes up in a plane to try to locate all of our study animals and download the GPS information from their collars. Flying is the most efficient way to download the GPS data because we can cover much more ground than driving. We are...
