| Puma and or Mountain Lion Scientific Name: Felis Concolor | |||||||||||||||||
| Body Characteristics |
The puma is a large member of the cat family, the largest in North America. They have a slender, strong, powerful, and very muscular limbs. They have a rather long neck with a small head with a short face. The hind legs are longer than the front. This is to help their jumping ability by rising the hind ended allowing a more power in their pounce. Theyhave a cryndrical tail for a counter balance. The underside of the puma is whitish, while the upper lips, chin, throat, and chest is almost pure white. The fur of a puma varies. The more common type of fur that is seen on pumas in more temperate climates is the hair is short and bristly with a reddish-brown color. While the more northern pumas have a long soft fur with a blueish-gray color to it. The baby pumas have short soft fur with black spots and brown surrounding them. They have white in the same places as the adults. Their tail is ringed as well. They are born with lengths of 20-30cm. They weight about 220-500 grams. The adults vary among male and female in size. A female can be 95-152 cm and 2,500 grams (25-60kg)in weight. A male can be 105-243cm in length and 6,700-1,100 grams (67-110kg). DIET The pumas main diet consists of deer. They eat other stuff to survive as well. Some examples are squirrels, slugs, grasshoppers, lizards, fish, porcupines, coyotes, and marten. Their diet depends on what is available. Grass is usually ingested to aid in digestion and eliminate hair balls. The reason that they get hair balls is that they have course tongues and the hair comes out of their skin when they clean themselves. A mountain lion can kill an animal that is up to 7 times its size! It does this by crushing its trachea. It is estimated that a puma eats about 1.8-2.7kg of food per day. The extra is stored for later. | ||||||||||||||||
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The pumas live in North and South America. They like to live in the Rocky Mountains. The map to the left shows this(the green is where they live in the wild, the white is where they don't live in the wild). Most live in temperate climates. They are also solitary animals. Solitary means that they don't hunt in packs, they travel alone. Many territories overlap but fighting is rare except in mating season. Many live in caves and or thickets. | Habitat | ||||||||||||||||
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| Endanged Facts |
Since the day that the white settlers came they were out to get the puma. They made up stories about how they killed cattle and innocent people. Only a small fraction of the stories were true. Livestock is food to pumas. They only go after that when natures prey that they normally go after is over hunted, most likely by humans. This is an interesting fact: a puma in Texas killed a calf so after it killed the calf its mother cow killed the puma. That is a true story. Rabies in pumas is an current event with them. It has been recorded and people use that as an excuse to terminate them. Many have been collard and it has been found most have died of mercury pollution and being hit by cars. There are things being done to help their current population. For instance there is a captive breeding program. Many new laws are being passed to protect them. There are only about 50 of them in Florida! The thing is that many things aren�t helping enough. If this rate of decline continues then in 25-30 years they will go extinct. This was true as of 1996 and could be a big threat still. | ||||||||||||||||
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