Thirty-two Florida panthers were killed this year, most struck by vehicles when crossing a road.
There is great affection for the highly endangered state animal, so 32 dead in one year is tragic.
Stories about this year’s panther deaths continue to run in national and local media, but many are written without context or with oversimplifications that, for example, hype the tally of deaths as a "record" and "a grim milestone."
Grim? Yes.
A record or a milestone? No.
Unfortunately, thirty-two panthers killed in a year is about average.
So why, now, is the sad, yet normal, average of panther deaths making national headlines?
“Once the hype takes off then you get pack journalism of a kind,” said Thomas Patterson, a Harvard University professor and author of “Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism.”
“They’re doing it. We’ve got to do something on this. And the inclination, of course, is to do it fairly quickly, which means you're not going to be digging into possible alternative explanations, looking at longer-term trends and like," he said. "It's dragging down the quality of journalism.”
Habitat loss across Florida and nearby states has been leading panthers down the road to extinction.
More than a century ago, Florida panthers could be found roaming throughout the Gulf states and beyond, including Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and even Tennessee and South Carolina, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
Today, throughout Peninsular Florida, existing residential developments with hundreds of homes, several schools, and scores of playgrounds are often being expanded with newly adjoining neighborhoods with more of the same.
Cattle farms and former citrus groves replete with creeks and shade trees continue to be flattened for corporate parks, Amazon storage warehouses, and malls often larger than smaller.
Webs of new roads crisscross the region to allow for commutes from home to work, from school to home, and from home to weekends out-of-town.
More than 75 percent of panther deaths in recent years happen when the animal is crossing a road and is hit by a vehicle.
It's common for journalists to write and broadcast end-of-year retrospectives on what happened to issues of great public interest. What's uncommon is how many reporters are having accuracy challenges putting 2024's panther death count into perspective, especially when the official numbers are easy to find at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's panther website.
Why is unclear.
For example:
Several media outlets recently published stories that the 32 panther deaths so far in 2024 set a new record using wording such as this from an online news site: “For the first time in eight years, Florida panthers are dying in record numbers.”
But, Florida panthers are not dying in record numbers.
The record was set in 2014 when 42 panthers perished. The record was matched in 2015.
This month an online publication published: “In 2022 and 2021, 27 panthers were killed in Florida.”
The FWC recorded 27 panthers killed in 2021. Again, the next year's death toll was the same, meaning 54 panthers were killed in Florida during those two years.
Only 13 panthers were killed in 2023, an abnormally low figure some experts believe is due to fewer people driving, instead opting to stay in during the waning days of the COVID pandemic. Other panther scientists say it is merely a lucky year for the animal,
More than a few journalists ignored the historical average of nearly 32 panthers killed every year prior to 2023 and wrote alarming stories about a huge spike in panther deaths due to vehicle collisions. That's untrue.
A few minutes spent doing the math to average the number of panther deaths from 2014 to 2022 would show a mean of 32 deaths. Statistically, the outlier of 13 in 2023 should be ignored and not made the basis for comparison.
There are somewhere between 130 to 230 panthers left, most jammed into Collier, Lee, DeSoto and nearby counties in greater Southwest Florida that comprise a mere 5 percent of their multi-state historical range.
So 32 a year is still tragic. It is unsustainable for a species that FWC records show produces far fewer kittens per year.
Perhaps that would be the dominant storyline today if newsroom staff had not dwindled across most mainstream media outlets that remain unshuttered because there would be enough time and reporters to properly flesh out stories based on data, numbers, and comparisons.
“Journalists typically don't have this knowledge when they stumble on the story, so they've got to do the dig, and sometimes the kind of information they want isn't readily handy and they don't have the capacity, nor the interest, in doing a really deep dig,” Patterson, from Harvard, said. “And then you get a story that just kind of propels itself along, factual or not.”
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