Florida Panthers

State panther biologists are hoping the sometimes cruel fate of nature does not repeat itself this year after they checked on a trio of kittens born to a mother who lost last year’s litter to a hungry black bear. They posted pictures of the baby panthers on Instagram

Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park gains more than 60 newly conserved acres, further connecting the world’s largest subtropical strand swamp.

The Florida Panther Day Festival previously planned for Saturday at the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge on state route in South Immokalee had been canceled. Efforts were made successfully to get the event back in place.

As 2024 comes to an end, some journalists are having difficulty keeping the official panther death count from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission accurate. Why is unclear.

When the wildlife corridor was envisioned, subdivisions with 10,000 houses and hundreds of thousands of feet of office space were not planned.

As agriculture gives way to planned developments, many worry the Florida panther is on a path to doom.Environmentalists say planned communities — Kingston in eastern Lee and Bellmar in eastern Collier and both the size of small cities — could hurtle the Florida panther from the Endangered Species List to extinction.

The Florida panthers’ numbers dwindled so quickly over the the early 1900s that hunting them was banned in 1958. In 1967, panthers were the first animal to be put on the federal Endangered Species List, and in 1973 the puma, a big cat relative, was named a Florida protected species.

When Governor Ron DeSantis signed the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act into law in the summer of 2021, the occasion was met with a flurry of glowing headlines and general celebration by conservationists across the state. But the effort to protect the integrity of Florida’s landscape is a race against time. It remains entirely legal to develop land within much of the corridor’s boundaries, even if such development would destroy the landscape-scale connectivity the law is meant to preserve. The corridor, in other words, remains under siege by development. And the state and federal governments have not been too eager to stop it.

Dr. Hollis Stewart is a wildlife veterinarian. She worked on the Florida Panther Project, to help repopulate the endangered cats.

A collaborative effort by animal advocates and Arthrex innovation a wild, female bobcat that was injured during a research capture spent a few weeks at Naples Zoo recovering behind-the-scenes and has been released back into the wild.