Mountain Lion's Power Comes with Its Pounce: New Wildlife Collar Sheds Light on Hunting

What gives mountain lions their power? It's all in the pounce. Scientists have used a new wildlife tracking collar in order to continuously monitor the movements of mountain lions in the wild to determine how much energy they use to stalk, pounce and overpower their prey.

"What's really exciting is that we can now say, here's the cost of being a mountain lion in the wild and what they need in terms of calories to live in this environment," said Terrie Williams, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Understanding the energetics of wild animals moving in complex environments is valuable information for developing better wildlife management plans."

Yet actually analyzing the data from the wildlife tracking collars wasn't simple. The researchers first had to perform calibration studies with mountain lions in captivity. They trained these large cats to walk and run on a treadmill and then measured their oxygen consumption at different activity levels.

Once the scientists had a baseline, the researchers were able to use the data to quantify the high energetic cost of traveling over rugged terrain compared to the low cost of "cryptic" hunting behaviors; these included sit-and-wait or stalk-and-ambush movements. During the actual pounce and kill, though, the large cats invest a lot of energy in a short time to overpower their prey. In fact, the mountain lions adjust the amount of energy they use in proportion to the size of their prey.

"A lot of these large carnivore species are threatened or endangered, and understanding their physiological limitations has been a big missing piece in conservation planning," said Williams. "This technology gives us a whole new level understanding of what these animals are doing and what it costs them to live in the wild, and that can really help move the science of conservation forward."

The findings are published in the journal Science.