Going Catatonic

"The Fish and Wildlife Service is stonewalling," Comiskey told me. Before her team's 12th and last meeting, in August 2002, Comiskey learned through the grapevine that the service had dropped a chapter she had coauthored with famed biologist and panther tracker Roy McBride. The chapter (which offered an alternative view to that of David Maehr, the state's former panther leader on whose research the FWS based its panther-recovery effort) was reinstated after Comiskey threatened to inform peer reviewers about the censorship. But she says the team report now before the public does not include the definition of habitat members agreed to, includes material added by the FWS without the team's consent, and is rife with contradictory statements and uncritical references to Maehr's work. 'They're trying to call it a 'team strategy,' " says Comiskey.

The peer reviewers' comments on the team's draft document, which have been available for almost two years, confirm the main points Comiskey, McBride, and other team members had made about the research on which the recovery effort is based. But the FWS, which seems more interested in protecting itself than panthers, won't allow the team to include the comments.

An independent scientific panel convened by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the FWS to vet existing panther literature dismissed the recovery effort as a failure, using words like "untenable, "egregious," "inexcusable," and "bad science" to describe Maehr's research, and noting that he had deleted key data that would have undermined his assertions. (When I asked Maehr about this charge, he said: "We left out animals from the Everglades because we felt this wasn't good panther habitat. At no time has there been intent to go around something by excluding data to get an answer we were looking for.") In the final editing of the panel's report, released in December 2003, "bad science" was dropped, and "particularly egregious conclusions" became "particularly unsound conclusions." But the central message survived. Maehr, himself a member of the team on which Comiskey served, offers this defense: "Much of the research that has been criticized was done in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a time when personal computers were just beginning their rise (i.e., no one in the Naples office of the [Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission] had a computer assigned personally to them)."

Still, even before Maehr left the commission, there had been "issues about how he handled data," reports Tom Logan, his supervisor at the time. "Obviously those issues have persisted in some of the reviews of his work." Maehr's research for the commission and the conservation strategy it spawned made him especially attractive to developers engaged in destroying panther habitat. Immediately on leaving the commission, he signed on with a consulting outfit.

One of his first assignments was Florida Gulf Coast University, to which real estate and agribusiness mogul Ben Hill Griffin III of Alico Inc. had arranged a donation of 760 acres, thereby vastly increasing the value of the company's 11,000 nearby acres. Eller helped draft a jeopardy opinion. But when Senator Bob Graham (D-FL) forwarded the FWS a letter from Griffin's lobbyist, and when Maehr wrote a letter of support for the developer, Eller's superiors rejected the draft, changing the opinion to "no jeopardy." Now, instead of panthers, the area supports two megamalls, a sports arena, the Ben Hill Griffin Parkway, and three sprawling residential communities with so many golf links the institution—which specializes in, of all things, environmental education—is waggishly called Florida Golf Course University.

In 1999 Eller and his colleagues determined that a three-mile extension of Daniels Road into the Fort Myers airport would destroy or degrade 1,540 acres of panther habitat. The biologists agreed not to write a jeopardy opinion if Lee County would protect just 250 acres of habitat. The county vowed to offer no compensation beyond the 69 acres the water management district had already required it to protect as wetlands mitigation. It then got senators Connie Mack (R-FL), Bob Graham, and Slade Gorton (R-WA), plus Representative Porter Goss (R-FL), to write letters to then FWS director Jamie Clark. Consulting for the county and using his discredited research, Maehr proclaimed that only the 69 acres of mitigation was necessary to offset the 1,540-acre loss. Accordingly, the FWS reduced its compensation demands to 94 acres.

By 2001 there were an estimated 78 panthers in Florida. In that year, misquoting the 1989 statement of one of its contracted biologists, the FWS stated that 50 cats were needed for a "minimum population," whatever that meant. The way the FWS saw it, this meant they had 28 extra animals. "No one who understood cats would ever say such a thing, especially when we only had 16 breeding females," Eller told me. "But I was ordered to write this into the biological opinion for a new terminal at the [Fort Myers] airport." Later the state's lead panther biologist, Darrell Land, informed me that the FWS's south Florida field supervisor, Jay Slack, has personally advanced this "absurd" argument to him.When I asked Slack about this, he said he doesn't recall saying such a thing.

Floridians have come far since 1885, when they authorized a $5 bounty for each panther scalp. Now they support protection by purchasing Florida panther license plates. A professional hockey team has taken the name of this erstwhile varmint. The Florida Advisory Council on Environmental Education reports that 91 percent of people it polled want to "save the Florida panther from extinction."

Now instead of panthers, the area supports two megamalls, a sports arena, the Ben Hill Griffin Parkway, and three sprawling residential communities with golf links.

Just about everyone inside and outside the state loves Florida panthers. Until, of course, they interfere with business; then they're suddenly friendless. Florida panthers aren't just smaller than their western cousins; they're shyer. They don't attack humans, or at least they haven't in recorded history. Yet when a mother and her two kittens were spotted early in 2004 near Pinecrest, the business council of the Miccosukee Indians demanded their removal. As of late June business council chairman Billy Cypress had written 10 voluminous screeds to the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and even the governor, with copies to sundry politicians. "Our children are afraid to go outside and may become traumatized," he has proclaimed. The cats threaten nothing save, perhaps, business opportunities in the unlikely event that the FWS enforces the law. At this writing, the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the FWS have obediently tranquilized and relocated one of the kittens—about five months before it would have ceased depending on its mother. Eller, Richardson, and Land are furious, and they agree there's little chance the kitten can survive on its own.