[Times photo: Stefanie Boyar]
Tim is one 10 panthers taken from Florida swamps to start a breeding program. Tim, who lives at Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa, can't breed because of health problems.

Biologists waded into South Florida swamps and pulled 10 kittens from their mothers' dens, intending to use them in a captive breeding program that was supposed to produce 500 panthers. But because of controversy and money problems, the captive panthers didn't get near each other until 1999.

Now, after two years of fruitless attempts to jump-start the breeding program, biologists wonder if the aging captives will die without ever reproducing.

"I'm very pessimistic these cats are ever going to make a kitten," said John Kasbohm, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who has been working on panther issues. "Every day that goes by, the chances are less."

Of the original 10 kittens, only six survive. One, male named Tim who is housed at Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa, is physically unable to breed. That leaves two males and three females. One of those, Cory, also belongs to Lowry Park Zoo.

All of them are more than 9 years old, "and that's kind of late to start breeding cats," said David Thompson of White Oak Plantation in Yulee, where three of the panthers now live.

At best they have two more years before they will be too old to breed, experts say. But the signs indicate it may already be too late.

"We've tried all the different pairings we could," Kasbohm said.

To boost the chances of producing kittens, Lowry Park shipped Cory to White Oak Plantation in March 2000 to breed with White Oak's male. However, that male was unable to impregnate either Cory or White Oak's female, Thompson said.

Seven months ago, White Oak Plantation swapped male panthers with the Jacksonville Zoo. So far, the results with the Jacksonville male, whose name is Seminole, have been equally dismal.

"We're just waiting to see if he can figure it out," said Thompson, director of conservation programs for the 7,500-acre corporate retreat of the Gilman Paper Co. in the northeast Florida town of Yulee.

As for the male that White Oak sent to Jacksonville to breed with Seminole's sister, Cypress, he has also exhibited an interest in breeding but no apparent aptitude for it.

The males don't know how to breed with a female, Thompson said, because they didn't learn the proper techniques when they were young.

"If you don't give the males a chance to learn how to flirt with the females by the time they're 2 or 3 years old, then they've got a steep uphill climb," he said. "It's a lack of practice, I believe."

The six panthers now at Lowry, White Oak and Jacksonville are the remnants of a program with grand ambitions but little advance planning or funding.

Faced with what appeared to be the imminent extinction of a species that once roamed throughout the South, Fish and Wildlife Service officials announced in 1990 that they would remove up to 50 panthers from the wild and use them for captive breeding.

"The unspoken effect of these removals would be simple: the elimination of all known breeding panthers in the wild," biologist David Maehr wrote in his book, The Florida Panther: Life and Death of a Vanishing Carnivore.

Animal activists sued. They argued the federal plan had failed to consider the impact on the wild population, and contended the government should pursue other strategies, such as bringing in Texas cougars to refresh the panthers' inbred gene pool.

The Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to trap only a small number of kittens for the captive breeding program. So between 1991 and 1992 a team of state biologists, including Maehr, went into the wilds of Collier County and trapped 10 kittens.

The breeding program was supposed to produce hundreds of the big carnivores, but nobody had planned ahead for where the offspring would live or how to pay for their upkeep, Kasbohm said. The captive breeding project stalled, and in the meantime federal officials decided to try breeding panthers in the wild with imported Texas cougars.

The cougars turned out to be the panther's real salvation. Female Texas cougars bred with male panthers in the wild to produce new litters free of the heart murmurs and reproductive problems that had plagued the state mammal. As a result the panther population has at last begun to rebound.

Meanwhile the captive kittens grew older. Four died. If the rest grew too old to breed, their genetic stock would be forever lost. Two are the last of their particular bloodline, Kasbohm said.

After three years of lobbying by Thompson, federal officials finally agreed in 1999 to allow the surviving panthers to breed, even though any kittens produced would have to remain in captivity as well.

If they fail to produce any kittens, though, "the program has nowhere near met its potential at all," Thompson said. "We've banked some semen from the males but we're a long way from what was originally envisioned."

No one knows how much the program cost taxpayers or the various zoos that kept the captive panthers fed and housed over the years. But Jennifer Hackshaw, general curator of Lowry Park Zoo, said the program was not a total waste. She pointed out that 600,000 people a year toured the Tampa zoo and saw the captive panthers on display.

"The value of the educational opportunity for people who saw those panthers is immeasurable," she said.

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Lucy Morgan

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