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The story below was taken from the Times Globe Newspaper.
Hunting for Answers
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A Real Cat Scan
Scientist turns to X-rays and DNA to delve into Eastern cougar
By David Young
Times Globe staff
writer
A Saint John scientist is turning to the awesome
power of modern biotechnology in an effort to shed light on one of the
province's most enduring wildlife controversies.
Don
McAlpine, curator of zoology at the New Brunswick Museum, has asked
microbiologists to analyze the DNA found in a small sample of feces thought to
be from an Eastern cougar.
The cougar, or panther, is on
the province's list of endangered species, but many biologists believe they
became extinct decades ago.
"For a long time there has
been a debate about whether the Eastern cougar survived, and the general
feeling among wildlife biologists is that they hadn't," explains Mr.
McAlpine.
The debate has raged on so long that even in
the last century, experts couldn't agree if the cougar existed in New
Brunswick. Believers have even accused the government of covering up cougar
evidence to avoid costly protection measures.
In this
decade, the debate has heated up once more.
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[ The stuffed big cat was brought to the Saint John Regional Hospital this week for an X-ray. (The bill will be sent to the museum, by the way, and no human patients were kept waiting.)]
In November of
1992, J.D. Irving Ltd. employee Tom O'Blenis was working near McKiel Lake, east
of Juniper, when he noticed cat-like tracks on a logging road. He called
government biologists.
After following the tracks in the
snow for about 2.5 kilometres, the, team found some cat scat. By analyzing the
tracks and having hair samples from the scat examined in Ottawa, Rod Cumberland
and Jeffery Dempsey concluded that the animal was a cougar, although they
couldn't say what kind of cougar.
"That seemed to be
proof positive that the cougars were in New Brunswick," Mr. McAlpine said.
Such important physical evidence was not to be lost. The
feces was shared among scientists.
A dried sample is now
officially part of the collection at the national museum in Ottawa. Another
specimen sits in glass vial the basement of the New Brunswick Museum on Douglas
Avenue.
"We save these things because ideas change,
technology changes and we want science to be verifiable," said Mr.
McAlpine.
But he has wondered if he could find out more.
Do the feces hold clues about where the animal came from?
After all, a few years ago, DNA evidence showed that a cougar
shot in Quebec was actually of Chilean stock and believed to be an exotic pet
that escaped.
DNA is a long molecule, similar to two
interwoven strings of beads. Found in every cell, the beads are like a code
which dictates what the animal, person or plant will look like. One code of
beads inside an egg will make a cougar; another will make a Coopers hawk;
another a human.
By taking some tissue and extracting the
DNA, and then deciphering a short sequence of the "beads," scientists can tell
- to an extent - what species the DNA came from. For example, they can tell a
cougar from a house cat, and even distinguish a North American cougar from the
South American variety. Researchers may be able to tell a Western cougar's DNA
from an Eastern cougar's.
Mr. McAlpine sent off some
feces to labs in California and Maryland for DNA analysis. In the meantime, he
has turned his attention to a much older sample.
Fifty
years ago, in 1938, a cougar was killed in the Lac Saint John area near
Madawaska. The animal was collected, stuffed and added to the museum's
collection as the last hard evidence of an eastern cougar in New Brunswick.
Mr. McAlpine said it is important to know conclusively if
this animal is indeed an Eastern cougar. But because the hide is tanned there
is little usable -DNA left in the skin. So Mr. McAlpine has turned to the
insides.
With the help of the X-ray department at the
Saint John Regional Hospital, Mr. McAlpine has found original pieces of skull
inside the animal. He will now look for left-over pieces of soft tissue around
the skull. Maybe he'll get a ligament, maybe some tissue in the nasal
cavity.
Once he finds something, he will send it to the
American labs again.
While this degree of investigation may seem to some as
an exercise in indulging scientific curiosity, it also has a practical
implication. By law, wildlife biologists must protect the animal if it exists.
If there are breeding populations, the government must develop management plans
to sustain the cougars.
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