See the photos of a mountain lion's all-female litter of kittens born in the wilderness near Los Angeles
CBSN
One of the few adult mountain lions in California's Santa Monica Mountains has given birth to a litter of all-female kittens. And on Thursday, the National Parks Service unveiled photos of the adorable litter for the first time.
The kittens, which have been named P-113, P-114 and P-115, were discovered in a "dense patch of poison oak nestled among large boulders" in the Santa Monica-adjacent Simi Hills on May 18, officials said. At that time, biologists believed them to be 24 days old.
Officials also say it's likely that the mountain lions are being raised by a single mom. Their mother, P-77, is about 5 or 6 years old and has been observed by the NPS since November 2019, but there aren't any male mountain lions being tracked in the area right now. The last two adult males who were regularly tracked in that area were P-65, who died in a wildfire, and P-38, who was poached, officials said, making the father of this litter a mystery.
Two more black-footed ferrets have been cloned from the genes used for the first clone of an endangered species in the U.S., bringing to three the number of slinky predators genetically identical to one of the last such animals found in the wild, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Wednesday.