Local Palisades Fire relief efforts around animals have prioritized household pets, but there is still an entire animal kingdom left in ruin.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the Palisades Fire had burned through nearly 24,000 acres, including habitable space for animals and plant life alike. Impacts from the fire on the area’s wildlife include potential starvation from lack of food, as well as danger from large-scale smoke inhalation.
According to a review published in Environmental Research Letters in December 2021, research suggests that even wildlife that have adapted to combat fires, there are still a litany of health risks linked to smoke inhalation. Many animals are susceptible to carbon monoxide poisoning during inhalation, resulting in local blood oxygen levels and lack of oxygen supply to tissues and organs.
Pepperdine University Professor Biology and animal ecologist Dr. Lee Kats explained to the Daily Press that while wildlife has learned to adapt to fire situations (like burrowing underground or fleeing to escape), he is still worried about the rate of speed the Palisades Fire hit the area.
“Even in our previous fires that weren’t as fast-moving, hundreds and hundreds of animals die,” Kats said. “We talk about things being adapted to the Southern California wildfires, but it doesn’t matter, there’s still a huge amount of loss. Often, we can’t get those (full) numbers, because scavengers are so quick at basically feeding on the remains.”
Those scavengers are acting out of instinct to gain sustenance, a supply that dwindles after fire events. A study by the National Parks Service and UCLA after the 2018 Woolsey Fire stated that mountain lions in the Santa Monica Mountains became desperate in their search for food. Loss of vegetation, the study says, removed hiding spots for these creatures to hunt, forcing new and unfamiliar habitats. In the aftermath, one mountain lion died attempting to cross a busy freeway, while another crossed safely but still passed due to starvation.
Kats added that unconventional animal behavior may lead them into residential zones, though this doesn’t apply to “bigger predatory species” and shouldn’t cause concern in the general public.
“We often see immediately after fire, very peculiar behaviors that we don’t traditionally see,” Kats said. “Animals showing up at the doorsteps of existing homes, showing up to garages, looking for, frankly handouts … this is not uncommon at all, I’ve been watching the native wild ground squirrels foraging from my citrus tree. There’s no other food available.”
Kats and his students focus primarily on wildlife that depends on freshwater streams, already a rare commodity that will be heavily impacted by the fires, particularly on vertebrates already on population decline like frogs and salamanders.
Streams, he said, are only good habitats if they have a typical design with pools and riffles, but fires causing streams to lose these attributes will cause an environment “unlike any of these animals have ever historically seen before in their evolutionary history.”
“Historically, we think maybe fires come through any particular area every 20 to 30 years,” Kats said. “Now, they’re coming through maybe every six to seven years. That’s a huge difference for organisms that evolved where the time scale was 20-30 years … with species, they can’t adapt quick enough to the environmental changes we are thrusting on them.”
Though Kats is not sure if he can contribute to “practical solutions” in the aftermath at the moment, he decried national media for focusing on “forest management” in an area that is more so a Mediterranean Chaparral climate. Moving forward, he added, there should be a plan in place to decrease fire frequencies and avert prescribed burns, which are “not exactly what we need.”
“We’re already having too many fires, and so the thought of bringing in more fires is not helpful at all … when the fires come back too quickly, your plant community begins to change,” Kats said. “You begin to get more grasses, and you (begin) to get more invasive species, and you begin to get fewer of our native species. The invasive species and the grasses burn more quickly, and the flames spread faster … we have (to do) as best we can to try to return our plant communities back to the native Chaparral.”
