UC Davis experts were sought out by wildlife officials and news media this week after a mountain lion killed one bicyclist and injured another in an Orange County park last Thursday.

Walter Boyce, co-director of the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center, leads a long-term research project based in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, about 75 miles from the scene of the Jan. 8 attacks. UC Davis biologists have put tracking collars on 20 mountain lions there since January 2001.

Boyce was in Cuyamaca Jan. 9 when he told the San Francisco Chronicle that as people crowd into mountain lions' natural habitat, the lions are eating vulnerable animals left outdoors, such as dogs, cats, geese and rabbits. And Northern California sprawl is creating "exactly the same conditions that exist down here," Boyce said.

Lee Fitzhugh, a UC Davis wildlife management specialist, has been warning for 20 years that mountain lions are rising threats to people in the American West. In 1985, after several worrisome encounters between humans and lions in California residential areas, he wrote to the governor urging that the ban on mountain-lion hunting be lifted. It was not.

On Saturday, Fitzhugh told the Los Angeles Times that individual mountain lions, especially young ones, are beginning to target humans in recreation areas as they learn to hunt. Lion attacks will remain rare, he said, but "more people will die."

Also on Saturday, UC Davis scientists at the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory in San Bernardino found probable human tissues in the stomach of the mountain lion killed Thursday by sheriff's deputies at the attack scene. In 1994, a related lab on the Davis campus conducted the forensic examination of a lion that killed another Californian -- Barbara Barsalou Schoener, a UC Davis graduate killed while running in Auburn State Recreation Area.

More information about UC Davis mountain lion research is online at http://www-ucdmag.ucdavis.edu/fall01/feature_2.html.