Yes, LA's mountain lions are trying to avoid us. Here's why

Encountering a mountain lion in Southern California is a rare thing — and it turns out they're likely trying to keep it that way.

A new study reveals how mountain lions in the greater L.A. area cohabitate with the more than 18 million people hiking, biking, and running around their natural habitats by adjusting their schedules to be more nocturnal.

The research, released Friday in the Biological Conservation journal, followed animals in the Santa Monica Mountains, the Simi Hills, Griffith Park, Santa Susana Mountains, and the Verdugo Mountains over a more than seven-year period.

Ellie Bolas, one of the authors of the study from the University of California, Davis, told LAist that flexibility is probably part of what’s helping us all share the same space.

“L.A. is really unique in that it's one of only two megacities in the world that has a large felid predator in it,” she told LAist. “We really wanted to understand what does that mean when mountain lions and recreationists need to be able to coexist.”

Main takeaways: understanding the "weekend effect"

Mountain lions become more nocturnal when living in areas that have higher human recreation when compared to those living in areas with less.

Seth Riley, wildlife branch chief for the National Park Service and adjunct professor at UCLA, told LAist they’ve been studying mountain lions for more than 20 years, but this was the first time they looked explicitly at activity patterns.

They studied what's called the “weekend effect” — which is the idea that humans are more likely to be hiking and biking and recreating on the weekends as compared to the weekdays.

But Bolas said they were surprised to find that mountain lions don’t respond to the weekend effect like other wildlife.

“It may be because they're already mostly nocturnal, and so they're less sensitive,” she said. “It may just be that there's so much recreation that mountain lions are avoiding the recreation in space, and so they're less sensitive to changes in time.”

P-22’s patterns underscore the findings

The late P-22, who lived in Griffith Park surrounded by freeways and densely populated neighborhoods in the most urban area of the study, helped drive the relationship between recreation and nocturnality.

He was one of the most nocturnal mountain lions, second only to P-41, who lived in the Verdugo Mountains.

“They were experiencing the highest levels of recreation, but they seem to be the most sensitive to it,” Bolas said. “So they retained their fear of people and were actually the most nocturnal.”

That’s good news, she said, as it means the animals are still responding to and avoiding people, which can help us continue to coexist.