Science has spoken on New Brunswick's great cougar debate

After months of testing samples of hair and scat gathered inNew Brunswick for potential cougar DNA the first batch of results are in and they are definitive.

Bobcat.

"Not cougar at all,"said Scott Pavey, head of theCanadianRiversInstitutegenomics lab. "I'm 100per cent on that."

Bobcat, while elusive, are native to New Brunswick and thought to have a healthypopulation.

There are still more samples undergoing testing which could reveal the presence of cougars in the province.

The two samples that have been testedare the two that were most recently collected.

One sample was hair and blood collected from the grill of a car after awoman claimedshe struck a cougar near Sussex in September 2016.

The other was scat obtained byprovincialwildlife officers afterman called in a report of a large cat eating a deer carcass in December 2014.

Pavey said a third sample is too small for testing, leaving four more prospects yet to be checked.

While all of the samples originate fromNewBrunswick, either collected by residents or wildlife officers, many of them have spent years outside the province. The New BrunswickMuseumoriginally sent hair and scat samples to a Montreal lab for analysis, but abacklogof work there kept them from ever being tested.

A partnership between themuseumand the lab located at theUniversityof New Brunswick Saint JohnCampus brought the samples back to their province of origin for analysis.

"I would have been shocked had either one of these samples been from cougar," said Donald McAlpine, the Research Curator and head of zoology at the New Brunswick Museum. "But there are still more samples to look at so it will be very exciting to see where further testing goes."

"It's exciting," said Faith Penny, the PhD student and lab technician who has been putting hours into the cougar "side-project."

Penny has been working to extract the DNA, replicating enough of the target genes toanalyze, and then comparing them to those of known species such asbobcatand lynx.

"When I got the results I dropped everything to check them right after lunch," she said.

Penny has been researching striped bass on the genetic level, but said getting toinvestigatethis "hometownlegend"has been a thrill.

"I guess I'm still abelieverthat there are cougars out there," she said. "But Idefinitelybelievethese results, and I'm not saying thatI'm surprised by them. It's hard to tell what things are, especially in the heat of the moment."

Penny has family members who also swear they've seen cougars in New Brunswick and said she well understands the sometimes fervent belief that drives the debate over whether or not the cats live in the province.

"We all want to see one," she said. "Ibelievethe science, but we'll see what the other samples say as well."

However, the remaining samples are proving difficult to extractpure DNA from.

"It'sparticularlychallengingwith old samples," said Pavey. "And it's alsochallengingwith scat because DNA...can be quite degraded because it's gone through an intestinal tract."

If any of thesamples do test positive for cougar DNA, it will not be the first time traces of the animal have shown up in the province.

Two hair samples proved to contain DNA when collected from Fundy National Park in 2003. By tracing the genes from that sample back to itsoriginpopulation, it was determined that animal came fromSouth America.