Endangered Florida panthers will not be collared and tracked in the wild for the foreseeable future, according to state and federal officials whose job it is to monitor the big cats.

Budget cuts have forced the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to abandon -- at least for now -- the Panther Team's efforts.

Program proponents are concerned about stopping the program, saying it provides useful information on the location of panther habitat, which is necessary to fight development that would encroach on their territory.

Since the 1980s, the team has hunted, treed, darted and collared panthers to track their health and population -- steady at between 80 and 100 animals for the past decade -- as part of the Florida Panther Recovery Program.

Team Leader Darrell Land said telemetric tracking using GPS collars has been suspended in all areas of South Florida, including the Everglades, Big Cypress Swamp and Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve.

Deploying a half-dozen employees on a tracking mission is expensive, Land said.

"It usually costs a couple of thousand dollars to send a team over to the Everglades for a couple of days to do this work. It costs us $500 to $600 a night just to house them in a motel," Land said. "Besides, the collars themselves cost between $2,000 and $5,000 a pop. It's very costly."

The GPS collars used for the past two years have not lived up to their billing anyway, Land said.

"They advertise that these are good for two years but we've been lucky to get a year out of the collars," he said. "The battery life sucks."

Oron "Sonny" Bass Jr., an Everglades National Park supervisory wildlife biologist, has been working with the wildlife commission on the de-collaring project.

"All of the collars have either been removed or stopped functioning," Bass said. "There are two panthers who are still wearing non-functioning collars."

Jennifer Hecker, of the Conservancy of Southwestern Florida, said she is saddened by the "deeply troubling" decision to end a program aimed at protecting the state animal.

"Telemetry has been relied upon to determine the panthers' habitat," she said. "This is a significant diminishment of protection for the species."

Brian Call, past president of Friends of the Florida Panther Refuge, also laments the decision.

"It's unfortunate that they don't have the money to monitor Florida panthers, especially when their critical habitat has never been designated," he said. "Without the GPS collaring, they don't really know what the critical habitat is."

The majority of panthers are found in Southwest Florida -- Lee, Hendry and Collier counties, Land said.

"We can research and manage the panthers from our home office in Naples," he said. "The counting of panthers is imprecise and difficult. We will continue to count tracks, scat and tree scrapes."

The state agency is brainstorming other ways to monitor the shy cats, including the use of game cameras.

"This is much less invasive, since we attach a camera to a tree along a well-used trail. Anytime you don't have to capture and put them through the stress is good for the animal," Land said. "We haven't given up on capturing the panthers, but there is some risk to the cat and we have been looking for more noninvasive techniques. If we detect a major change in the population, we may go back to the collaring."

Historically, panthers lived from Florida north to Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and west to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and into Texas. The species is threatened by the destruction of its habitat, mostly from development; collisions with automobiles; and genetic defects from extensive inbreeding.

Placed on the endangered species list in 1967, the panther's population in 1995 was so low that Texas cougars were imported to expand the gene pool.

This year, there have been four recorded panther deaths: Three were hit by vehicles and one died in a fight with an aggressive male. Last year, there were 15 deaths, 10 from vehicles.

sgibbs@keysnews.com