Wild & Weird: Tinder for Mountain Lions
Mountain lions have a special form of communication. Rather than spray urine like their domestic cousins, male cougars scrape the ground to create a mound of dirt with a shallow hole in front of it. Then they'll pee on it, sometimes marking it with scat for good measure. "Scrapes," as these potty mounds are called, function kind of like a Tinder profile. If a ready-for-breeding female encounters a male's mound and likes what she finds, she'll urinate on it too. That's like swiping right — saying she's in the area and DTM (down to mate).
Scrapes also mark the borders of a male cougar's territory, advertising his dominance over an area to limit confrontations with other he-cats.
Check out this very rare footage of an Arizona mountain lion creating his scrape on Facebook and YouTube.
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