A few weeks ago there was the stressed-out mountain lion trying to get around the border fence. Now there’s news that in Arizona the fence is posing a threat to the state’s black bear population, which, researchers say, is at the limits of its range, which has already been pinched by urban sprawl in the southern part of the state. This isn’t a matter of the same bears that live in, say, Colorado roaming as far south as Mexico. Arizona’s bears have more genetic commonality with Mexican brown bears and are more apt to want to mate with those bears than those to the north. Arbitrarily (from the bears’ perspective) cutting them off from each other will have impacts, and not just on bears, the authors suggest, but probably on the entire ecosystem in the Southwest.

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