> Mountain lions as a species are not threatened in California, but a petition submitted Tuesday to the state Fish and Game Commission argues that six isolated and genetically distinct cougar clans from Santa Cruz to the U.S.-Mexico border comprise a subpopulation that is threatened by extinction.
I understand it lacks the 'We define extinction vortex as...' preamble, but you can easily infer it.
The article fails to directly define the term, and the indirect definitions do not point to anything that might constitute a “vortex”:
>The article points several times to the increasing isolation of the populations and the threats that giving them protected status would require development to take isolation of population in care when developing.
Which only implies the vortex, or feedback loop, if you already know the term and meaning, but the article does not expect you to know it..!
Isolation alone hardly reads as an evolutionary feedback loop... unless you already know that isolation creates an evolutionary feedback loop
For "vortex" to actually be fitting I'd expect some kind of circular process: perhaps a feedback loop, wherein some process is causing extinction which increasingly leads to more extinction. Like how melting ice leads to warming, which leads to more melting ice, etc, might be fair to call a "warming vortex".
It might interest you to know that there is an analogy between black holes and vortexes, as the latter are used as physical models of the former: https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys4151#affil-auth
That is indeed what it means. Per Wikipedia: "[The extinction vortex model] shows the events that ultimately lead small populations to become increasingly more vulnerable as they spiral toward extinction."