With no natural predators to worry about, jaguars (Panthera onca) roam the forests of South and Central America. This feline is found in 18 countries, but only 4% of its critical habitat is effectively protected. The lack of protection has allowed its habitat to be destroyed and fragmented, the main reason why this emblematic species […]
At the beginning of the 1990s, while observing the large trees of the Amazon ceding ground to the scrub-like vegetation of the Cerrado, in a process driven by human activity, Brazilian scientist Carlos Nobre conceived of the hypothesis that a process of savannization of the world’s greatest tropical forest was underway. Thirty years later, a […]
By the 1960s, the North American jaguar had vanished from the southern US borderland after being hunted to extinction. Yet in the mid-1990s, there was a remarkable discovery: the jaguar had reappeared in the Sky Islands of Arizona, a region of rugged linked mountain ranges spanning the US and Mexico border that boasts the highest […]
In 2016, conservation biologist Holly O’Donnell was striding through the Amazon rainforest in southwestern Peru, recording every mammal she saw or heard while performing a line transect survey for the Peruvian NGO Fauna Forever. A few minutes into her walk, she smelled something fetid. Following the scent several meters off the trail, she found the […]
Ousado the jaguar could hardly walk. Fires had blown through his territory in the Pantanal region of Brazil, scorching the very ground the animal was running upon as he tried to escape. When a team of volunteer veterinarians eventually captured him in Encontro das Águas State Park, all four of his paws had turned beet […]
Fernando Tortato usually spends his time scanning camera trap footage to monitor jaguars in the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland, a region that sprawls across Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay. But for the past 45 days, he’s taken on a new role as a firefighter, sometimes working grueling 24-hour shifts to help extinguish the flames […]
In 2016, in the midst of the first investigations into jaguar trafficking in Bolivia, biologist Ángela Núñez received a short audio clip via Whatsapp: “Teeth, tiger”. That was all she could hear and it was enough. The file was sent by an informant close to the Manuripi-Heath Amazon National Wildlife Reserve in Pando who claimed […]
An adult male jaguar nicknamed “Short-Tail” (due to his partially missing tail) was caught on camera in both Belize and Guatemala, making him the first individual confirmed to cross the international boundary between the two countries. Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) scientists published their observation in CATnews, the newsletter of the Cat Specialist Group, a component […]