The Brazilian Amazon is hemorrhaging illegally traded wildlife according to a new report released Monday. Each year, thousands of silver-voiced saffron finches and other songbirds, along with rare macaws and parrots, are captured, trafficked and sold as pets. Some are auctioned as future contestants in songbird contests. Others are exported around the globe. Fish bound […]
Tag: Panthera onca
Pac-Man: The jaguar hunted for parts in Mexico
Pac-Man walks quickly, wags the tip of his tail, and shows off his fangs while panting. Suddenly he stops and slightly raises his left rear leg. He turns to see Cam walking steadily behind him. The jaguars then appear to lose each other in the Lacandon Jungle. A hidden camera is the only witness to […]
Panthera: At least 500 jaguars lost their lives or habitat in Amazon fires
The fires ravaging the Amazon forest in Brazil and Bolivia this year have burned key habitats of at least 500 adult, resident jaguars as of Sept. 17, rendering them dead or homeless, say experts at Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization. “The number of homeless or dead jaguars has undoubtedly increased since Panthera’s estimate […]
Can jaguar tourism save Bolivia’s fast dwindling forests?
ÑUFLO DE CHÁVEZ, Bolivia — Few countries in the tropics have seen their trees chopped down as quickly as Bolivia did between 2001 and 2017.According to data from the University of Maryland and World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch, Bolivia lost 45,000 square kilometers (17,400 square miles) of tree cover, or 7 percent of its […]
Peccary’s disappearance foreboding for other Mesoamerican wildlife
The white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari), a hairy, pig-like mammal that once lived throughout the forests of Central and South America, now only skitters around in 13 percent of its former range, according to a report released in November 2018. More than two-thirds of white-lipped peccary populations are on the decline, said scientists who met to […]
Hunting, agriculture driving rapid decline of jaguars in South America’s Gran Chaco
New research finds that one-third of critical jaguar habitat in the Gran Chaco, South America’s largest tropical dry forest, has been lost since the mid-1980s. According to the study, led by researchers at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU Berlin) and published in the journal Diversity and Distributions this week, deforestation driven by agricultural expansion — mainly […]
Fang trafficking to China is putting Bolivia’s jaguars in jeopardy
BOLIVIA — A skull rests in the hands of a hunter. It is a jaguar’s skull that has all of its teeth in place, except the four fangs that the jaguar used to sink into the necks of its prey – until Jesús shot him with an old shotgun in the Bolivian Amazon. “For the […]
Use of mammals still prevalent in Brazil’s Conservation Units
For as long as humans and animals have co-existed, people have utilized them as resources. Animals, and their parts, have been used for a variety of purposes, ranging from basic food to more esoteric practices such as in magical ceremonies or religion. A new study published in mongabay.com‘s open-access journal Tropical Conservation Science has found […]