Two men dressed as jaguars circle each other and growl, trying to bring rain to a village on the Pacific coast of Mexico. A Mayan farmer in Belize finds jaguar tracks near his thatched hut, and ties his dog inside for the night. A Guahibo shaman in Venezuela paints his face with black spots, then snorts a powerful narcotic through a hollow jaguar bone. A cowboy in the Brazilian Pantanal examines the fresh remains of a cow, looking for characteristic puncture wounds or chipped vertebrae that will tell him a jaguar is prowling the area. These modern-day events, seemingly unrelated, are tied to a cultural heritage that thrived in pre-Columbian empires of the Americas. These are the people of the jaguar, connected by a powerful cultural thread binding them to their ancestors, to one another, and to the world’s third largest cat.
The jaguar’s fossil history spans nearly 1.5 million years. A larger version of today’s cat once ranged as far north as Washington State. But as the species’ distribution and body size decreased over time, this secretive, robustly built cat entered the twentieth century roaming unbroken forests and shrub lands from the southwestern United States through the dry pampas of Argentina. The technology boom of the 1900s brought inventions such as the airplane, the tractor, the automobile, and the rocket, and created a huge demand for many of Earth’s natural resources as well as a greater ability to get at and extract these resources. The forests of the jaguar came under siege.
By the 1960s, environmental degradation and decades of harvesting spotted cat skins for the North American and European fashion industries had decimated many jaguar populations. In 1969 alone, nearly 10,000 jaguar skins valued at more than $1.5 million were imported into the U.S. By the time most of the jaguar range countries outlawed the trade, during the 1970s, sharp declines in jaguar numbers were noted from areas where the cats had once been abundant. Meanwhile, Latin America’s human population was growing faster than that of any other region except Africa.
Of the world’s four great cats—tiger, lion, jaguar, and leopard—the jaguar is the least studied, the most elusive, and, in many ways, the most problematic. Until recently, scientists could not even guess at the cats’ numbers, but the people who encountered jaguars—usually through conflicts with livestock or pets—always believed there were too many. In fact, in most areas, jaguar numbers were steadily declining, as habitats were shrinking and prey populations were heavily hunted, forcing more jaguars into contact with people and livestock.
In 1999, realizing that scientists knew little more about jaguars than when I had first studied them in the jungles of Belize 20 years earlier, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) held a workshop that brought together more than two dozen experts from throughout the jaguar’s range. Using Global Information System (GIS) technology, we developed detailed maps of existing jaguar habitat. We also pooled our knowledge to determine where good jaguar populations still existed, assess the most significant threats to the species, and devise a strategy to mitigate those threats and to protect important populations throughout the cat’s wide range.
The bad news quickly became evident. During the last 100 years, more than half of the jaguar’s habitat had been obliterated. Central America had lost 65 percent of its forest cover, and Brazil 58 percent. The cats had disappeared from North America. Latin America had one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world, and the attitudes of local people had changed little. Jaguars were viewed as dangerous predators and inveterate cattle killers to be shot on sight.
But there was also good news, and cause for optimism. Jaguar populations persisted in scores of areas from Mexico to Argentina, in habitat that was mostly intact, though often unprotected. We called these areas Jaguar Conservation Units (JCUs). And while livestock depredation and outright killing of jaguars remained two of the most persistent threats to jaguar survival, we now had the technology and methods to more accurately study jaguars and to help lessen conflicts with livestock.
Out of that workshop, the WCS Jaguar Conservation Program was born. Within a few years, we had carried out exploratory surveys, population estimates, and ecological research in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. We also launched experimental projects with ranchers to resolve jaguar-livestock issues in the Brazilian Pantanal, the Venezuelan llanos, the Belizean rain forest, and Mexico’s Sonoran Desert. A jaguar education curriculum was developed in Spanish, and a small grant program funded young nationals who wanted to help conserve their country’s jaguars and at the same time advance their careers.
But the longer we worked on jaguars, the more reports of jaguar conflicts and the more requests for assistance from students, ranchers, local farmers, and government agencies crossed my desk. Jaguars were popping up in some unlikely sites, not always near designated JCUs.
One day, I sat in my office pinpointing jaguar locations on a map of the cat’s range. Then, as if playing a game, I started connecting the dots. When I was finished, I realized what we all had been missing.
My thoughts went back to 1997, when a study of the skull characteristics used for nearly a hundred years to separate jaguars into eight subspecies found that jaguars are, in fact, structurally alike throughout their range. Two years later, at the time of our workshop, DNA research conclusively showed that jaguars had not yet diverged into any discrete subspecies. The implication of such data is that jaguars, despite gross loss of habitat and continual persecution, are the only widely distributed large carnivore species in the world that has not fragmented into isolated, self-contained populations in any part of its range. There is only one jaguar out there. The question is, why?
Simulation models show that, in a population of only 20 mammals, genetic exchange from just a few outside individuals per decade is enough to increase the probability of that population’s survival. The same experiment showed that in a population of 50 jaguars, genetic exchange from only one jaguar every 100 years preserved genetic integrity better than did a single, isolated population of 100 jaguars. Clearly, a few dispersing jaguars over a long period of time could maintain genetic continuity and prevent isolation between the populations.
In 1993, reports of jaguars occasionally swimming across the Panama Canal were borne out by track evidence on Barro Colorado Island. In 1996, a rancher in southern Arizona, thinking his dogs had cornered a puma, grabbed his camera and photographed a jaguar. That photograph led to the discovery of a small jaguar population in the Sonoran state of Mexico, which had been completely off the experts’ radar screen. We quickly realized that some jaguars were traveling long distances from Mexico into the seemingly inhospitable desert habitat of the southwestern U.S. This was no anomaly. State game agencies had decades of reports of regular, though infrequent, visits by jaguars to the United States-Mexico border.
Sitting at my desk, I stared at the dots I had just connected. I thought about jaguars walking the beaches of Costa Rica, wandering the mangrove swamps of Mexico, moving through citrus plantations in Belize, crossing high mountain passes in the Andes, and living in the harsh Chaco region of Bolivia. Hunters believe that jaguars wander long distances through almost any kind of habitat. When the last jaguar was killed in California in 1955, American naturalist Aldo Leopold estimated the cat had traveled at least 500 miles from its home.
Genetic uncertainty strongly affects extinction in animal populations. I realized that we had an unprecedented opportunity to guarantee the survival of the jaguar. While I had been focusing our efforts on JCUs—known jaguar populations in areas with relatively abundant prey and largely intact habitat—I had ignored the mostly human-dominated landscapes between these sites. With no clear genetic divergence detected between populations throughout the cats’ range, I could assume that at least some jaguars were using these landscapes—dispersing through everything from citrus plantations to village gardens.
We decided to refocus the WCS Jaguar Conservation Program and call it Paseo Tigre—the Path of the Jaguar—to connect the dots in the field, so to speak. The goal is lofty, but to settle for anything less is to cheat the jaguar out of its best chance for survival.
The most important component of Paseo Tigre is still the JCUs. But in addition to identifying, surveying, and protecting these populations, whether on public or private lands, we want to know how jaguars move between the JCUs.
We know what jaguars need: occasional access to water, some degree of forest cover, and prey species that can range from peccaries to armadillos. We also know that jaguars can live close to people, but they generally avoid large open areas and sites of high human density.
A consensus among jaguar experts produced six landscape features that most affect jaguar presence and movement: habitat type, percent of tree and shrub cover, elevation, human densities, human settlements, and roads. This allowed us to map the broader landscape over which jaguars can potentially move throughout their range. Then we subdivided each landscape feature into categories (the percentage of tree or shrub cover, for example) in order to fine-tune the landscape and delineate the most highly probable dispersal corridors that jaguars actually use to travel between neighboring JCUs.
By August 2005, after more than a year of work and consultation, the maps are finished. I sit mesmerized by the huge swath of green representing the potential landscape over which jaguars can move, and the narrower yellow corridors connecting JCUs. While good jaguar habitat has decreased more than 50 percent during the last century, the potential for the dispersal of jaguars is still extensive, only 16 percent smaller than the cat’s historic range. And while jaguar numbers have decreased markedly, we know of at least 52 JCUs with more than 800,000 square miles of habitat. We already have completed more than 40 surveys. We have assisted cattle ranchers in four countries via ongoing outreach programs. And there are scores of passionate young grantees studying jaguars.
My elation is short-lived, however. A closer look at the maps reveals serious potential holes in the animals’ dispersal routes. Jaguar movement through parts of Mexico, Panama, and Colombia is clearly a problem, and the connections to some crucial JCUs, such as the Brazilian Pantanal, are extremely tenuous. We need to immediately investigate these areas.
There are years of fieldwork ahead: surveying, monitoring, and refining our data sets for the JCUs and the landscapes connecting them. Working closely with the WCS Latin America staff and other NGOs (non-governmental organizations), we must set up more protected areas, investigate land purchases and conservation easements, work with local communities within the jaguar corridors, incorporate jaguar education as part of school curricula, and bring the governments of 17 countries on board with the idea of formally recognizing jaguar corridors as part of strategic planning for national land-use policies.
On a warm summer evening in New York City, I sit at dinner with Carlos Manuel Rodriguez Echandi, Minister of the Environment and Energy for the Republic of Costa Rica. A fervent conservationist and jaguar lover, he is a major force behind new protected areas and schemes to sustainably use his country’s natural resources. He listens intently as I lay out the idea of Paseo Tigre. When I finish, he leans back and looks thoughtful. He knows my unasked question, is it possible?
"This is good," he says finally, nodding his head and smiling. "With your help, Costa Rica will be the first to set this up. Then we will convince others that this must be done."
Later, while falling asleep, I imagine a network of jaguar corridors snaking their way throughout the Americas. The task is enormous. Some countries will be much more difficult to work with than others and, in the end, the final matrix will not be what it is now. But I am sure that Paseo Tigre can be a reality.
Though a jaguar cub born in Mexico likely will never meet his brethren in Brazil, they will be linked in the most elemental sense, through genetic lineage. And we will have both preserved the cultural integrity of the people of the jaguar, and ensured the survival of the jaguar.
Alan Rabinowitz is director of the WCS Science and Exploration Program. In our October 2005 issue, he wrote about setting up the world’s largest tiger reserve in Myanmar.
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