Dr. Eduardo Carrillo, a cheerful, ruddy-cheeked man who could charm the eyelashes off a pit viper, has had the great fortune of seeing jaguars in the wild at least two dozen times.
He has seen them creeping along the forest floor, their polka-dot fur spangling through the underbrush like velvet confetti. He has seen them hunting giant sea turtles on the beach, napping on cliffs, paddling across rivers and lazing against the fat roots of a giant fig tree. Each time he sees a jaguar, he says, "it is like a miracle or a dream, the most exciting thing you can imagine."
As often as Carrillo has spotted jaguars, however, jaguars have spotted him scores, even hundreds, of times more.
Jaguars may be large, measuring 1.8m from snout to tail and weighing up to 158kg. They may live in places like Sirena, a tropical rain forest on the southwestern peninsula of Costa Rica, where every day is an ecotourist's Mardi Gras of spider monkeys tumbling over howler monkeys, Muppet-face sloths and toucans and scarlet macaws flapping overhead like crayons with wings. Yet even when other normally shy creatures feel free to make spectacles of themselves, the jaguar remains aloof.
"Jaguars are so hard to find," said Carrillo, a Costa Rican biologist who works for the Wildlife Conservation Society of New York. "I can be standing right next to one, and I know it because I've picked up the signal from its radio collar, and still I may never see it."
His students are well aware of the cat's elusiveness. Roberto Salon, who is working toward a master's at the University of Costa Rica, conceded with some embarrassment that after 18 months of studying jaguars he had yet to see one in the wild.
■Is the largest and most powerful cat of the Western hemisphere, averaging up to 1.8m in length, not including the tail, and weighs up to 158kg.
■ A mature jaguar is powerfully built, with a massive head and shoulders, and thick, fairly short legs.
■ Jaguars are rarely seen in the wild due to their shy nature and their well-camouflaged coats. Most jaguars are yellowish to tawny in color, spotted with large black rosettes or rings. Black (melanistic) and nearly all white (albino) jaguars are occasionally born.
■ The jaguar -- a symbol of power, strength and beauty -- was worshipped as a god by early indigenous cultures, including the Aztecs, the Olmecs and the Maya.
■ Jaguars are accomplished, versatile hunters. They will catch and eat almost anything, including monkeys, capybaras, deer, peccaries, birds, turtles, snakes and iguanas. Jaguars may also eat plants and fruit such as avocado.
■ Jaguars hunt mostly on the ground around dusk and dawn, but can climb well and sometimes will ambush prey by leaping from ledges or tree limbs.
■ Jaguars are excellent swimmers and have been seen swimming between islands.
■ Jaguars are solitary except during mating, and have home ranges that can be as small as 10km2 or as large as 180km2.
■ Jaguars prefer to live in thick tropical forests, swamps, coastal mangroves and lowland river valleys -- areas with good cover and access to fresh water -- but they have been known to hunt in dry, open scrubland when necessary.
■ The range of the jaguar has shrunk greatly in the last 100 years from over-hunting and loss of their tropical forest habitat. Jaguars once ranged from southwestern and southeastern United States to southern South America. Today this magnificent animal is an endangered species, rare except in parts of southern Mexico, Central America and South America. -- source: jaguar facts
As a result of its exceptionally stealthy style, the jaguar has long been one of the least studied members of the feline tribe. But lately Carrillo and his colleagues at the wildlife society, together with a scattering of Latin American environmental groups, have formed a kind of jaguar juggernaut.
They are determined to flesh out the spotty portrait of the neotropical carnivore and loft the cat to conservation stardom on par with the whale, the elephant and the chimpanzee. They are gathering its vital statistics and exploring its quirks and customs.
How many cats remain in the wild, and what do they need to prevail? How do they find mates, choose mates and lose mates when coupling is through? Why are they such masterly climbers and swimmers but such miserable sprinters? How do they manage the swing shift so deftly, at times seeking prey in the day, at others by moonlight? And why is a baby jaguar like the vice president of the United States?
"Nobody has ever managed to film a wild female out with her cubs," said Dr. Alan Rabinowitz, director of science and exploration at Wildlife Conservation Society and head of the entire jaguar program. "You'll see the mother. You'll see signs of the cubs. But you won't see the cubs themselves."
In one sign of progress, Carrillo and the WCS will sign an agreement at the end of this month with Panama to formalize a commitment to protect wilderness areas in the southern part of the country that may serve as cross-cultural causeways, allowing jaguars from Central and South America to migrate, mingle and breed as they please.
The jaguar, admirers say, is born pinup material, a great cat in every sense of the word. It belongs to the genus Panthera, the royal clan that includes leopards, lions and tigers. Distinguishing the great cats from the rat pack is the possession of a modified hyoid bone in the throat that allows them to roar.
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