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Jaguars caught in conservation's spotlight

The Wildlife Conservation Society, together with a scattering of Latin American environmental groups, are determined to study the elusive jaguar and raise awareness of what will help in the conservation of the species. Above, a jaguar in a Corcovado National Park is caught in a camera trap near the Sirena Research Station in Costa Rica. PHOTO: NY TIMES

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.

Panthera onca ■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

"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.

What's the point of saving a car company, if the animal it's named after goes extinct? -- Dr. Alan Rabinowitz, director of science and exploration at Wildlife Conservation Society

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.

Cheetahs cannot roar. Neither can lynxes, servals, ocelots or mountain lions -- which are also called cougars, pumas and, strangely enough, panthers. Jaguars can, and they are the only cats in the Western Hemisphere to so rumble.

The range extends from northern Argentina to the Sonoran region of Mexico, not far from the UD border. On rare occasions, jaguars may amble into Arizona or New Mexico. Mostly, however, they prefer the thick extravagant gloom of a tropical rain forest.

Jaguars are the top predators of their habitat and, thus, can serve as a so-called indicator or flagship species. If the jaguars are thriving, then chances are that most organisms lower on the neighborhood food chain are faring well, too. If, on the other hand, jaguars start venturing out of their preferred forest cover to attack livestock, then there is probably something out of whack in the woods.

The team set up 32 cameras along known jaguar corridors, placing them in a grid pattern over 70km2. The cameras are automatically activated by heat and motion -- the signature of a passing mammal. They have been clicking round the clock since August, capturing thousands of portraits of all sorts of animals, including the desired felids.

Individual jaguars can be distinguished and accounted for by their singular patterns of spots. This spring, the cameras took a picture of a black jaguar, the first one known in Corcovado. Carrillo is reluctant to make estimates in advance of the data analysis, but he said he expected 50 to 100 jaguars in Corcovado and its environs, a reasonable density for a large meat eater that needs a extensive space to earn a living.

Rabinowitz, author of the influential "eco-memoir" Jaguar: One Man's Struggle to Establish the World's First Jaguar Preserve (2000), said such numbers were on the high end of jaguar statistics and applied to relatively pristine places like the Santa Cruz ranch in Bolivia and his hard-won Cockscomb jaguar preserve in Belize. Elsewhere, however, the jaguar is losing range to familiar culprits like logging, slash-and-burn agriculture and poaching.

"We've got a two-sided coin here," Rabinowitz said. "In the last 25 years, we've lost a lot of jaguar habitat, and the human-jaguar conflicts continue. On the other side of the coin, we have more laws in place now, a greater focus on conservation and more protected areas set aside.

"Where does that leave us? We don't know. But I'm glad that we're doing the work now, before we've reached the critical point where the jaguar is on the brink of disappearing."

In addition to the surveys at nodes throughout Latin America, biologists are also trying to determine if jaguars migrate across the Darien Gap along the border between Panama and Colombia, and thus whether the jaguar populations of Central and South America are likely to be stirring their gene pools together, or remaining in comparative reproductive isolation.

Because countries that are cat-rich are often cash-poor, jaguar biologists have been grateful for the largesse of one especially apt corporate donor, the Jaguar North America car company. Several years ago, after its president, Michael Dale, had helped reverse slumping sales, he experienced a minor epiphany that inspired him to donate US$1 million to jaguar research.

"He told us, `What's the point of saving a car company, if the animal it's named after goes extinct?'" Rabinowitz recalled. Whether the car is suitably named is open to question. As field researchers have learned, jaguars are neither fast nor graceful. "They remind me of fire hydrants," Rabinowitz said. "They're incredibly stocky and built close to the ground."

They are, however, the embodiment of power. Although smaller than the other great cats overall, the jaguar has a comparatively huge head and the strongest jaw for its size, capable of pulverizing bone. Its paws are broad and its claws gothic.

The jaguar hunts by stealth and kills by leaping on an animal's back and crushing its neck. In one South American language, the word for jaguar means "the wild beast that can kill its prey in a single bound." Should the prey manage to dart away, the jaguar rarely chases it. In sum, the jaguar has evolved a two-pronged approach to dinner -- stay virtually invisible until the last possible moment and then deliver an overwhelming blow.

Yet for all its ferocity of mien, the jaguar is something of a dandelion around humans. It is the least likely of the Pantheras to attack a person unprovoked, and, in contrast with tigers, lions and even pumas, it has never been documented as a man eater.
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