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 Jaguar Fragmented HabitatAt dusk one evening, deep in a Costa Rican forest, a young male jaguar rises from his sleep, stretches, and silently but determinedly leaves forever the place where he was born.

There's shelter here, and plenty of brocket deer, peccaries, and agoutis for food. He has sensed, too, the presence of females with which he might mate. But there's also a mature male jaguar that claims the forest-and the females. The older cat will tolerate no rivals. The breeze-blown scent of the young male's mother, so comforting to him when he was a cub, no longer binds him to his home. So he goes.

But the wanderer has chosen the wrong direction. In just a few miles he reaches the edge of the forest; beyond lies a coffee plantation. Pushed by instinct and necessity, he keeps moving, staying in the trees along fences and streams. Soon, though, shelter consists only of scattered patches of shrubs and a few trees, where he can find nothing to eat. He's now in a land of cattle ranches, and one night his hunger and the smell of a newborn calf overcome his reluctance to cross open areas. Creeping close before a final rush, he instantly kills the calf with one snap of his powerful jaws.

 

 

 

The next day the rancher finds the remains and the telltale tracks of a jaguar. He calls some of his neighbors and gathers a pack of dogs. The hunters find the young male, but they're armed only with shotguns; anxious, they shoot from too great a distance. The jaguar's massively thick skull protects him from death, but the pellets blind him in one eye and shatter his left foreleg.

Crippled now, unable to find his normal prey in the scrubby forest, let alone stalk and kill it, he's driven by hunger to easier meals. He kills another calf on an adjacent ranch, and then a dog on the outskirts of a nearby town. This time, though, he lingers too long. Attracted by the dog's howls, a group of villagers tree him and, though it takes many blasts, kill him. Jaguars, they say, are nothing but cattle killers, dog killers. They are vermin. They should be shot on sight, anytime, anywhere.

This sad story has been played out thousands of times throughout the jaguar's homeland, stretching from Mexico (and formerly the United States) to Argentina. In recent decades it's happened with even greater frequency, as ranching, farming, and development have eaten up half the big cat's prime habitat, and as humans have decimated its natural prey in many areas of remaining forest.

Alan Rabinowitz envisions a different ending to the story. He imagines that the young jaguar, when he leaves his birthplace, will pass unseen by humans through a near-continuous corridor of sheltering vegetation. Within a couple of days he'll find a small tract of forest harboring enough prey for him to stop and rest a day or two before resuming his trek. Eventually he'll reach a national park or wildlife preserve where he'll find a home, room to roam, plenty of prey, females looking for a mate.

Rabinowitz is the world's leading jaguar expert, and he has begun to realize his dream of creating a vast network of interconnected corridors and refuges extending from the U.S.-Mexico border into South America. It is known as Paseo del Jaguar-Path of the Jaguar. Rabinowitz considers such a network the best hope for keeping this great New World cat from joining lions and tigers on the endangered species list.

Jaguar Fragmented HabitatRabinowitz began his work with the Wildlife Conservation Society and now heads the Panthera Foundation, a conservation group dedicated to protecting the world's 36 species of wild cats. The foundation's current work represents a radical change in Rabinowitz's conservation philosophy from just a decade ago. In the 1990s, having censused jaguars across their range, Rabinowitz and other specialists identified dozens of what they called jaguar conservation units (JCUs): large areas with perhaps 50 jaguars, where the local population was either stable or increasing. At the heart of most of the JCUs were existing parks or other protected areas, which Rabinowitz hoped to expand and secure with surrounding buffer zones. "I felt that the best thing we could hope to do was to lock up these great populations in these fragmented areas," he said.

Within a few years, though, the new science of DNA fingerprinting-studying genetic material to determine family and species relationships-revealed an amazing fact: The jaguar is the only large, wide-ranging carnivore in the world with no subspecies. Simply put, this means that for millennia jaguars have been mingling their genes throughout their entire range, so that individuals in northern Mexico are identical to those in southern Brazil. For that to be true, some of the cats must wander regularly and widely between populations.

Rabinowitz and his colleagues went back to their data to see whether the preserves could still be linked with habitat adequate to support a traveling jaguar. "Lo and behold," Rabinowitz said, "while good jaguar habitat, where the cats can live and breed, has decreased by 50 percent since the 1900s, habitat a jaguar can use to travel through has decreased only by 16 percent. Most of it is intact and contiguous. These places are like little oases-very small patches that jaguars will come to, use a while, and then leave. We were writing these places off because they're not habitat where a permanent jaguar population can live. Now they're turning out to be crucial."

Rabinowitz hopes to convince national governments throughout the jaguar's range to maintain this web of habitat through enlightened land-use planning, such as choosing noncritical areas for major developments and road construction. "We're not going to ask them to throw people off their land or to make new national parks," he said. The habitat matrix could encompass woodlands used for a variety of human activities from timber harvest to citrus plantations. Studies have shown that areas smaller than one and a half square miles can serve as temporary, one- or two-day homes-stepping-stones-for wandering jaguars.

While the habitat making up the proposed network is mostly intact for now, prompt conservation action will be needed to protect it, especially in certain areas of Central America and Colombia, where some jaguar travel paths already are critically tenuous. By studying satellite photographs and airplane surveys, and walking sections of the proposed corridor to follow up on reports from local people, Rabinowitz and his team can identify the segments most in need of protection. He then can go to government decision-makers with hard scientific data, he said. "Our first challenge is looking at corridors where there's just a single tendril. We've got to lock up these areas."

Jaguar Fragmented HabitatDiana Hadley of the Arizona-based Northern Jaguar Project works to protect the northernmost jaguar population in Mexico, with the long-term goal of seeing the species return to the United States. Hadley said the project and its Mexican partners "fully support" Paseo del Jaguar. "If these magnificent animals are ever to reoccupy appropriate habitat north of the border," she said, "the stepping-stones in the jaguar corridor are essential." Paseo del Jaguar ranks with the world's most ambitious conservation programs, and realizing it will take many years. Rabinowitz is focusing first on Mexico and Central America, where officials in all eight countries have approved the project. Costa Rica has already incorporated protection of the corridor into laws regulating development.

Later he'll tackle South America, where landscapes and political situations are more diverse and challenging. Rabinowitz is encouraged, though, by his audiences' emotional response when he talks about jaguars-a response based on the animal's enduring aura of beauty, strength, and mystery. Indigenous peoples around Mexico's central plateau, and the Maya, farther south, incorporated the jaguar into their art and mythology. Today even mobile-phone-carrying government ministers sitting in urban offices feel what Rabinowitz calls "a powerful cultural thread binding them to their ancestors. Nobody can say that the jaguar is not part of their own heritage," he said. "What better unifying symbol can there be than the jaguar?"

By Mel White

From National Geographic

 

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.

Jaguar ConservationHe 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.

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?

Jaguar Conservation"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."

jaguar conservation 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.

NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Published on TaipeiTimes
Wednesday, Jun 18, 2003