Jaguar: The Elusive Swimmer

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ebony Money and I'm Rich Schwartz. Welcome to Amazing Wildlife, where we explore unique stories of wildlife from around the world and uncover fascinating animal facts. This podcast is a production of My Heart Radio and San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, in international nonprofit conservation organization behind the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park. Today we're traveling to the Amazonian Rainforest, the largest remaining habitat for jaguars, but the Amazon is rapidly changing for the jaguar. That means less space, food and mates, and more contact with people. In a bit, we'll talk to the Director of Population Sustainability, Dr Matisse Tobler with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance about the role of technology and jaguar conservation. But first, let's learn more about the only living large cat native to the America's rick Jaguars are the smallest of the large cats, but they're the largest of South America's big cats. That's a bit confusing. Can you help us visualize their actual size? Well, elbody, believe it or not, jaguars aren't the smallest of the big cats. Jaguars are actually bigger and bulk ero than leopards, outweighing them by a few pounds. Now, of the big cats, only tigers and lions are larger. For example, male leopards can get up to a hundred and seventy two hundred seventy five pounds, where male jaguars can reach close to two hundred twenty five or maybe even a little more. But jaguars are indeed the biggest cats of the America's pound for pound, The next largest cat in the America's is the cougar or sometimes called the mountain lion or even the puma. But let's pounce on the main question here. Let's talk about the size of the jaguar. They can weigh between a hundred and twenty six two upwards of two to two and fifty pounds, the males usually being bigger than the females, and from nose to rump they usually measure just under four feet to about six ft in length, and if you include the tail length, then they're about five to eight and a half feet in length. And again, the females tend to round out the lower end of these measurements, while the males are at the higher end of those measurements. Well, you have to include the tail. It's only right. Well, that's a lot of variation, rick from one hundred and twenty six pounds to two pounds. What's the quickest way to tell the big cats apart, because I, for one think leopards look almost identical to jaguars. Ah, yes, ebany the age old questionment, did you spot a jaguar or did you spot a leopard? Well, if you happen to be a world traveler, the easiest way to know is by location. If you are in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East and you see a big spotted cat that could be a leopard or a jaguar, well it's a leopard. We know this because jaguars do not live in those parts of the world. And if you see a big spotted cat in the southern parts of North America, Central America, or South America, well that's a jaguar, not leopard, because that's where jaguars live. And for those of you who are planning on visiting the San Diego Zoo and want to be really good at spotting the difference between jaguars and leopards, simply look at the details of the spots jaguars and leopards both have spots that are made up of clusters of smaller spots. These are called rosettes, although both cat species have them. The jaguars rosettes have a spot inside of the circular cluster, but the leopards rosettes do not. Another good way to confirm the species of cat you're looking at while visiting the San Diego Zoo is to look at the really cool sign on the habitat. There's always a lot of great information there and so rick you mentioned rosettes. Um does the jaguars look serve a greater purpose? Does it help to maybe camouflage? How does the the tan or or an orange fur in the black rosettes that you describe blend in in the Amazon absolutely ebony? And when you look at the native habitat of the jaguar, which can range from thick, dense rainforest to dry forest or you know, shrub land and grassland, one of the first things you'll notice is the lack of one consistent solid pattern or color you see in nature, and especially in those environments, all of the habitats have these lighter and darker shades of color and light reflecting off some things and shadows created by others. Well, that coat of the jaguar helps to break up the body pattern or shape of the jaguar. It really is the perfect camouflage for them, and that's important when you need to be able to sneak up on your prey to survive. Oh yes, the ever present circle of life. So how else are jaguars adapted for life in the tropical rainforest. Well, for one, ebony, get this, they love water, which you know, I think for us as it's kind of weird to think of a cat loving water. But jaguars are excellent swimmers, and not just on the surface. In fact, they can even close their nostrils, which allows them to take that breath and sort of snorkel underwater while they swim. This allows them to cross streams and rivers with ease, but also comes in very handy when hunting for fish and turtles. Other notable adaptations aside from their awesome camouflage is their incredibly powerful jaw. Now pound for pound, jaguars have the most powerful bite of all the big cats. This is due to how the jaw muscles are arranged in the structure of the jaw and skull allowing for maximum leverage and power when biting down where most big cats will bite the neck or muscle of its prey to suffocate it. Jaguars are well known to bite the back of the head where the skull meets the spinal cord, using its powerful jaws and sharp teeth to drive those teeth into the neck vertebrate and incapacitate the prey. This tends to be a faster way for them to finish the hunt, and that can be if you're trying to catch prey and water. If it takes too long with the neck and muzzle bite, well, you might be forced to try and hold your breath for a long time while underwater. So some of their prey is underwater, are on the water. You mentioned this prey say, I'm a jaguar. You know what do I eat? What's what's for dinner? Well, honestly, have any you know? Jaguars are really opportunistic eaters. They'll hunt and eat whatever they can catch, which is more than eighty five different species in the habitats that they live in. Now. This includes deer, armadillo's monkeys, birds, iguanas, turtles, copy burrows, and get this, they are really good at catching fish, but probably most impressive, they will sometimes take on tapers and cayman. Now, if any of our listeners don't know what those are, the taper is a relative of the rhino and the cayman. Well, they're related to alligators and uh, cabybra, Am I saying that right? Oh? I guess, yeah, I guess. I'm assuming everyone knows that, capy bra. So capit Barry, here's your tribute. If anyone ever gets asked the world's largest rodent, it's the copybara. They're they're bigger than a laborator retriever and they are a type of roadent that lives in South America. That's been so thank you for the clarification because I I thought I knew the answer until I heard it, and I was completely wrong. So I have more species to study. So Rick, Jaguar's hunting technique is is different, I understand from other big cats. What can you tell us about the way the jaguar hunts? Well, interestingly enough, Ebony and I have to apologize. I'm not good at rolling my rs here, but the jaguars name comes from top Guarani. I'm sorry if I did that wrong. From their word yaguar, which means he who kills with one leap. Now, jaguars tend to use a stock and ambush technique. They have been observed stalking their prey from a distance and then hiding themselves in a position that is in or near the path of the prey. Now, they do hunt during the daytime, but this also works especially well for them at night, as they do have great night vision and many species they prey upon have poor nighttime vision. But don't get me wrong, jaguars can run very quickly too. It's for short bursts and short distances, but sometimes that can be hard to do because of the thick, dense rainforest where they live. And I think it has to be mentioned just how intelligent these cats are. There have been many observations of jaguars at the water's edge using the tip of its tail to tap the water every now and then. That attracts fish to the shallows, where the jaguar can successfully capture it. What's the benefit of hunting at night for jaguars? You mentioned their vision? Is that their greatest strength? Oh there, yeah, you know there are. There are a lot of great benefits for the jaguar when hunting at night ebony first and foremost. Like most cats, jaguars have that exceptional low light and nighttime vision we're talking about. This of us gives them the upper hand or should I say the upper paw when hunting their prey. This is because a lot of their prey items do not see well at night, like we mentioned, so for the jaguar, they can conceal themselves even better when sneaking up on their prey. Another benefit hunting at night is that it provides better body temperature management. It can get pretty warm at certain times of the year in their native ranges, so hunting at night not only makes them hard to spot, but also makes them one cool cat. At the San Diego Zoo, how do wildlife care specialists recreate the jaguars diet? That's one thing that's really great about what our staff does at the San Diego Zoo. We offer a wide variety of experiences for our animals when it comes to engaging with our habitat, and the jaguars are included in this. Of course, some days they may have a carcass or full sort of prey item to feed on, and other days food is in smaller pieces hidden around the habitat or up in a tree. And I have to say one of the more innovative things I have seen for the jaguars is when they give them live fish in the pool. And keep in mind this pool is pretty big and deep enough for them to fully submerge like they would in a ponder stream in the wild. So our jaguars will slowly get into the water and stock the fish, swimming underwater very carefully and grabbing the fish for a meal. It really is impressive to see all of the innovative in different ways. Our wildlife care specialists create these natural experiences for our wild life at the San Diego Zoo. And since jaguars often live in dense forests and are solitary and nature, have they been found to communicate like other large cats? Oh? Yes, of course. I mean when it comes to jaguar, both the male and female jaguars roar, which helps them find one another during mating season. You can imagine that roar has to travel through these forested areas pretty well, and it's kind of interesting. It's not like you would think of classic roar like the lion that you hear or a tiger. A jaguars regular call is sometimes referred to as a saw as in like you know when you're sawing would because it does have sort of this raspy back and forth sound that is repetitive, like wood being sawed. Other sounds of the jaguars may include snarls, growls, and grunts. Of course you know that as normal cats would do amazing. Thanks Rick. Next, we're talking to Dr Matthias Tobler, a wild ecologist, to learn more about jaguars. But first this now it's time for the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance Minute, an opportunity for you to learn what's new at the zoo. One of the current threats to the Peruvian Amazon ecosystem is intense artisianal gold mining, which uses mercury to extract gold dust, and unfortunately that mercury is released into the environment and bio accumulates in wildlife and people. Mercury can cause harm to reproduction and immune functions, as well as the nervous system. Testing for the presence of mercury and wildlife can be expensive. In challenging a San Diego Zoo Wilife Alliance, scientists Dr Caroline More has successfully tested more than two hundred biological samples using the runabout, a handheld mercury analyzer prototype developed by partner a Cone. This mercury monitoring at the Los Amigos Biological Station will continue with testing wildlife samples for mercury hearing, genomic biodiversity, in disease screening, with toxicology testing. We've been exploring interesting facts about the jaguar. Now we're going to continue the conversation with Dr Matthias Tobler, a wildlife ecologist with San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. Matthias, We're so excited to get your take on the jaguar. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. So what does it mean to study the ecology of jaguars in the Amazon? So the Amazon is the largest habitat for the jaguar. And when we started this project over fifteen years ago, there was really hardly anything known about the jaguar in the Amazon among some of the first who really went out there and tried to study the jaguar in the Amazon. And and part of that is because the Amazon is such a remote place. There's some man you have places it's really hard to get to, and it's really hard to study jaguars there, So why is it important. The jaguar is the largest predator in the Amazon, so it means it also regulates a lot of the other species. To praise species, right, So for example, the peccaries, which are wild pigs that can live in groups up two hundred hundred individuals. Those species romanophorest floor. They eat fruit and they rooted up saplings and they really influenced the regeneration of the forest. And the jaguar praise a lot on peck is in the Amazon. So the jaguar regulates the factories and that again affects how the fallow the forest regenerates. The other thing about the jaguar is that it's an umbrella species. That means it's a species that uses large areas of habitat as large territories. And if we can protect enough intact forest for the jaguar, we're also protecting a lot of the other species. So we kind of use the jaguar as a focal species that helps us protect functional ecosystems and the diversity of the Amazon. So Matias earlier, we were talking about the jaguars size and in comparing it to two other big cats, I understand for for many big cats, including jaguars, there's a huge variation in size across the range and in habitat. Is that correct, Yes, that's correct. We see a lot of variation based on climate, based on pay availability, based on the actual habitat of jaguar and the Amazon are chinnerally smaller than jaguars in more open areas like the pantanale wetlands where prey density is higher um the habitat is open. And we see that with other species too, with tigers. Tigers in tropical rainforests are much smaller than tigers for examine a cold climate like Siberia. So this is something we see through many of the big cat species. So can you tell us about the same Eagle Zoo Wildlife Alliances monitoring sites in South America? Yes, the work we do focuses on Peru and Peru as the second largest population of jaguars after Brazil, and we work in an area called Madrios in southeastern Peru which has really large areas of intact forest. Initially, when we started this work, we study jaguars and protected areas to kind of get a baseline data on what a natural jaguar population looks like. But then we realized that a lot of these jaguars actually live outside protected areas. They live in locking concessions in brazila concessions in areas where there's agriculture and livestock. So we really expanded our were and now we're looking at jacket population across a large region and look at different land use types and definitely different areas, and and really try to compare that and and see how these different management regimes affect jaguar population. So what are you finding. One thing we realize is that well managed, certified locking concessions, for example, can provide important habitat for jaguars and even protect very important jaguar populations. So what is are you saying that logging could actually be good for jaguars. Yes, not all locking is the same. So when most people think about logging in the Amazon, they think large scale deforestation and people going in and cutting all the trees and burning down the rest of the forest. But there's a lot of well managed locking concessions and these are these are companies that selectively managed the forest. They go in and cut out certain trees, but leave the remaining of the forest intact. So that forest can read growth and they can then go harvest trees again twenty years later. So for these concessions, the company themselves have to manage the forests well, and they're actually certified for for sustainable management and there's a label called FACY and the companies protect the forest from other people that would go in and maybe squat in there or just go in and hunt. So the companies themselves kind of serve as the protector of the forest. And we found that in these logging concessions, even though there are people in their extracting trees, there's a lot of forests that is actually not being managed during a certain year, and and jaguars do really well in there. They use these concessions, there's a good prey base and we have populations that are comparable to protected areas. So mutis what's the jaguars status in nature. The jaguars classified as near threatened by the i c N Red List. That means the population of this declining, but they're not critically endangered. They're not at the level so low that we're down to the last few hundred individuals or anything. But we have to take this a part a little bit So the jaguars range is really wide. The ranges from the northern Mexico and there's a few jaguars have even crossed into the United States into Arizona, New Mexico once a while up to northern Argentina. So it's a very broad range and and the status is really not the same everywhere. In Central America, the jaguars lost of its original habitat and the populations are refragmented, whereas in the Amazon, as I mentioned before, we have this huge habitat with really healthy population, so that this is a stronghold for the for the for the jaguar, and it's really where the species still thrives. But the goal is to maintain that and and do not lose more habitat. So, speaking of that, when when monitoring the jaguar in in nature like in the Amazon, what factors are considered? As we heard from Rick, the jaguars a solitary animal and it's very well camouflaged. That means we hardly ever see jaguars in the wild. I've worked on jaguars for over a decade, and I've seen jaguars in a wild, but it's not like you go out there and you can go count them. It's really reliant technology to study jaguars. Our main tool that we use to study jaguars or camera traps, are the trail cameras, which are automatic cameras that have a motion center and take pictures of animals that pass by. And with the jaguar, we have the advantage that their spot patterns are really unique for each individual. They're like a fingerprint, so we can use the small patterns to identify individuals and actually count individuals based on the photographs we get from the cameras. Why do you count the jaguars? Why is it important to count the jaguars? It goes back to the monitor. We want to know what a population is doing. And basically, if we want to know what the population is doing, we need to get an estimate of their density or the number of individuals that we have in an area, so we can see if that is declining and we take some more conservation actions, or the population is increasing and the work we're doing is actually benefiting the species. How have jaguars um responded to their their shrinking habitat? Did you say it was an eight percent loss in recent years in some areas. We've really they've lost most of the habitat, especially again in Central America where we had large deforestation. What happens there is that really when human encroaching jaguar habitat, then humans and jaguars get closer together and there's often conflict. So jaguars start depredating livestock and domestic animals, or people are scared of jaguars and and that often causes a lot of problems. So what changes have been made or are can be made to improve the coexistence of local communities with the wildlife. There's a lot of misconception local communities of how dangerous jaguars are two people. The jaguars rarely attack people. It's extremely rare that jaguar attacks of person, and it's probably more likely that a person walk through the forest and it's hit by a falling tree or fallen branched and being attacked by jaguar. So many people are afraid of jaguars and whenever they encounter jaguar they kill them. So we hope to change the image people have of jaguars throughout out each programs. If we hope to tell people jaguars their ecology and how and they're importance and ecosystem and hopefully change their attitude toward jaguar. Another common issue is that jack wars killed livestock, so we're working with communities and local government officials on developing methods to reduce live stock depredation through better protectioning animals, putting them into enclosures at night, putting up fencing, finding other strategies of the turing jaguars from areas where there's or domestic animals or livestock. We also have to be aware that many communities throughout the Amazon have been living with jaguars for a long time, so this shows us that coexistent with jaguars is possibill and communities do live alongside jaguars, so yes, it is possible with the rightfuls. Mattia's has been wonderful talking to you, um, thank you so much for all of the information that you've shared. Thank you Evany, and it's been a pleasure to be here jaguars and thanks for listening. We hope you learned a lot about jaguars. Be sure to subscribe and tune into next week's episode, in which we're bring in the story of an animal sometimes referred to as a Wolf of the Amazon River. I'm Epnie Money and I'm Rich Schwartz. Thanks for listening. If you would like to find out more about San Diego Zoo while lack alliance, please visit sdz w a dot org Amazing Wildlife. As a production of I Heart Radio, our producer is Nikia Swinton and our executive producer is Marcia to Peanut. Our sound engineer and editor is Amita Gnatra. For more shows from My Heart Radio, check out the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite showsh