Secret lives of jaguars revealed
Details of the secret lives of jaguars – including how often the elusive creatures give birth – have been revealed thanks to a landmark study of the big cats using radio collars and camera traps in Costa Rica.
Jaguars, which once roamed from the United States to Amazonian Brazilian but are now rarely seen north of Mexico, are listed as near threatened by the World Conservation Union. In March there were calls for an inquiry into the death of what could have been the last jaguar in the U.S. after the creature died shortly after being captured and fitted with a tracking collar.
But a lack of understanding of the cats’ mating habits has made it difficult for conservationists to estimate the current size of the jaguar population or to put in place measures to protect them, according to a report on the BBC.
Since 1990 however, Eduardo Carrillo and Joel Saenz of the National University in Heredia, Costa Rica and Todd Fuller of the University of Massachusetts have been studying jaguars in Costa Rica’s Corcovado National Park.
Now their near-two decades of research are paying dividends with the team able to follow a single female jaguar for three and a half years by using a radio collar. During that time the jaguar fell pregnant twice with the resulting cubs following her for 19 or 20 months, providing important habits about the creatures’ life cycles.
“One of the main questions about jaguars is their natural birthing habits,” Carrillo said. “We have little knowledge about this until now.”
The study has also revealed interesting findings about the cats’ diet with the jaguars mainly feeding on peccaries and marine turtles, suggesting the animals are capable of eating anything that crosses their path – including humans.
But despite capturing images of adult jaguars with their camera traps, the team has so failed to capture any images of a female jaguar with its cubs.