Jaguar facts
This is about the cat, not the car…!
On the Prowl
The jaguar is the largest cat in the Americas and the third-largest in the world after the tiger and lion.
The best place to see it is in the Pantanal region of Brazil, and I had 16 sightings when I went there in September 2016.
Each individual jaguar is given a reference number and name, and the local rule is that if you spot one that hasn’t been seen before, then you get to pick the name.
As a result, the jaguars I saw were called Geoff, Estela, Peter Schmidt, Marley, Mick Jaguar and Ruth!
I went on boat trips every day, and the jaguars were mostly found lying on the high mud banks of the Cuiabá and Piquiri rivers.
The highlight of the whole adventure was seeing a jaguar kill a local crocodile called a caiman (see Hunting section below).
Jaguars generally kill caiman by biting them on the back of the head, but this particular jaguar (Marley) was only two years old and didn't really know what he was doing.
He'd grabbed the caiman by the throat instead, and it was still alive.
A lion would have suffocated it, but Marley was a jaguar, so he somehow had to change his grip to kill it, and that took him about 10 minutes of dithering about.
Jaguars tend to hide their prey rather than eating it at once, so we watched as Marley desperately tried to drag an enormous caiman up the steep 10-foot river bank through a tangle of undergrowth.
What would his mother have said?!
When he finally succeeded, after two exhausting attempts, everyone watching on the boats gave him a big round of applause!
Basic facts
Order: Carnivora
Family: Felidae
Species: Jaguar
Scientific name: Panthera onca
Subspecies: None
Mass: males 37–90 kg (81.6–198.4 lb), females 28–60 kg (61.7–132.3 lb)
Height at shoulder: 68 to 75 cm (26.8 to 29.5 in)
Length of head and body: 1.12 to 1.85 m (3 ft 8 in to 6 ft 1 in)
Appearance: Big cat with a brown coat and black spots. The ‘rosettes’ on the animal’s flanks have a ring of spots with one in the middle. Males are generally 10-20% bigger than females. The melanistic jaguar or black panther is completely black due to the effects of a recessive gene.
Top speed: 80 km/h (50 mph)
Gestation period: 91 to 111 days
Lifespan: 11 years (up to a maximum of 22 years in captivity)
IUCN Red List Status: Near Threatened
Population: 64,000, decreasing
Habitat: Forest, Savanna, Shrubland, Grassland, Wetlands (inland), Artificial/Terrestrial
Distribution: Mexico, Central and South America
Habitat
The jaguar prefers forests and riverine environments such as swamps and floodplains, particularly with dense undergrowth.
It has been found at altitudes up to 3,800 m (12,500 ft) but not in montane forests.
Eyes Cold
Hunting
The jaguar is an apex predator and ‘obligate’ carnivore (or ‘hypercarnivore’), which means it relies entirely on meat consumption to survive.
It will eat animals of any size, ranging from 1 to 130 kg (2.2 to 286.6 lb), but it prefers prey weighing 45–85 kg (99–187 lb).
The jaguar prefers mammals such as capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) and giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla) as well as marsh deer (Blastocerus dichotomus), southern tamandua (Tamandua tetradactyla), collared peccary (Pecari tajacu) and black agouti (Dasyprocta fuliginosa).
It is particularly gifted at stalking and ambushing its prey, either on forest tracks or along the banks of a river.
In the Pantanal, the jaguar preys on caiman by walking along the high riverbank and then jumping down on top of them and killing them with a bite to the back of the neck.
This is the same with most mammals such as the capybara, but their method of killing large mammals such as the South American tapir is different, and they adopt the lion’s strategy of biting the throat and then suffocating the animal to death.
They typically hide their kill in a thicket or up a tree and then eat it later at their leisure, starting with the neck and chest, then followed by the heart, lungs and shoulders.
Jaguars in the Pantanal kill prey at unpredictable intervals, ranging from 1-7 days in the dry season from April to September and 1-16 days during the wet season from October to March.
Based on specimens in captivity, the jaguar appears to need around 1.4 kg (3.1 lb) of meat every day to survive.
Leopard with kill
Breeding
Female jaguars reach sexual maturity at 2.5 years whereas males have to wait until they are three or four years old.
The female jaguar’s estrous cycle lasts from 41.8 to 52.6 days.
Females remain in heat for 7-15 days, during which time they are more restless and tend to make long calls.
They are what is known as ‘induced ovulators’, which means they ovulate due to genital stimulation either just before or during mating, but they may also ovulate spontaneously, ie according to a menstrual cycle like that of humans.
Pregnancy lasts for 91-111 days, and either one or two cubs will be born in a ‘birth den’.
They are born with closed eyes, which open after two weeks.
At three months, they are weaned, and they live in the birth den for around six months before starting to hunt with their mothers.
They remain with their mothers until they are two years old.
The father generally spends only around five days mating with the mother and is not involved with rearing the cubs, but there have been a few reported cases of infanticide.
Territory
Apart from females with their cubs, jaguars are solitary creatures.
They mark their territories using scrape marks, urine, and faeces.
The territories of males tend to be larger than those of females, but the exact size depends on the level of deforestation and human population density:
In the Pantanal, they are 25 km² (9.7 sq mi) for males and 15.3 km² (5.9 sq mi) for females
in the Amazon, they are 180.3 km2 (69.6 sq mi) for males and 53.6 km2 (20.7 sq mi) for females
In the Atlantic Forest, they are 581.4 km2 (224.5 sq mi) for males and 233.5 km2 (90.2 sq mi) for females.
Territories may overlap, but jaguars tend to avoid one another, and fights are rare.
Communication
Jaguars produce a variety of noises:
roaring
grunting
prustening (or chuffing or chuffling) - a short, low call used by a female when approached by a male, perhaps indicating submission, or by a female with her cubs or by either sex when greeting or courting another
bleating - used by cubs
gurgling - used by cubs
mewing - used by cubs
Threats
Mick Jaguar
The world jaguar population is in decline, and its estimated global range fell from 19,000,000 km2 (7,300,000 sq mi) in 1900 to 8,750,000 km2 (3,380,000 sq mi) in 2000, mostly in the southern United States, northern Mexico, northern Brazil, and southern Argentina.
The IUCN deems the jaguar to be in its ‘Near Threatened’ category, and the global population has fallen by 20-25% since the 1990s.
it faces many threats to its existence:
loss and fragmentation of habitat (eg deforestation in the Amazon)
illegal killing (eg over livestock predation)
poaching (for skins and other body parts, particularly in Mexico).
If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.
If you’d like to book a lesson or order an online photography course, please visit my Lessons and Courses pages.