jaguars

Facts..  Jaguars are mainly found in the Amazon rainforest and in India.  Jaguars love to swim and to soak in the water. The jaguar's habitat needs a lot of trees and plants for the jaguar to hide from its prey while it hunts. The jaguar blends in well with its surroundings, but it still needs some cover to hide.  The jaguar has a fairly long life span of up to eighteen years. One of the oldest jaguars found living in the wild was twenty-one years old. They have been found to live up to 30 years in the zoo.  Jaguars enjoy a wide range of foods. Sometimes it has to come out of the rainforest to kill cattle or sheep. It also likes to eat birds, fish, monkeys, deer, a variety of rodents, and other small mammals. It has been known to attack young crocodiles. Seven times out of ten, the jaguar will get its meal, even the crocodile!

Facts continued..  The jaguar has a different style of attack than most big cats. It stalks its prey, hiding and sneaking behind large plants, climbing trees, and then attacking. The jaguar's strength is so great, it can kill its prey in one bite! Instead of going for the neck or the jugular vein, it bites into the prey's skull, damaging a vital part of the brain, killing its prey. The jaguar can do this damage with great ease and gracefulness.  They are solitary animals and live and hunt alone, except during mating season. The male's home range is between square miles. The female's home range is between square miles. A male jaguar may share his home range with several females. He will aggressively protect his home range from other males to ensure that any females in his territory mate only with him. The jaguar hunts mostly on the ground, but it sometimes climbs a tree and pounces on its prey from above. Unlike most big cats, the jaguar loves the water..

How did jaguars become endangered?  The causes for jaguar endangerment is mostly human. Humans hunt jaguars for sports, for the pleasure of hunting, for its beautiful fur, and/or jaguars get killed by farmers that have hade their livestock destroyed. All of the subspecies of the Panthera onça are endangered and a lot of them are extinct except in zoos. When they are hunted, they are mostly hunted for their fur and during the 60’s-70’s, approximately 18,000 jaguars were killed every year for manufacture of their fur in return of expense. Unless they get attacked or feel cornered, jaguars don’t attack humans (they seldom do). Yet, humans kill these so unique and attractive animals… Apart from humans, another source of jaguar endangerment is habitat loss. This is because their forests get cleared out and the jaguar’s own necessities include its prey animals and large territory to provide these preys, along with water, possible forests and the suitable ecosystem/environment for the jaguar. Jungles for instance, a pleasing ecosystem for the jaguar, are being ruined which means another loss of habitat. Therefore, the habitat plays a big role in the jaguar’s importance of extinction.

What is being done to protect them?  Researchers in Brazil have created a program to help keep jaguars in their natural habitats. Jaguars are being captured by the team of researchers and by doing this they have time to place collars on the jaguars necks that will emit radio signals to allow for the monitoring of the movement of the animal. From there the data is passed to the researcher’s computer. This reveals the paths the jaguar takes. By doing this, they can easily keep track of where the jaguars are.  People are also creating parks for the jaguars to live in.  You can join a club or a fund and help save them by donating money.  People can also help by helping to protect and preserve their habitats such as the rainforest.

Affects on the environment  Since jaguars are at the top of the ecosystem, if they were to go extinct, all their prey would increase in population, which would cause a greater demand for food. The carrying capacity of the habitat would be exceeded.

Why I chose this organism… I chose this organism because I thought it would be fun to learn more about this organism!