Jaguars to Get Safe Passage in Colombia

About a decade ago, biologists made an amazing discovery about jaguars: Despite a range that stretches from Mexico to Argentina, the hemisphere's cats are not divided into subspecies. Jaguars rely on a continent-sized network of corridors to run around South and Central America, apparently mating along the way. Because in-breeding is one of the leading causes of species extinction, this finding had huge implications for the animal's conservation: saving the jaguar would require protecting existing jaguar populations and establishing a transnational strategy to protect their corridor system.

Panthera, a conservation organization specializing in wild cats, has just inked a plan with the Colombian government that moves this ambitious vision one step closer to reality.

"The most important link in ensuring connectivity of jaguars all the way from northern Mexico to Argentina is in Colombia, the corridor in which Central American and South American jaguar populations meet," says Panthera President Alan Rabinowitz. (See map.)

Panthera's idea, then, is to secure the wilderness pathways that link these wild cat havens by working with the farmers, cattle ranchers, and indigenous communities that may live on them — and to figure out ways to broker peace between jaguars and cattle ranchers.

Corridors needn't be protected areas, just stretches of wild ecosystem where any human inhabitants will tolerate an occasional jaguar crossing.

The plan — to be executed by Panthera and the Colombian government — is a sliver of a much larger strategy and first-class example of "rewilding," an innovative, continent-scale approach to conversation that focuses on "cores, corridors, and carnivores."

It could not come at a better time: Jaguars, like most of the world's 36 wild cats, are very much endangered. They are threatened by habitat loss and fragmentation stemming from deforestation: More than 40 percent of the jaguar's habitat was destroyed during the last century. They are also hunted by cattle ranchers for their nasty, but understandable, habit of eating livestock.

A jaguar extinction would be a huge aesthetic loss to humanity:

But it would also be a tremendous ecological one, because the big cats have an outsized influence on their environment. Like other keystone predators, jaguars hunt the animals that eat the plants, fruits, and seeds that allow forests to regenerate themselves, and carry the seeds long distances before they, ahem, evacuate them. If only I could control my surroundings by eating excessive amounts of capybara. (Which, for the record, I did eat last summer while scouring the Colombian amazon for jaguars. True story.)

Photo credit: Stefan Willoughby