EnglishBy Jason G. Goldman
Biologist Miguel Ordeñana crouches down in the shade of a forest and reaches into his pack for a small bottle. He sprays the substance on a tree just a few feet above the ground. A few meters away behind him is a camera trap he’s deployed. The liquid he’s spraying is a cologne called Calvin Klein Obsession for Men and if he’s lucky, the scent will convince a jaguar to stop and sniff it long enough for the camera to snap a photo or two.
Nobody knows why this particular aroma is enticing to the big cats. It could be the vanilla extract, or it could be the civetone, a synthetic chemical meant to mimic the excretions of a small nocturnal cat-like mammal native to the Asian and African tropics. Either way, jaguars go nuts for the stuff.
That was a few years ago, and Ordeñana, a wildlife biologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles who was then collaborating with Paso Pacífico, did get lucky. While locals had reported seeing jaguars in the region, this was the first time they were formally documented by scientists. In the years since, the spotted cats have made their presence known in the Paso del Istmo region, a corridor of land sandwiched between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific Ocean.
A male jaguar pads along a trail in the Paso del Istmo, Nicaragua, in April 2014.
These cats are something of an anomaly. “We know that jaguars have dipped their toes into the Paso del Istmo,” says Paso Pacífico executive director Sarah Otterstrom, “but they’re pretty much gone from western Nicaragua, which is a pretty large area. And they’re gone from El Salvador and they’re probably gone from western Honduras.” In other words, the big cats have been driven out of almost the entire Pacific dry forest of Central America.
The region’s other big cat has suffered a similar, if less precipitous, decline. The puma, also known as the mountain lion, cougar, panther, ghost cat, catamount, and almost forty other common names in different areas, has the widest range of any modern large cat, stretching from the Northern Yukon all the way to the southernmost reaches of Patagonia. And while a single puma was photographed with a camera trap last year in El Salvador, and a second one recently turned up dead, shot by hunters, that species is likewise only rarely seen in western Central America.
It’s certainly not unusual for large cats to be extirpated from parts of their range, or to go extinct entirely. The jaguar is largely extirpated from the United States, for example, besides the odd sighting in Arizona. And the cougar has disappeared entirely from the U.S. east of the continental divide, save for a small population hanging on in Florida. But Central America is home to the Mesoamerican Biodiversity Hotspot, a region that has both a high rate of endemism (species found there and nowhere else) and a high rate of habitat loss. It contains the third largest forested area in the world and is a vital linkage between the ecosystems of North and South America.
Two pumas stroll past a camera trap in the Paso del Istmo, Nicaragua, in January 2020.
As agriculture and urban development have expanded, large mammals like jaguars and pumas have lost habitats that are vital to their survival and movement, but habitat loss alone doesn’t account for the cats’ plummeting populations. Add revenge killings, when ranchers kill predators due to real or imagined threats to their livestock, and the global trade in wildlife parts, and you have a recipe for extinction.
It’s due to the habitat concerns, in part, that many big cat conservation projects have historically focused on the more intact forests of eastern Central America rather than the more heavily populated and more intensively altered regions closer to the Pacific Ocean. But maintaining or restoring habitat doesn’t, by itself, solve the anthropogenic problems. That’s why Paso Pacífico has dedicated its efforts towards coexistence.
“Paso Pacífico disagrees with the idea of ignoring the importance of major predators in human-dominated ecosystems. We think that you still need these major predators on these landscapes,” says Otterstrom. “You need them to be able to survive at some level.”
That’s because the carnivores at the top of the food chain, also known as apex predators, help to regulate the rest of the ecosystem. Free from the pressure exerted by large predators, medium-sized carnivores like coyotes, foxes, and ocelots (also called mesopredators) would see their populations go through the roof. But as a result, their prey base – the small mammals, like rabbits and rodents – would decline. Populations of the largest herbivores, like deer, tapirs, and peccaries, would expand because their own predators would be missing. If those animals over-grazed the plants they eat, it could have impacts on everything from insect communities to carbon sequestration to hydrology. In other words, the entire system would go sideways in an ecological process called a trophic cascade.
One need only look at mega-cities like Los Angeles or Mumbai to understand that large predators like mountain lions and leopards, respectively, can co-exist alongside human communities – as long as they are protected from being shot, run over, or poisoned. If cats such as these can make it in two of the most heavily urbanized landscapes on the planet, surely there is a place for jaguars and pumas in western Central America.
Making space for predators in these regions requires re-imagining what suitable habitat looks like. “As we restore areas, the cats come back,” says Otterstrom, adding that as predator conservation efforts succeed, resources will need to be marshaled for addressing the human-wildlife conflicts that will inevitably follow.
To start with, people should probably avoid spraying themselves with Calvin Klein Obsession for Men when out in the woods.