Miguel Ordeñana, the wildlife biologist leading our jaguar conservation efforts, has begun blogging at Urban Carnivores, where he’ll be reporting on big cats in LA’s Griffith Park, and in the Paso del Istmo.
Mongabay.com’s Picture of the Day is from Bolivia.
This jaguar mother was photographed with her two cubs in the Kaa Iya National Park in Bolivia.
“Kaaiyana’s tolerance of observers is a testimony to the absence of hunters in this area, and her success as a mother means there is plenty of food for her and her cubs to eat,” said John Polisar, coordinator of Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) Jaguar Conservation Program. WCS released the photos.
AKA why we love the Guardian’s GrrlScientist:
“Big cat” is not a precise biological term, it is just a verbal shorthand for distinguishing the larger members of the taxonomic family Felidae from smaller ones. Some people formally define “big cats” as the four Panthera species: the tiger, lion, jaguar, and leopard. But other people also include cheetah, snow leopard, clouded leopard, and cougar under the “big cat” umbrella.
Big cats make interesting sounds. For example, only Panthera can roar. For this reason, they are often collectively known as “the roaring cats”. Roaring requires special morphology of the larynx and hyoid apparatus in the animal’s throat. Interestingly, despite having hyoid morphology similar to roaring cats, snow leopards cannot roar.
Read more at The Guardian. Or simply watch the video from Big Cat Rescue:
In Bolivia’s Madidi National Park:
Researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) set up the camera traps to try and identify jaguars based on the unique patterns of their spots. Once the images were collected, the team ran them through software originally designed to recognize tigers by their stripes.
The 19 jaguars found by the project represent a record number for a single camera-trap survey in the country.
Read more about it at National Geographic Daily News.
Smithsonian.com’s Science & Nature, reports on “a bold plan for wildlife corridors that connect populations from Mexico to Argentina could mean the big cat’s salvation.”
In antiquity, killing a jaguar was often part of a religious ceremony or a mark of status. But as ranches and settlements sprang up across Latin America, jaguars lost their religious significance. Demonized as dangerous predators, they were routinely shot. The fashion craze for fur after World War II added to the carnage; in 1969 alone, the United States imported nearly 10,000 jaguar pelts. Only a 1973 international ban stemmed the trade. Killing jaguars is now illegal throughout their range, but enforcement is minimal, and the cats have been wiped out in El Salvador and Uruguay. Meanwhile, over the past century people have razed or developed 39 percent of jaguars’ original habitat across Central and South America.
…
Panthera’s Jaguar Corridor Initiative aims to connect 90 distinct jaguar populations across the Americas. It stems from an unexpected discovery. For 60 years, biologists had thought there were eight distinct subspecies of jaguar, including the Peruvian jaguar, Central American jaguar and Goldman’s jaguar. But when the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity in Frederick, Maryland, part of the National Institutes of Health, analyzed jaguar DNA from blood and tissue samples collected throughout the Americas, researchers determined that no jaguar group had split off into a true subspecies. From Mexico’s deserts to the dry Pampas of northern Argentina, jaguars had been breeding with each other, wandering great distances to do so, even swimming across the Panama Canal. “The results were so shocking that we thought it was a mistake,” Rabinowitz says.
Panthera has identified 182 potential jaguar corridors covering nearly a million square miles, spanning 18 nations and two continents. So far, Mexico, Central America and Colombia have signed on to the initiative. Negotiating agreements with the rest of South America is next. Creating this jaguar genetic highway will be easier in some places than others. From the Amazon north, the continent is an emerald matrix of jaguar habitats that can be easily linked. But parts of Central America are utterly deforested. And a link in Colombia crosses one of Latin America’s most dangerous drug routes.
…
“My vision was to ranch by example,” Kaplan says, “to create ranches that are more productive and profitable and yet are truly jaguar-friendly.”
Our friends at the Wildlife Conservation Society have had a great deal of success identifying individual jaguars with camera traps in Bolivia’s Madidi National Park:
A record number of jaguars have been identified in one of the world’s most biologically diverse landscapes. Using technology first adapted to identify tigers by stripe patterns, researchers for the Wildlife Conservation Society have identified 19 individual jaguars by spot patterns in the rainforests of Bolivia, a record number for a single camera trap survey in the country.
“We’re excited about the prospect of using these images to find out more about this elusive cat and its ecological needs,” said WCS conservationist Robert Wallace. “The data gleaned from these images provide insights into the lives of individual jaguars and will help us generate a density estimate for the area.”
We’re so excited to follow in their footsteps with our own Jaguar Conservation Initiative.
Schoolchildren from Ostional, Nicaragua named this Hawksbill Brasilia |
Thought to be locally extinct as recently as 2007, the Eastern Pacific Hawksbill has been the subject of recent study using satellite telemetry. Our friends at ICAPO (the Eastern Pacific Hawksbill Initiative), working with other organizations, have just published their findings in the scientific journal Biology Letters.
After two years of turtle tracking, this team of turtle biologists has observed that, unlike what we know of their Carribbean and Indo-Pacific relatives, the Eastern Pacific Hawksbill population relies on mangrove estuaries for foraging habitat. Given that most Hawksbills have always been observed to inhabit coastal reefs, it’s possible that among the preliminary findings of this study is the potential that we’re watching an evolutionary adaptation indicating a different species emerging in the Eastern Pacific.
We’re proud to have contributed to these efforts to better understand the critically endangered Hawksbill sea turtle, and we’re especially pleased to see this exciting research has garnered a good deal of press.
LA Times:
Endangered hawksbill turtles make a surprise appearance Scientists find a population of endangered hawksbill turtles unexpectedly making a go of it in mangrove estuaries.
BBC Latin America:
Cómo se resolvió el misterio de las tortugas Carey
(This is a great photo essay.)
Huff Post Green:
Hawksbill Sea Turtles Not Extinct In Eastern Pacific
Science News:
Hawksbill turtles in funny places
Alexander Gaos, co-founder of ICAPO, our partner in sea turtle conservation, is featured in the latest issue of Conservation Magazine. They call him the Turtle Whisperer.
On Wednesday April 13th, the California Academy of Sciences and Sea Turtle Restoration Project will host the first (hopefully not the last) Science of Advocacy Session at the International Sea Turtle Society annual meeting.
We look forward to hearing from these promising speakers:
- Dr. Darren Schreiber (UC San Diego) will give us a primer on the intersection of neuroscience, public policy and behavior change.
- Dr. Lekelia Jenkins (University of Washington) will discuss Sea turtles, Sentiment and Moral Imagination.
- Conservation Photographer Neil Osborne will explore why (the right) picture (of a sea turtle) is worth a thousand words.
Much of the discussion will draw on the findings of this paper:
Biology, Politics, and the Emerging Science of Human Nature
James H. Fowler* and Darren Schreiber
In the past 50 years, biologists have learned a tremendous amount about human brain function and its genetic basis. At the same time, political scientists have been intensively studying the effect of the social and institutional environment on mass political attitudes and behaviors. However, these separate fields of inquiry are subject to inherent limitations that may only be resolved through collaboration across disciplines. We describe recent advances and argue that biologists and political scientists must work together to advance a new science of human nature.
PDF: http://dmschreiber.ucsd.edu/Publications/FowlerSchreiberScience2008.pdf
We look forward to learning more at this event next week!