Two pumas stroll past a camera trap in the Paso del Istmo, Nicaragua, in January 2020.<\/p><\/div>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 That’s why Paso Pac\u00edfico has dedicated its efforts towards coexistence.<\/p>\n
“Paso Pac\u00edfico 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.”<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 the small mammals, like rabbits and rodents \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
Making space for predators in these regions requires re-imagining<\/a> what suitable habitat<\/a> 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.<\/p>\nTo start with, people should probably avoid spraying themselves with Calvin Klein Obsession for Men<\/em> when out in the woods.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Jason G. Goldman Biologist Miguel Orde\u00f1ana 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3839,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[216,210],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3834","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-conservation-initiatives","8":"category-wildlife-conservation","9":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3834"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3834"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6647,"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3834\/revisions\/6647"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}