Friday 17 April 2009

Replanting the Rainforests: Jaguar - Part 2

[If you want to contribute to the Replanting the Rainforests campaign, see this page]

Here's more about the urgent condition of the jaguar after the last post:


Jaguars may be large, measuring 1.8m from snout to tail and weighing up to 158kg. They may live in places like Sirena, a tropical rain forest on the southwestern peninsula of Costa Rica, where every day is an ecotourist's Mardi Gras of spider monkeys tumbling over howler monkeys, Muppet-face sloths and toucans and scarlet macaws flapping overhead like crayons with wings. Yet even when other normally shy creatures feel free to make spectacles of themselves, the jaguar remains aloof.

[...]

Individual jaguars can be distinguished and accounted for by their singular patterns of spots. This spring, the cameras took a picture of a black jaguar, the first one known in Corcovado. Carrillo is reluctant to make estimates in advance of the data analysis, but he said he expected 50 to 100 jaguars in Corcovado [a biologist] and its environs, a reasonable density for a large meat eater that needs a extensive space to earn a living.

Rabinowitz, author of the influential "eco-memoir" Jaguar: One Man's Struggle to Establish the World's First Jaguar Preserve (2000), said such numbers were on the high end of jaguar statistics and applied to relatively pristine places like the Santa Cruz ranch in Bolivia and his hard-won Cockscomb jaguar preserve in Belize. Elsewhere, however, the jaguar is losing range to familiar culprits like logging, slash-and-burn agriculture and poaching.


More stuff here.

The jaguar is also posed a threat in Belize.

I don't like the fact that I'm writing nothing and providing links to other articles – a sign of laziness. But I want to write something original soon. Have been thinking about it.

1 comment:

Space Lover said...

Oliver: Thank you so much! Your comment made my day. Please read it and say whatever you want to. Your comment encouraged me a lot!