TUCSON – Although jaguars are widely assumed to live exclusively in Mexico, Central and South America, they once prowled Arizona, New Mexico and Texas before colonizers and poachers in the 19th century drove most of these beautifully spotted big cats out of the U.S.
So when Ganesh Marin was studying ecosystems along the border U.S.-Mexico this year, the University of Arizona Ph.D. student wasn’t expecting to see a young jaguar sauntering in his video feed in mid-March.
The far-ranging jaguar has been on the endangered species list for nearly 20 years because of deforestation, ranching, farming and poaching, and experts estimate only 15,000 are left in the wild globally. But there now is a glimmer of hope that Panthera onca – the largest cat in the Americas and a creature venerated in many Indigenous cultures – might one day return to its range in the U.S. Southwest.
“The goal of my research was not originally to find any jaguars,” Marin told Cronkite News. “I was working with my graduate adviser to observe the ecosystems that lived along the border and see how the diversity of those systems changed.”
Marin’s observations were meant to identify the ecosystem’s key players, and the young jaguar, despite being an unexpected variable, showed a potentially much bigger picture.
Jaguars – all of them male – occasionally have been seen in southern Arizona over the past decade, to the delight of researchers and schoolkids in Tucson, who gave the cats such names as Macho B and El Jefe. But the last known jaguar populations that included females were nearly 100 miles south of the border in Sonora, Mexico, Marin said.
“Jaguars used to live as far north as the southern part of the Grand Canyon,” he said. “But because of this jaguar, since he’s a juvenile, we believe that the female population may be expanding north as well.”
Although the expansion of a population of predator cats may seem alarming to the average outsider, Marin and his adviser, John Koprowski, who’s now the dean of the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming, see hope that the animals are able to maintain a connection with their North American range.
“The fact that this jaguar Ganesh found is so close to the border means there are enough resources there for it to survive,” Koprowski said. “The fact that we have a young male who was clearly born somewhere else and able to find his way to the border shows positive signs of connectivity between the ecosystem on one side of the border and the other.”
This connectivity is something the United States has been trying to foster over the past few years especially. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services established a recovery plan in early 2019 designed to host six jaguars in a strip of territory along the border. The hope is to spur discussions about national conservation efforts with officials of Southwestern states.
“The state of Arizona, in particular, has had a hand in the conservation of jaguar habitats as well,” Koprowski said. “On our end, we do the best to provide the science that enables larger groups of people to take action in the protection of these habitats.”
But the effort to protect these jaguars while establishing connectivity exists on both sides of the border. Marin said there have been consistent efforts to make the people of Mexico aware that the borderlands are a rich area for increased biodiversity, especially now that jaguars are making their way toward it.
“We’re working with cattle ranchers to make them aware of the migration and keep the jaguars out of harm’s way,” Marin said. “If the jaguars choose to move this way, it also opens up potential doors for pumas and bobcats and other species.”
But of course, these cats won’t be making their way up Interstate 19 on their journeys. Although connectivity exists, it isn’t yet apparent how jaguars and other species would make their way into new habitats or back to old ones.
“We’re letting them lead the way,” Koprowski said. “These animals are most likely to find the path of least resistance. There’s no set route for them, so we’re going to let them show us where they’re going once they decide to venture over, and draw patterns from there.”
This article appears in Apr 15-21, 2021.
This article is misleading in a number of ways, starting with the headline.
The habitat in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands is not “potential” habitat, it’s proven and occupied, and it’s been scientifically mapped multiple times in the past. There have been more than a dozen different jaguars photographed in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in the past 25 years. In fact, there has never been a year since 1996 when there was not at least one jaguar known to be living in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
The place where Mr. Marin detected the latest jaguar is a well-known, high-value jaguar movement corridor. In fact, it’s arguably the best remaining cross-border corridor for jaguars, and multiple jaguars have been photographed in that area in the past, so it’s really not surprising that there’s one there now.
Jaguars have already returned to their range in the U.S. Southwest. There have been three jaguars photographed in the U.S. in just the past five years, at least one of which is still living here now and maintaining a territory in the U.S. His name is Sombra, and he’s been photographed numerous times in the U.S. since 2016.
It should not be “alarming” that jaguars are making a comeback here. Jaguar attacks on humans are practically unheard of, even more exceedingly rare than mountain lion attacks. Jaguars belong here, and humans coexisted with them here for many centuries before white settlers and U.S. government predator control programs purposely exterminated them in the U.S. over the past 150 years to benefit livestock.
Jaguars have been listed as endangered for far longer than “20 years”. They were first listed in the 1970s, but that was not extended to the U.S. until 1997, because U.S. Fish and Wildlife opposed and resisted protecting jaguars in the U.S. for purely political reasons. The protections that jaguars have now in the U.S. only resulted from a series of lawsuits that compelled the agency to protect them. Their current recovery plan largely dismisses the importance of recovery in the U.S. and puts the onus on Mexico, again mostly for political reasons.
Far from being supportive, the State of Arizona has been another thorn in the side of jaguars. The state officially opposes their protection here and continues to spout B.S. propaganda that jaguars don’t belong here and the jaguars that do come here are somehow irrelevant or cut off from the breeding population just because they crossed the border. In fact, they even killed the famous jaguar Macho B in 2009 in an illegal, botched capture and then tried to cover it up. Read Tony Davis’ excellent coverage on that travesty in the Arizona Daily Star.
The jaguars that live in the U.S. and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands are part of a small, vulnerable population of northern jaguars centered in Sonora south of the border. The notion that they are somehow separate from that breeding population is ridiculous. These borderlands jaguars were born somewhere where there are females, most likely in Mexico, and then they range far and wide to establish territories and find mates. That is the normal biological behavior of jaguars, and there is nothing to stop them from returning to wherever they were born and wherever there are more females and participating in the breeding population. They can go right back along the same routes they used to come here in the first place.
It’s not about “fostering” connectivity, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife is not doing that anyway. They rubber-stamped the proposed Rosemont Mine, which is a major threat to destroy connectivity for jaguars in the U.S. It’s more about trying to protect the connectivity that already exists, but is being eroded by habitat destruction and fragmentation. If incredibly destructive projects like Rosemont and the idiotic, wasteful, racist border wall are allowed to be completed, it will end any chance for jaguars to recover in the U.S. and seriously compromise the chances of the northern jaguar population to expand and recover on either side of the border.