Tag: jaguars

Cat versus caiman

September 17, 2013 • 9:07 pm

by Greg Mayer

Jaguars are the largest species of American cat, and are the top carnivore from the southwestern US to Argentina. In the Pantanal wetlands of southern Brazil, Justin Black took a series of extraordinary photographs showing just how top a carnivore it is, as a jaguar took on, and carried away to eat, an adult caiman.

A jaguar, having seized an adult caiman by the neck, prepares to carry off the ill-fated reptile.
A jaguar, having seized an adult caiman by the neck, prepares to carry off the ill-fated reptile.

Black obtained an exquisite set of photos, showing the jaguar spying the caiman from the shore, swimming out to the sand bank on which the caiman rested, sneaking up on it and seizing it from behind, and then carrying the living caiman in its jaws back across the water; the whole set of photos can be seen in the Daily Mail. It is likely that the jaguar eventually dispatched the caiman, and consumed it. Jaguars and anacondas are among the few known predators of adult caimans. This species of caiman grows only to about 8 or 9 feet. The largest species of caiman, the black caiman, reaches 13 feet or so, and there are two species of crocodile in South America that are bigger than that; a jaguar might have trouble handling these larger crocodilians.

Caturday felid– No. 1, the jaguar

November 13, 2010 • 8:34 am

by Greg Mayer

Jerry recently posted about a new analysis of cat coat color patterns by William Allen and colleagues from the University of Bristol that is in press in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B, so I thought it might be interesting to take a look at one of the species in the analysis, that I was able to photograph recently: the jaguar, Panthera onca.

It kind of looks like he’s about to spring and make a meal of me, but I didn’t take the picture in a tropical American forest, but at the Milwaukee County Zoo. Jaguars are of course spotted cats, with dark rosettes on a lighter background. Leopards (Panthera pardus), found in Africa and Asia, are rather similar, but jaguars have a dot in the middle of many of the rosettes. Jaguars also have a relatively larger head and more muscular forequarters, which are also noticeable in the next picture.As Jerry noted in his post, Allen and colleagues found that spotted patterns were significantly associated with closed or forested habitats. The jaguar is a bit of a problem in this regard, as it is a habitat generalist, found in the semi-desert of the southwestern US and northern Mexico, as well as in Neotropical rainforests. The authors attempted to account for varying degrees of habitat usage and specialization, although they did apparently miss the jaguar’s occurrence in semi-desert.