Fires that swept across South America's Pantanal wetlands in 2020 burned thousands of square kilometres of critical jaguar habitat and may threaten the big cats' long-term survival, new research reveals.
The blazes displaced, injured or killed 45% of the region's 1,668 jaguars, the second-largest jaguar population in the world, according to the study published on Thursday in the journal Communications Biology.
"Jaguars are not migratory animals," the co-author of the research Alan de Barros, an ecologist at the University of Sao Paulo, noted. "High quality environments such as the Pantanal may often result in jaguars" being more clustered together, he said. Displacement following habitat loss can lead to territorial disputes between cats and reduce the availability of prey, the study said. Jaguars have to roam farther to look for food, depleting their energy levels, which can ultimately result in lower reproductive rates.
Allison Devlin, deputy director of the jaguar program at global big cat conservation group Panthera, said the northern Pantanal was unusually dry in 2020.
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