For millenniuns, jaguars have served as potent cultural icons for many native American people from the Mayans and Incas, to the Guaran of the Gran Chaco. The Maya believed the jaguar's skin symbolized the night sky, while the Aztecs fed the hearts of sacrificial victims to the big cats. Among Amazonian societies, the jaguar, with its shining, reflective eyes, were thought to connect to the spirit world.

Today, Jaguars remain an important symbol in many religious and artistic expressions in the New World. However, there is a growing conflict between those that would honor the jaguar for its spiritual, cultural and ecological significance with those that continue to cause its decline.

Jaguar Conservation Program has the following components:

Population status and distribution surveys. There are areas where scientists do not currently know if jaguars still exist or whether populations are stable, or if there is adequate habitat and prey to support jaguar populations. The jaguar experts identified at least 18 "Unknown" areas (MAP) which will be priorities. These "Unknowns" are important to survey because they may include areas that are important for long-term survival of jaguar populations.


Establishment of long-term ecological studies of jaguars in various habitats and across a range of human impacts. As scientists are learning by researching other large carnivores, protected areas alone will not guarantee long-term survival of the jaguar. Jaguars also occupy habitats that have been modified by human activity including pastureland and ranching land. To address this facet of jaguar conservation, we need to learn more about jaguars and their ecology across the range of landscapes in which they live. Over the next five years, WCS proposes to establish several major jaguar research sites, over a longitudinal gradient, in landscapes that harbor known important jaguar populations. The objective is to advance the knowledge about jaguars in different habitat types and to determine how jaguars and people can continue to coexist in regions.


Jaguar-livestock conflicts and rancher outreach. Actual interactions between jaguars and livestock, as well as the perception of jaguar behavior by the ranching community, is a major reason for the continued killing of jaguars throughout Mexico, Central and South America. In some areas in Venezuela and Brazil, the only Jaguar habitat outside of protected areas are on large expanses of cattle land or other private holdings. The plan is to hold workshops and develop solutions to these issues with ranchers in these areas.

Population Monitoring. Monitoring jaguar populations, their prey and their habitat is a vital and important component of any large-scale program. It permits the conservation community to understand whether prescriptions are working and allows to evaluate how jaguar populations are doing on a variety of scales from the specific research site, to the landscape, ecoregion, and finally across their entire range. In order to implement monitoring at these various levels, especially of a low-density, secretive, and solitary carnivore, we must have relatively easy, inexpensive means of monitoring the status of these populations.Pprotectors also want to make sure that can compare the population data collected in one site with the population data collected in another and streamline the data collection using a standardized collection protocol.

Health and Genetics. There are almost no data on free-ranging jaguar health, yet the health of a jaguar population has important conservation implications. As habitats become more fragmented, interactions with unvaccinated domestic cats and dogs and livestock increase, and natural prey populations decline, the ability to understand the dynamics of disease in the jaguar population becomes critical. Having a baseline of what is "normal" as well as monitoring and assessing changes are important components that will be implemented at a minimum with the landscape research projects. Establishing standardized collection protocols and sampling methods are fundamental to collecting data on jaguar health. Similarly, genetic changes in populations of jaguars need to be assessed and monitored. Pioneering genetic techniques such as those developed to identify individuals from hair samples, scat samples, or other material can also be useful in population monitoring.
Education and Policy Initiatives will be developed that provide information on the jaguar and its conservation to a variety of audiences from the general public to the ranching community. This will also be a tool for disseminating new and important results from this program as well as addressing such policy issues as hunting and captive breeding of jaguars.
A key component of the Jaguar Conservation Program involves building local capacity in jaguar countries to study, monitor, and protect jaguars. Working with WCS, many of the actions associated with implementing the program will be undertaken by Latin American scientists, and the majority of the funds will be distributed in approved projects throughout the jaguar's range.


Wildlife Conservation Society categorizes jaguars as landscape species meaning that they require more than one habitat for their survival, are critical to the survival of many other species, and have a strong cultural significance.