Companionship between jaguars is rare but enduring

The fame of the jaguar as a solitary and antisocial hunter (panthera onca) needs to be revised, indicates a study carried out in the Pantanal and Venezuela. Long-term monitoring of the males of the species indicates that, in fact, they are capable of forging alliances with each other, sleeping and eating together, facing adversaries and perhaps even collaborating to monopolize females in a given region together.

The observations suggest that there is more in common between jaguars and lions, the most famous social felines, than previously thought. There would also be some parallels between the super predator of the Americas and cheetahs, extremely fast African felines that also record collaborations between adult males.

The big difference is that, for now, partnerships between jaguar males have only been recorded in the case of pairs, while the process involves more individuals in the case of lions and cheetahs. As far as is known, the other species of big cats, such as tigers, leopards and cougars, have a more solitary social structure and behavior.

The results have just been published in the scientific journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology by an international team of scientists, which includes several Brazilians and also specialists from Poland, the USA, Mexico and Venezuela.

To identify the male pairs’ long-term alliances, the group relied on information from camera traps (which automatically obtain images when the animal approaches them), monitoring of individuals by collars with GPS and radio, genetic evaluations (in general, through jaguar feces) and sightings in the field.

Data were collected in the Brazilian Pantanal and the Venezuelan region of the Llanos (pronounced “Djanos”). These areas have relatively abundant populations of jaguars, thanks to the richness of resources for the animals (with a high density of natural and introduced prey) and are also environments similar to each other, with seasonal floods and mosaics of relatively open vegetation and riparian forests. .

This facilitates coordination between individuals in the coalition and monitoring by researchers. Furthermore, collaboration between adult big cats is believed to be more common in this type of open environment, given that it occurs in African savannas in the case of lions and cheetahs.

The first finding of the study is that alliances between two adult males are quite rare. Of a total of more than 7,000 records of male jaguars in the study, only 70 are examples of cooperation between them (the set also includes 18 cases of aggression and nine of “tolerance”, that is, in which males do not they attack each other, but they don’t cooperate either).

In the event that pairs do form, however, the companionship can last for several years. In the Llanos of Venezuela, for example, two males were spotted together 40 times from 2013 to 2018.

They used to travel the territory in pairs and also mark it (to demonstrate their ownership in front of other males) together. On some occasions, one of them would mate with a female while the other stayed close by. Both expanded their domains by driving out other males over time.

In the north of the Pantanal, one of these partnerships was registered between 2015 and 2018. In addition to traveling and marking the territory together, they used to smell each other’s faces and were seen sharing two cattle corpses and expelling a young male invader together. An interesting fact is that the researchers did not manage to identify, through genetic analysis, any kinship between the allies — in other species, adult males who are brothers, for example, can end up forming coalitions.

Unlike what happens with lions, pairs of allies do not hunt together and do not seem to form collaborations with females. There are indications that partnerships tend to form in places where there is an abundance of females, each with small and neighboring territories, which would indicate that males are allying to guarantee access to mates and exclude other males from competition for them. .

An intriguing detail is that today’s jaguars, even those that inhabit the most resource-rich environments such as the Pantanal, have relatively few large prey at their disposal—but this is a relatively recent situation in their evolutionary history.

At the end of the Ice Age, around 10,000 years ago, South America was teeming with large herbivores, such as horses, sloths and giant armadillos, species of llamas that populated much of Brazil, and “supercapybaras”. It would be much more like Africa today, where lions hunt in packs.

“It could be that, at that time, jaguars were bigger and formed coalitions to capture these large herbivores. There were also other large predators to compete with them, such as bears and saber-tooths”, he told the Sheet Venezuelan researcher Rafael Hoogesteijn, one of the co-authors of the new study, who works at the conservation NGO Panthera.

“With the extinction of these large savannah herbivores, jaguars decreased in size and became more specialized in capturing large tropical reptiles such as anacondas, alligators and turtles, which explains the fact that they have the strongest bite of all the big cats. “, he explains.