The jaguar moves between patches of forest in the Mesoamerican Corridor across Central America. Meanwhile, the majestic Colombian Massif still serves as a refuge for the oncilla, while the puma silently roams the vast expanses of the Paraguayan Chaco fleeing the reprisals of ranchers. The pampas cat pads stealthily among the remaining dry forests of Southern Ecuador and Northern Peru, while the ocelot, a medium-sized cat of nocturnal habits, attempts to camouflage itself in remnants of the Atlantic Rainforest in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. All these scenes allude to the same problem: a group of cats trying to survive in shrinking territories.

While the range of these five felines is large and many of them inhabit protected areas, science has shown that to maintain healthy populations there needs to be connection between individuals. In addition to protected areas, they also need access to biological corridors to make contact with other unrelated cats.

This is why it is increasingly important that these corridors are either fully protected and have sustainable resource management plans in place to ensure free movement of species.

“Establishing corridors is one of the best opportunities, and in many cases the last or only opportunity, for fauna and flora to coexist in landscapes dominated by humans, that is, where plants and animals have the opportunity to move around, improving their chances of survival in the long term,” says José Fernando González Maya, Scientific Director of the Water and Land Conservation Project (ProCAT) and Co-President of the Small Carnivore Specialist Group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Journalists from five countries, coordinated by Mongabay Latam, chose five biological corridors distributed between Peru, Ecuador, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Colombia and Brazil to expose the threats faced by five felines that are crucial to Latin American ecosystems.

One of the most important findings was that in each of these places, corridors aim to ensure the conservation of felines by reducing the risks they face, including reprisal hunting, habitat loss, vehicle collisions and the incursion of feral or domesticated dogs in their places of refuge.

Protecting the largest

The jaguar (Panthera onca) and the puma (Puma concolor) are the two largest felines in the Americas and establishing biological corridors is of vital importance for their conservation, considering that these species require vast areas of land to satisfy their basic needs.

“In a world dominated primarily by humans, there are few places that retain the natural conditions in large areas needed by the puma and the jaguar. For these large species, corridors are a strategy that, to some extent, allows for genetic flow between populations, despite there not being large areas of habitat,” González Maya explains.

The ProCAT expert goes straight to the point: it is not enough to conserve protected areas – the few remaining places with ideal natural conditions – more spaces are needed to sustain populations of large carnivores.

Esteban Payán, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Coordinator of Felines for Latin America, points to the jaguar as an example. A male jaguar, he says, needs between 10,000 and 20,000 hectares of territory – between 14,000 and 28,000 soccer fields approximately – for himself and the two or three females with which he mates. Their cubs will later have to leave to acquire their own territories.

Payán explains that a very large protected area like Chiribiquete National Park, in Colombia, which spans over four million hectares – can satisfy the needs of some 500 or 600 jaguars. “These are very low densities,” he says.

For the WCS expert, creating protected areas, like national parks, will always be an achievement, but such areas, on their own, are insufficient to house these big carnivores.

“Corridors are an important resource because parks on their own aren’t enough. We need private reserves and we need ranches, which despite not being reserves, have good practices. So that large cats can cross a ranch without being killed or pass through a palm plantation, where they probably won’t have enough food, but which act as connections to ensure their survival in the long term,” says Payán.

This is why Payán and his colleagues are currently working with ranchers and Colombian agricultural unions “so that they may keep doing their things, but in the spirit of coexistence. So that there’s space for cattle but also for cats.”

The Mesoamerican Corridor, one of the corridors in this series, is important to guarantee the flow of the jaguar between Mexico and populations of South America. But the corridor is threatened by fires lit by illegal ranchers for the expansion of pasture and grazing, the presence of large monocultures, road construction and hunting for the large felines.

Biologist Bárbara Escobar, an expert in wildlife management and Coordinator of the NGO Panthera in Guatemala, says that fires and ranching are the main threats in Guatemala and that while the department of Petén has protected areas that connects jaguar habitats with Belize and Mexico. Guatemala’s department of Izabal is the link with the rest of Mesoamerica.

Escobar explains that Izabal is the only area through which jaguars can still cross from Honduras to Belize. “It’s a critical link to which we perhaps haven’t paid enough attention.”

The puma is another feline that requires a large area and that has, fortunately, managed to adapt better than many animals to changing landscapes over the years. The puma is currently categorized as least concern by the IUCN Red List, but it still needs corridors to guarantee its long-term survival.

In the Paraguayan Chaco, a vulnerable ecosystem due to agricultural pressure and a rise in deforestation, the reporter tasked with this story explains how the so-called “mountain lion” is threatened by the expansion of ranches and reprisal hunting by ranchers. Habitat degradation has left pumas with less prey, leading them to the risky behaviour of sometimes attacking cows, sheep and other livestock.

This is one of the reasons why there is support for corridors that join Defensores del Chaco National Park with Chovoreca National Park. Defensores is the largest protected area in Paraguay, at 720,723 hectares. Pairing the parks would create an extensive circuit of roaming for all the native fauna of the region.

Laura Villalba, a WCS biologist in Paraguay, says anything that increases connectivity between protected areas benefits the puma and “would lead to greater availability of prey, without losing forest cover and exposing [pumas] to the depredation of farmers who feel that [the puma’s] presence threatens their herds of goats, sheep or cows.”

This is important because, according to the expert, complaints are almost always related to puma activity.

Protected areas are not enough

Biologist Cindy Meliza Hurtado, in her doctorate thesis at the University of British Columbia, investigated connectivity and carnivore conservation in the Tumbesian Region, a biodiversity hotspot in Northern Peru and Southern Ecuador. She discovered that connectivity is as important as habitat size (that is, percentage of forest cover) to explain patterns of carnivore richness. She also found that the effect of connectivity on carnivore richness is greater than the effect of protection status.

“A connected network of PAs [protected areas] would have a greater impact on carnivore conservation than would isolated PAs. These results agree with recent studies that recognize the value of PAs but also highlight the need for increased connectivity among them,” she writes.

Hurtado found that biological corridors and increased connectivity in fragmented landscapes are an important conservation measure to counter biodiversity loss, but cannot be the only conservation activity. She also highlights the importance of expanding protected areas with effective management, reducing conflict between humans and wildlife, and promoting biodiversity friendly agriculture.

“Wildlife corridors and increased connectivity can be used as a primary or complementary conservation strategy in tropical biodiversity hotspots,” she writes.

In a recent study in Global Ecology and Conservation, José Fernando González Maya and other researchers analyzed the connectivity of protected areas in the Americas. One of the main findings was that a protected area that is close to another has more species and more potential for their survival.

“While the proportion of territory under protection is strongly correlated with the proportion of protected species, especially for threatened taxa, these results underscore the importance of optimizing PA [protected area] networks rather than simply expanding their number… larger, interconnected PAs can be more effective in conserving biodiversity than a greater number of smaller, isolated reserves,” the researchers write.

For González Maya, it’s necessary to connect protected areas so that they do not end up becoming habitat islands, that is, wilderness areas that “are surrounded by a hostile matrix that does not actually provide resources”, he says, “because when it becomes an island there are problems of isolation, scarcity and susceptibility to catastrophic events. Having the possibility of connecting areas increases the flow of individuals that enter and leave.”

Wildlife corridors are also hugely beneficial to medium-sized and small cats like the ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), the oncilla (Leopardus tigrinus) and Garlepp’s pampas cat (Leopardus garleppi), because they can easily become temporary homes when necessary.

“One of our conceptual proposals is conceiving of corridors as landscapes where fauna can move around, where it can fulfil some of its vital requirements,” says González Maya, adding that, in the case of the oncilla, many corridors contain small patches of habitat, which despite not being large enough to maintain a population in the long term, “become marginal habitats or temporary habitats for certain individuals.”

The Colombian Massif is one of the key corridors for the oncilla, because it allows for the connection of populations that inhabit the three ranges of the Andes.

“Despite being a small species, it has a very large home range. People tend to think that a small species doesn’t need much space, but this species needs large and well-conserved areas to live,” Diana Stasiukynas, Science Coordinator of the NGO Panthera, told the journalist following the tracks of the small feline in Colombia.

Esteban Payán adds that biological corridors created for large cats like the puma and jaguar play a dual role, since they also impact positively on the lives of small wild cats—and many other species.

“The puma and the jaguar are umbrella species or focal species, so if we concentrate on them it has a positive effect on the conservation of other species,” he says.

Corridors are gaining increasing recognition as a concept due to the rapid increase in deforestation, degradation and fragmentation hammering the habitats of thousands of species of flora and fauna.

Researchers working with the pampas cat in Southern Ecuador and Northern Peru told the journalists from Mongabay Latam that they are trying to establish a large corridor that will benefit this little-known feline – until recently it was considered a subspecies of the colocolo (Leopardus colocolo) – whose main threats include reprisal hunting, vehicle collisions and the incursion of domestic animals into its territories.

The conservation corridor is being proposed by Nature and Culture International (NCI) and comprises an area of two million hectares – 4.7 times the size of the city of Quito – that extends from Azuay and Zamora Chinchipe, in Ecuador, to Piura and Cajamarca, in Peru.

“We are trying to think in terms of landscape, to not look at conversation in isolation, just in your park or your protected unit, but instead develop much broader objectives, because this is how species, how ecosystem services, work. Having a conservation corridor makes you look at your actions on this scale,” says Katty Carrillo, NCI Coordinator for the North Andes Mosaic.

The ocelot is another American feline with a broad presence across the continent. But at the southern limit of its distribution it is threatened by the advance of soya in the last remaining fragments of the Atlantic Rainforest, in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, close to the border with Argentina.

Turvo State Park is one of its last refuges, but the possible isolation of animals in this territory has serious genetic consequences for the species and could, in the future, restrict and limit the range of its populations. Because of this, the NGO Curicaca, together with partners such as WWF, is working to create a vast biological corridor along the Paraná River, joining preserved areas in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.

“Our aim is to complete the project in a hundred years. We are not working with a short-term perspective,” says Alexandre Krob, Technical Coordinator of Curicaca.

Feral dogs: a common enemy

Human activities are increasingly destroying the habitats of Latin American felines, which are becoming trapped in their own territories. This is why, according to experts, it is important to prevent the isolation of their populations and connect patches of remaining habitat with other places where they can travel easily, providing a kind of “temporary shelter.”

But in many cases feral dogs and unsupervised domestic dogs have made even these areas dangerous. This has become one of the most common concerns among cat researchers.

“Dogs aren’t just a problem in Latin America but in all tropical areas. Both feral and domestic dogs can get together at night to hunt. They’re dangerous because they bite and kill, and because they transmit diseases. The latter is a serious concern among small cats because they are increasingly restricted to small areas, mate among themselves and begin to have genetic homogeneity, and this also reduces their capacity for defence against diseases,” says Esteban Payán.

José Fernando González Maya says that well-preserved habitat is available for small species of felines, but that they do not use certain areas because they are already “occupied” by feral dogs. For the researcher, feral animals are difficult to manage because they are a taboo subject and bring up a lot of emotions, despite scientific evidence revealing that they are a huge problem.

“For example, we did a study with Colombia National Natural Parks and practically 100% of protected areas in the country are inhabited by feral dogs […] Many public policies are based on philosophical narratives and not on technical, scientific information,” he explains.

Camera traps have even photographer the pampas cat having encounters with domestic cats and dogs.

“Many have owners, but the latter are totally irresponsible. They’re effectively stray dogs, as we call them, and because they’re in almost daily contact, domestic animals can transmit diseases to wild animals and also compete for resources, for territory,” says Nicolás Astudillo, Southern Region Coordinator of the Andean Condor Foundation in Ecuador, which has set up camera traps in the province of Azuay.

“Dogs are a very serious threat. There are two roads that run through Puracé [National Park], and one of them constitutes a serious threat because dogs are straying from this road into other much more remote areas. Consequently, the core habitat of species like the oncilla is affected because they have nowhere to go to avoid these interactions with dogs,” says Juan Camilo Cepeda Duque, a Colombian biologist and Director of the Andean Tiger Cat Conservation Project.

In the case of small felines – and even large ones like the puma and the jaguar – very little is known about their behaviour and distribution. However, Jim Sanderson, Founder and Director of the Small Wild Cat Conservation Foundation (SWCCF), does not think that this is an impediment to taking immediate action to combat threats to felines. Biological corridors are one of these strategies and ways of taking action.

“Many academics want to do more research and raise awareness, but we know that research doesn’t reduce threats and that awareness doesn’t change people’s behaviour. We don’t need more research on wild cats, we need more action to reduce threats,” Sanderson concludes.

 
Banner image: Puma, jaguar, ocelot, oncilla and pampas cat. Image by Kevin Nieto.

This article was first published in Spanish here on Oct. 15, 2024.

Jaguar tracks still stained with blood in Bolivia

Credits

Jeremy Hance Editor

Theo Bradford Translator

Topics

AnimalsBig CatsBiodiversityCatsConservationEndangered SpeciesEnvironmentHabitatHabitat LossHuman-wildlife ConflictHuntingJaguarsMammalsWildlifeCentral AmericaLatin AmericaSouth America

See Topics