Jaguars

What are Jaguars?

The jaguar is the largest cat in the Americas. The jaguar has a compact body, a broad head and powerful jaws. Its coat is normally yellow and tan, but the color can vary from reddish brown to black. The spots on the coat are more solid and black on the head and neck and become larger rosette-shaped patterns along the side and back of the body.

Where do they live?

The mighty jaguar once roamed from Argentina in South America all the way up to the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Today, jaguars have been almost completely eliminated from the United States and are endangered throughout their range, which stretches down to Patagonia in South America. The jaguar makes its home in a wide-variety of habitats including deciduous forests, rain forests, swamps, pampas grasslands and mountain scrub areas.

Locations where jaguars live.

Behavior

Jaguars are solitary animals and live and hunt alone, except during mating season. The male's home range is between 19 and 53 square miles and often overlaps with the smaller home ranges of multiple females. A male aggressively protects his home range and resident females from other males. Unlike most big cats, the jaguar loves the water — it often swims, bathes, plays and even hunts for fish in streams and pools. Like all members of the big cat family, jaguars can roar. The jaguar’s roar sounds like a deep, chesty cough.

Hunting

The jaguar hunts mostly on the ground, but it sometimes climbs a tree and pounces on its prey from above. It has very powerful jaws and sharp teeth and usually kills its prey with one crushing bite to the skull.

Facts about jaguars

• The jaguar is the largest wild cat in the Americas. Its coat provides excellent camouflage but it is also prized by the fur trade, and this is one reason why the jaguar is now very rare indeed.
• Little is known of the family life of the jaguar in the wild and biologists now trying to study it in its natural habitat are handicapped because it has become so rare.
• The jaguar is often misidentified for a leopard (and vice-a-versa). However, the jaguar has a larger, more powerful looking jaw than the leopard (the leopard’s head is smaller and narrower than the heavier jaguar). Their body outlines are very similar, but the jaguar is more heavily built with a stocky appearance and sturdier legs. Even the jaguar’s distinctive spotted coat is almost the same as the leopards. However, the jaguar’s spots are more defined, darker and larger.
• The jaguar lives in a variety of habitats, from dense jungle and scrub-land to reed thickets and shoreline forests. It even inhabits open country, but needs a reliable supply of water as well as sufficient cover in the form of long grass or rocky outcrops to hunt successfully.
• The jaguar and the leopard are the only big cats which do not roar.
• Jaguars are excellent swimmers and are quite at home in the water. It also hunts successfully in rivers, catching frogs, turtles and small alligators in the shallows, or swiping at passing fish while clinging to an overhanging branch.
• Males are solitary animals until breeding season. However, it is the female who rears the young on her own. The cubs stay with the mother until they are two years old and a year later they will be sexually mature, although the male does not breed successfully until it is four years old.
• All-black colored jaguars are not uncommon in a litter. Mixed litters are often born to mixed parents.
• Amazon Indians have told the story of jaguars emerging from the forest to play with children.
• All subspecies are endangered. Loss of habitat to farming and over-hunting for its fur and to protect live-stock present the greatest threats to the jaguar.

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