It’s early in the morning, and since my inhibitions haven’t had time to form for the day yet I’ll jump right into the topic of large predator reintroduction. Well, perhaps not reintroduction per se but at least a discussion about one particular predator. I have become increasingly interested in the recent historic biogeography of North America. When I say recent biogeography, I am interested primarily in A. what happened at the late Pleistocene-Holocene transition 12,000 years ago and B. what has happened since European contact with the Americas began in earnest 500 years ago.

I am going to keep this short for my fellow PLA members so that you’ll be able to read and comment at will next week. I recently became interested in the topic of Jaguars in America following a trek with my good friend Riley Arian this past November. We climbed from the Coachella Valley Floor within the city limits of Palm Springs to the top of Mt. San Jacinto. That took us from less than 500 feet above sea level at the bottom to over 10,800 feet ASL when we hit the summit. We started at just before midnight, were perhaps halfway up when we got to see the sun rise over the Salton Sea, and then reached the top at around 1pm where we popped a half-bottle of champagne and gazed at truly unbelievable views of Nevada, Mexico, and the Pacific Ocean.

While researching the trip, Riley and I were struck to find out that in the 1860’s, the last ever jaguar in the state of California was shot and killed by a hunter on Mt. San Jacinto. Now, I had known of the plight of jaguars in southern Arizona and I was aware of their northern Sonoran distribution – but I hadn’t been aware that they had been found that far north in the United States. I will suffice it to say that some additional research made it clear to me that, indeed, jaguars had a substantial distribution in the United States until the 1800’s.

This camera trap photo, courtesy of the outstanding conservation NGO Sky Island Alliance, shows a jaguar persisting only 30 miles south of the Arizona-Mexico border.

Credible reports list jaguars as present in California as far north as Monterey (wow!), and western biology legend C. Hart Merriam even wrote a short paper entitled “Is the Jaguar Entitled to a Place in the California Fauna?” with the conclusion – at least as I read into it – as a pretty clear YES.

Alright, so I’ve whet your appetite using California, my home state, as an example. But what about other areas of the United States? Specifically, what was the status of jaguars in the Southeastern USA – a region which has become near and dear to my heart in recent years? Well it appears that they were there as well. If you understand jaguar biology, that has got to be one of the least surprising things you’ll read in this blog. You see, the idea of jaguars as part of our nation’s fauna seems alien to those that imagine the big cats at home only in the dark dense tropical forests of Central and South America. In reality the cat is much more of a habitat generalist. Indeed, the area with the highest known jaguar population densities is the Brazilian Pantanal. This is a gargantuan open tropical wetland that’s a far cry from the dark primeval forests of Amazonia.

What it is not a far cry from, though, is the Louisiana bayous. In fact, aside from the latitudinal difference the two wetlands probably aren’t half bad ecological analogues of each other from a jaguar’s perspective. Are the capybaras, tapirs, and caimans of the Pantanal analogues of the abundant nutria, deer, feral hogs, and alligators of the southeastern coastal wetlands? Depending on which ecological or evolutionary perspective you looked at it from, it could probably be yes or no. From the perspective of jaguar I’d tend to go with yes…

The massive alligator population in these areas is what really convinces me. It’s widely accepted that the jaguar’s massive head and jaws (they look like a leopard on steroids…) are an evolutionary response to their specialized predation on armored reptiles. Armored reptiles? That’s 1. turtles and 2. crocodilians. According to my friends and mentors in the southeastern herpetology world, the southeast is a turtle diversity mecca. In fact, my friend Dr. Sean Graham contends that Mobile Bay in Alabama is the global turtle diversity hotspot – with more species than any other single locality on the globe.

And could alligators represent a significant prey base for jaguars? Well, I’ll let this video answer that question for you…

SMOKED.

In science we like to use data rather than single anecdotes, but I assume you’ll trust me following that practiced and professional killing job. That jaguar had killed lots of caimans before.

If it happens in the rivers and wetlands of the Pantanal, you can believe that it was happening in the swamps of Cameron Parish, LA and other southeastern wetlands. The last decent report of a jaguar in Louisiana was of one shot by hunters in 1886. That timeline tracks pretty well with their disappearance from much of the rest of their range in the United States.

Could the south support any jaguar populations today? Well, I have no illusions about the immediate feasibility of large predator reintroduction, but I think that the ecological answer to that question is a resounding yes. I would use the Everglades as my case study example but I haven’t been able to find any reports of Jaguars in south Florida, so I’ll use Cameron Parish, LA which I mentioned before.

Disclaimer: I am about to use the least scientific method of all time to estimate carrying capacity. My wildlife professors would shoot me for this. Nobody should read what I’m about to write.

Jaguars in Cameron Parish, Louisiana?

Cameron Parish within Louisiana.

First of all, lets look at the latitude. Biogeographically, the latitude of an area is one of the most significant determinants of its biota. Latitude is, fundamentally, a measure of how far a location is from the equator. Typically, the further from the equator the colder and less stable the climate. Cameron Parish is at 29 degrees latitude. The Pantanal is at 18 degrees latitude. Incidentally, the Pantanal is at 18 degrees south while Louisiana is north latitude, but ecologically it doesn’t actually particularly matter whether you are north or south of the equator – just how far away from it you are. So – since Louisiana is ten degrees further from the equator and is therefore colder and less stable than Brazil, could jaguars live there?

Well of course they can, because they did. This whole discussion is rather futile considering that foregone conclusion, but I just want to make it clear that these are some of the many things that we need to take into account when having discussions like these. As I mentioned before, Merriam was rather convinced that jaguars had been found as far north as Monterey, CA at 36 degrees north, and jaguars were (and probably still are) present in the Pampas grasslands of Argentina at 35 degrees south. Louisiana is no problem.

Can such an area hold a self sustaining population of the cats? Would it be big enough? Well, here is where I’ll incorporate some horribly messed up math. Clearly, wetlands can be very productive jaguar habitat. I’ll use the Pantanal as my numbers base for these calculations, as it is by far the best studied wetland jaguar population. Research suggests that, conservatively, the population density of jaguars in the Pantanal is at 6 individuals per 100 square kilometers. Incidentally, # individuals / 100 km^2 is the standard unit of density for big cats: they aren’t particularly common anywhere – even in the best habitats.

Historic jaguar habitat in Cameron Parish, LA. Photo courtesy of America’s Wetland Foundation.

Lets assume that, because primary productivity is lower ten degrees further from the equator, and because it is coastal rather than landlocked marsh (I’m not even sure how that would affect jaguar density but I thought I would mention it for posterity since this is mostly just a thought experiment anyways…) that the Cameron Parish wetlands could sustain 1/2 of the Pantanal’s conservative density estimate: 3 jaguars per 100 square kilometers.

Well, Cameron Parish is just over 5,000 square kilometers in area. That means that it could support a population of 150 jaguars according to our estimates! That is definitely a self sustaining population! Could you imagine a historical jaguar reserve in the heart of the American southeast? Wow! Of course, if you can’t imagine it – that means that you are living on planet earth as opposed to the dreamworld that I’ve been in since I started typing this blog up…

The parish is home to just over 6,000 people. That means that it has the lowest human population density of any Louisiana parish. The population was never high but it’s currently at a lowpoint after it was utterly devastated by Hurricane Katrina a decade ago. Even so, that counts for over six thousand people that probably don’t want to share their “backyards” with jaguars. Now I can call that sad and upsetting, someone else might call it reasonable and common-sense. Jaguars rarely attack people, and there isn’t any particularly significant livestock industry in the Parish that I’m aware of. Unfortunately, though, people don’t like large predators. Given their incredibly important place within ecosystems and even human cultural traditions, that is a real shame, but it is the truth. One needs only to look at the wolf-hate attitude in the northern Rockies to see that that’s the case.

If anything, consider this blog a thought experiment in what could-be. If we can change attitudes, we can change the entire look of our landscape. We could have nature that is wilder than we could imagine – with native jaguars stalking alligators in the coastal marshland of Louisiana. With native mountain lions on the front lines of deer overpopulation in the Appalachians. These are ecologically feasible, but currently politically impossible outcomes. I know so many people that would be happy to raise their fist and shout hurrah for lion conservation initiatives in Kenya. If, however, I asked them about how they felt about reintroducing native mountain lions into the Pennsylvania Appalachians, they would have all sorts of excuses for why that wouldn’t be a good idea. “They would eat all the deer and leave none for hunters!” or “I wouldn’t want mountain lions in the woods, my kids play outside!”

A radio collared mountain lion, dubbed P22 by biologists, persists within the city limits of Los Angeles. Los Angeles’ urban pumas shows that humans can coexist alongside large predators. We just need the right attitude. Photo courtesy of National Geographic.

Unfortunately, what these people are really saying is “Let the Africans deal with large cats, I don’t want them here.” That is level of hypocrisy that I cannot abide by. If any wildlife, let alone large predators, are to exist in the future – the developed, “conservation minded” countries are going to have to lead by example. In this case, leading by example starts with changing attitudes.