By Juliette Portala
(Reuters) – Fires that swept across South America’s Pantanal wetlands in 2020 burned thousands of square kilometres of critical jaguar habitat and may threaten the big cats’ long-term survival, new research reveals.
The blazes displaced, injured or killed 45% of the region’s 1,668 jaguars, the second-largest jaguar population in the world, according to the study published on Thursday in the journal Communications Biology.
Jaguars, which range across the Americas and are largely found in the Amazon rainforest, are a near-threatened species which is vulnerable to endangerment in the short term, with about 173,000 cats remaining.
The 2020 fires, found to be the most destructive during a study period that ranged between 2005 and 2020, torched nearly a third of the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetlands.
“Jaguars are not migratory animals,” the co-author of the research Alan de Barros, an ecologist at the University of Sao Paulo, noted. “High quality environments such as the Pantanal may often result in jaguars” being more clustered together, he said.
To determine how many of the big cats may have perished in the blazes or been injured or displaced, de Barros and his colleagues relied on 12 years of jaguar distribution data and 16 years of maps of the burned area.
Displacement following habitat loss can lead to territorial disputes between cats and reduce the availability of prey, the study said. Jaguars have to roam farther to look for food, depleting their energy levels, which can ultimately result in lower reproductive rates.
Helping to fuel the fires, de Barros said, was “a perverse combination” of rising temperatures and a drop in water draining to the Pantanal due to deforestation of the Amazon and the Cerrado uplands.
Allison Devlin, deputy director of the jaguar program at global big cat conservation group Panthera, said the northern Pantanal was unusually dry in 2020.
“The dryness of the soil and the peat, the root system of this (2020) season caused the fires to be much more severe, burn much hotter, and the wind that came through also helped to fan the flames,” she said.
Scientists have warned that drought in Brazil’s Amazon and the Pantanal wetlands, which extend along the borders of Bolivia and Paraguay, could also contribute towards destruction of natural carbon sinks – ecosystems critical to curbing catastrophic climate change – and put species at risk.
(Reporting by Juliette Portala, editing by Gloria Dickie and Bernadette Baum)
