In June, trail cameras captured rare footage of a male jaguar moving through the lush foliage of the Guatemala forests near the Honduran border.
Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization, celebrated the once-in-a-decade snapshot as a huge milestone for the species, which is endangered in Guatemala. It also served as a reminder of how the corridor between Guatemala and Honduras serves as a vital corridor for wildlife on either side of the border.
Allison Devlin, director of Panthera’s jaguar program, and Barbara Escobar-Anleu, Panthera Guatemala’s country coordinator, elaborated on the discovery in a recent interview with Good Good Good.
“In our most recent camera trap records, we have recorded male jaguars in both Guatemala and in Honduras in this specific region,” Devlin and Escobar-Anleu said in a joint statement.
“We need to work with teams to ensure that connectivity is functional, including continued monitoring to hopefully detect female jaguars and indicate if they are reproducing – especially ensuring functional connectivity between the core JCUs. That means making sure that physical and genetic connectivity persists.”
They explained that the Bi-National Corridor between Guatemala and Honduras is a “key bottleneck in connectivity” for jaguars.
“Genetic analyses consistently indicate a lack of genetic exchange between core jaguar populations in the Selva Maya JCU, which covers Mexico, Belize, and portions of Guatemala, and core populations in central Honduras.”
They cited a recent study, published by researcher Claudia Wultsch and her colleagues in 2024, that indicated a lack of “genetic connectivity” between jaguar populations.
“This is likely due to deforestation and threats including direct mortality due to conflict with humans,” Devlin and Escobar-Anleu explained.
Fortunately, Panthera is hard at work to create better solutions for local people — and jaguars.
“Our teams work with local communities to reduce threats to jaguars, including mitigating human-wildlife conflict and illegal wildlife trade,” they said. “We need to ensure that jaguars have a healthy natural prey base and that the habitat is intact.”
“For example,” they said, “in Jeanette Kawas National Park, our team with Panthera Honduras worked together with the Honduran government and local communities to successfully reintroduce collared peccaries, an important prey species for jaguars.”
The pig-like omnivores, which were once thought extinct in the park altogether, are now rebounding with a population that is 80 individuals strong.
That, coupled with the new trail camera footage of a jaguar navigating the corridor, is giving the experts at Panthera hope.
Devlin and Escobar-Anleu said: “We are still studying the status of jaguars and their prey in the Bi-National Corridor, and are already seeing positive momentum from cooperation between our government colleagues and local communities in both Honduras and in Guatemala, working together to ensure safe passage for jaguars throughout Mesoamerica and their range.”
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Featured Image: Christopher Crouzet/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
