IUCN Red List – Pain In The Bud

In 1999 biologists from the Dallas Zoo were lending a hand on a project to monitor and protect America’s ocelots, who primarily range in southern Texas.

With limited resources, the team was trying to keep the wild cats in a protected area and get them to use paths where camera traps had been installed. One tried and true method was to use scents, but what could attract ocelots?

“Sort of on a lark, one of our research assistants produced a bottle of Obsession,” Dallas Zoo’s Cynthia Bennett said at the time.

The felines loved it. Members of the research team watched astounded as the scent magically transformed previously ignored objects into items of sudden fascination.

The cats happily rubbed their cheeks and bodies against anything sprayed with the stuff.

“It´s a little embarrassing to watch, actually,” Bennett said. “It does make you wonder what´s in the perfume.”

(It’s probably civetone, a synthetic version of a pheromone produced by civets used as a binder in the Calvin Klein scent.)

In addition to their predilection for cologne, ocelots are known for enjoying water, hunting by twilight, and napping in trees. The medium-size felids, who weigh up to 40 pounds in the wild, are also easily recognizable by their big eyes, the dark rings that surround them, and the way those markings become twin stripes that sweep over their foreheads.

Perhaps most striking are their large, wavy rosettes, which sometimes get them confused for young jaguars. In several indigenous South American languages, ocelots and jaguars share a name or have very similar names.

An ocelot kitten. After a gestation period of about three months, ocelot moms give birth to as many as three kittens. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

An ocelot resting in a tree. Like other leopardus species, ocelots are proficient climbers. Credit: Wikipedia Commons

Ocelots have another quality that may lead people to confuse them with jaguars: they’re fond of water and they’re considered strong swimmers. That allows them to master their habitats, which often include rivers winding through rainforests and mangrove swamps.

The resourceful cats are adept predators on land and they can also pluck fish out of rivers.

An ocelot going for a dip. Credit: yellowlime_des/Reddit

Ocelots are categorized as a species of “least concern” by the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) but that doesn’t mean they’re thriving. Like pumas, the species is adaptable and can survive in varied surroundings. Still, ocelots contend with the same pressures other species experience, including habitat loss and fragmentation, hunting and poaching.

And while they can’t get enough of Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men, maybe that’s a good thing.

According to zookeepers and wild cat experts, ocelots have a uniquely funky body odor which is amplified by their prodigious scent-marking. They want everyone to know where their territory is.

For zookeepers, the cats’ Obsession obsession could pull double duty as olfactory enrichment in their habitat — and a way to mitigate the stink.

Name: Ocelot (leopardus pardalis)
Weight: Up to 40 pounds, with limited sexual dimorphism (males are slightly larger)
Lifespan: Up to 20 years in captivity
Activity: Crepscular, nocturnal
Habitat: Claims territory in places where prey, water and dense ground cover are plentiful but the species is adaptable and survives in varied biomes

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The name jaguar comes from the indigenous Tupian word yaguara, meaning “he who kills with one bound.”

On the Scale of Badassery that’s an 11, which is appropriate for such a regal, ephemeral creature who seems to exist only in glimpses before melting back into the jungle.

From ancient chronicles etched in Mayan pictograms to modern-day descriptions of encounters with jaguars, one thing is consistent: When you’re fortunate enough to set eyes on a jaguar, it’s because the animal allows you to.

The world’s most elusive hunter is like smoke: There one moment, gone the next, without any physical evidence that it was present in the first place.

The jaguar was a symbol of strength and power in Mayan culture, similar to the way the tiger represents

There’s a lot of confusion about jaguars, so let’s get that out of the way first. The jaguar is the third-largest-cat on the planet, behind tigers and lions. Jaguars are the largest cats in the Western Hemisphere and are the apex predators in the Americas.

They’re often confused with leopards, the other spotted big cats, but aside from living on different continents, jaguars are visibly larger, heavier and more sturdy than their African cousins.

Compounding the confusion is the widespread habit of using “panther” to describe both jaguars and leopards, and sometimes other cats too, like pumas.

A panther isn’t a type of cat: Panthera is the genus to which big cats — tigers, lions, jaguars and leopards — belong, while a black panther can refer to any melanistic jaguar or leopard.

Like its cousins in the genus, the jaguar is an ambush hunter.

But unlike tigers, leopards and lions, jaguars do not kill by going for the spinal cord — they go for the head itself, puncturing skulls, turtle shells, heavily armored caiman scales and anything else they want to make a meal of.

That’s where the “one bound” in their name comes from: By the time a jaguar pounces, it’s already too late for the victim.

Jaguars are paragons of feline grace, yet even among cats they’re strikingly beautiful animals:

Unlike tigers and lions, there are no recorded cases of prolific man-eaters among jaguars, and the mysterious cats are careful to avoid conflict with humans. The one exception is when a female jaguar feels her cubs are threatened.

Travelers who brave the untamed, near-impenetrable remote rainforests of South America may not see jaguars on their journeys, but the jaguars see them: Humans who venture into the thick tangle are “calmly watched by a jaguar or two” and most of them “don’t realize they’re under surveillance,” Nadia Drake wrote in a 2018 Atlantic story about encountering the enigmatic felids in Peruvian jungles:

Those who have studied jaguars say they sense a kind of preternatural consciousness in the beasts, a combination of disciplined energy and shrewd awareness that allows the jaguar to unleash its power in calculated ways. Alan Rabinowitz, struggling to find the right words, calls it simply “jaguarness.”

The ancient Aztecs saw that same cunning in the eyes of jaguars, naming them the “kings of the animal world” and employing jaguar motifs on statuary, stone reliefs and other artwork. Jaguar imagery was common throughout the pre-European Americas, and at the time the animal ranged across North and South America without a true rival at the apex.

Like tiger imagery is used to denote power, grace and agility in Asian cultures, the jaguar’s image was used for similar purposes, associating the animals with royalty and gods.

In Mayan culture, deities took the form of jaguars, and the big cats were known as gods of the underworld, fertility, war, protection and fire. Ek Balam, for example, was the Mayan god of the underworld, and was depicted as a black (melanistic) jaguar.

Jaguars share another quality with tigers, one that’s rare among cats: They not only enjoy the water, they excel at swimming and even hunting in rivers and swamps. While most cats will do almost anything to avoid entering water, jaguars and tigers have no reservations about immersing themselves, particularly on hot days.

Like all big cats, jaguar numbers are decreasing. The animal is classified as “near-threatened on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species as its habitat has been fractured.

Unlike the other members of the panthera genus, habitat loss hasn’t led to conflicts between humans and the majestic cats. Jaguars, it seems, would rather retreat deeper into the jungle than go to war with humans. It’s crucial to preserve what’s left so these beautiful, amazing cats still have a jungle to go back to.

All photos courtesy of National Geographic and Mexico Lore.