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| Jaguar (Panthera onca) resting in a tree at the peak of the high‐water season. Melanistic male jaguar observed in Mamirauá Reserve during the peak of flooding hanging >30 m high in a tree. Left panel: Wide angle view showing the jaguar location. Right panel: Zoomed in view of jaguar resting. in Ramalho, Main, et al., 2021. DOI: 10.1002/ecy.3286 |
Large felids (>30 kg) have exclusively carnivorous diets and depend upon medium and large terrestrial prey to fuel high metabolic demands (Sunquist and Sunquist 2002, Carbone et al. 2007). Although some of them commonly use trees for resting, hunting, avoiding predators or competitors (e.g., leopards Panthera pardus [Le Roux and Skinner 1989] and pumas Puma concolor [Santos et al. 2014]), and others may prey on arboreal, aquatic, and semiaquatic species (e.g., jaguars Panthera onca [Azevedo and Verdade 2012] and tigers Panthera tigris [Mukherjee and Sen Sarkar 2013]), there are no documented cases of large felids living a primarily arboreal existence for extended periods. Here, we report the evolution of a unique lifestyle for a large terrestrial top predator, in which jaguars live an arboreal and semiaquatic existence for 3–4 months of the year in a completely flooded environment during the annual high‐water season of the Amazon River Basin (Fig. 1).
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| Jaguar (Panthera onca) resting in a tree at the peak of the high‐water season. Melanistic male jaguar observed in Mamirauá Reserve during the peak of flooding hanging >30 m high in a tree. Left panel: Wide angle view showing the jaguar location marked by red circle. Right panel: Zoomed in view of jaguar resting. |
Emiliano E. Ramalho, Martin B. Main, Guilherme C. Alvarenga and Luiz Gustavo R. Oliveira‐Santos. 2021. Walking on Water: the Unexpected Evolution of Arboreal Lifestyle in A Large Top Predator in the Amazon Flooded Forests. Ecology. DOI: 10.1002/ecy.3286