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Jaguars are secretive and solitary, and are rarely seen interacting with other individuals in the wild. As a result, many aspects of their social lives are seldom witnessed outside of captivity and much remains unknown about their natural history. In one of a series of intensive surveys in the Brazilian Amazon, researchers from the Amazon Biodiversity and Carbon (ABC) Expeditions including Dr. Joseph Hawes (Senior Lecturer in Ecology and Conservation at the University of Cumbria) were therefore surprised to record an intimate meeting between two jaguars, capturing the full sequence of courtship and copulation behaviours. The six-minute video, from an expedition in Serra do Pardo National Park, is particularly notable since the female of the pair was melanistic – displaying a black coat rather than the typical spotted version. Melanism is relatively common in cat species and 10% of jaguars are thought to have this condition, but this is the first ever published film of such a mating event. This single observation highlights the importance of efforts such as the ABC Expeditions which combine vegetation inventories and multi-taxa wildlife surveys to assess biodiversity and carbon stocks in severely under-sampled regions across the Brazilian Amazon. The Amazon Biodiversity and Carbon (ABC) Expeditions are led by the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) and the University of East Anglia (UEA), and funded by the Research Council of Norway: http://www.abc-expeditions.com/ The video footage can be viewed in full from within the open-access publication, led by Dr. Thomas Luypaert (NMBU), in Ecology and Evolution: https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.71776 Image: a still from the newly published video of jaguar courtship and mating behaviours. Credit: Amazon Biodiversity and Carbon (ABC) Expeditions. |