WWF - Expedition Diary - Jaguar Collaring - In Search of Jaguars: An Amazon Tail

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Expedition Diary - Jaguar Collaring

In Search of Jaguars: An Amazon Tail

Deep in the heart of the Amazon roam jaguars, pumas and other creatures of the jungle. Rodrigo Donadi of WWF’s AREAS Amazonia project has been tracking them for almost two years. He’s felt the bone-rattling sound of a jaguar’s roar and seen herds of wild pigs stampeding through the lush rain forest. Join him in the Amazon as he comes face to face with the jaguar – king of the jungle.

Teammate Lucas Huyamana checking for signals along the river. We often track animals by riverboat.
© WWF / Rodrigo Donadi

We go through the great effort to capture these amazing animals so that we can place tracking collars and follow their movements across the landscape. This will provide us with important information about their lives like habitat preference, seasonal movements, daily activity patterns and home range size. This information is used to ensure that Amazonian jaguars and pumas have enough area to maintain viable populations.

The AREAS Amazonia project uses two types of collars: traditional radio collars like those used in many studies around the world; and a second, new type of GPS tag called a TrackTag. This tag differs from other satellite or GPS tags in that it works under the thick canopy of a tropical rain forest. Most satellites tags function by relaying information to a single satellite. Normally this is a great advantage since one can get daily live 'fixes' on the animal being tracked. But in the Amazon the canopy prohibits this, so the TrackTag can use any satellite available and takes a fix every 15 minutes which it archives for later retrieval and processing. Unfortunately, this means that we must wait until the collar falls off of the animal - controlled by a programmable drop-off mechanism - before we can retrieve the data. At the moment, WWF’s Conservation Science Program is working with Navsys on the development of a downloadable TrackTag, which would be a great step forward for Amazonian conservation.