A big cat just made a low-key but important appearance in the Honduran highlands. A camera trap in the cloud forests of the Merendón Mountains snapped photos of a robust male jaguar on Feb. 6—the first time in a decade the species has been documented in that area, at roughly 7,200 feet in elevation, Nautilus reports. Jaguars once roamed from the US Southwest to Argentina, but habitat loss, agriculture, urban growth, and poaching have shrunk and fragmented their range; the species is now classified as Near Threatened, having lost around 49% of its historic range.
Jaguars are usually found at much lower elevations. Conservationists with Panthera, the big-cat nonprofit that captured the images, say the "cloud jaguar" sighting supports a key idea: that these forests can function as part of a "Jaguar Corridor" running from Mexico to Argentina, giving the wide-ranging predators a way to move, breed, and maintain genetic diversity through heavily deforested landscapes. "For jaguars, connectivity is paramount," says Allison Devlin, director of the jaguar program at Panthera, per Scientific American.
Cloud forests have been protected in Honduras since 1987. "They didn't know then, but now we know they were also protecting a very important habitat for jaguars," Franklin Castaneda, Honduras country director at Panthera, tells CNN. The photographed cat was found in a protected area that links Honduras and Guatemala, where ranger patrols, anti-poaching efforts, and the reintroduction of prey like iguanas and peccaries have been underway. Those measures, combined with a new international framework and a Jaguar 2030 roadmap backed by most jaguar-range countries, are intended to make this sighting less rare in the years ahead.
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