[Animals] The story of 'El Jefe': the jaguar that reappeared after years on the border between Mexico and the US

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Despite the fragmentation of its ecosystem, 'El Jefe' broke survival records among jaguars on the US-Mexico border. This is his story.
The border wall that divides Mexico with the United States measures at least 3,142 kilometers. Especially after the Trump administration, which used this physical division as one of the main lines of action to safeguard the security of American citizens. However, there are spaces where there is still no human intervention: "nature forms its own barrier", as documented by the BBC in 2020.

Deserts, mountains, wetlands, and the Rio Grande connect wildlife between Mexico and the United States. This is how the natural history of the Earth has dictated the path, for millions of years. Before human intervention, the current border was part of an extensive species migration corridor. Recently, the wall and mining exploitation in northern Mexico has currently limited the passage of big cats and other animals, evocatively habituated to cross without political interventions.

'El Jefe', a full-grown male jaguar seen for the first time in Arizona in 2011, is one of the few currently documented examples of successful crosses between the two territories, according to what was observed by Dr. Carmina Gutiérrez, from the organization Northern Jaguar Project (NJP), a participant in the Borderlands Linkages Initiative (BLI) program led by the Wildands Network. In 2021, the Mexican Fauna Protection team (PROFAUNA), also a BLI participant, managed to register this male jaguar again on the Sonora side.

Following in the footsteps of the jaguar

Conservation efforts for the jaguar and other wild cats in northern Mexico are not new. On the contrary, as Carmina Gutiérrez explains in an exclusive interview with National Geographic en Español, the Northern Jaguar Project was founded in 2003 with that intention. For almost two decades, they have dedicated their efforts to the conservation of the jaguars of this region. "The first investigations were aimed at seeing if there were still jaguars in Arizona and Sonora," explains Gutiérrez. To do this, continues the specialist, cameras were placed in ranches to start tracking the species that possibly still existed in the region. The research team decided to install trap cameras, since they are not invasive with the ecosystem.

BASED ON THESE PRELIMINARY RECORDS, "IT WAS DETERMINED THAT THERE WAS STILL A REPRODUCTIVE PO[CENSORED]TION IN THE AREA", POINTS THE SPECIALIST.

The sightings of jaguars that have occurred gave rise to the orchestration of a project to protect and safeguard the jaguar po[CENSORED]tion, as well as its habitat in Sonora, so that there would once again be jaguars on the other side of the border. Together with her, the biologist Miguel Gómez, manager of the Jaguar del Norte® Reserve, is also in charge of identifying those jaguars that may be crossing the border between Mexico and the United States.

Specialists acknowledge that recent sightings in the United States have been "very few, and all have been male," Gutiérrez details. "Like, for example, 'The Boss.'" It was first sighted in 2011, and for almost a decade, it was lost track of. However, with the support of other researchers working in the same line of study, the Northern Jaguar Project received in June 2022 a series of photographs of jaguars sighted in Sonora.

Upon receiving them, Gutiérrez and his team compared them with those they had in the database, "to see if we had any matches." Only then did they realize that, indeed, the jaguar in the images was 'El Jefe':

"[THE MOST LIKELY] IS THAT THIS INDIVIDUAL MOVED FROM ARIZONA TO MEXICO AT SOME TIME IN THE LAST 7 YEARS," DETAILS THE DOCTOR OF SCIENCE. "THIS HIGHLIGHTS THE NEED TO HAVE PERMEABILITY IN THE BORDER WALL, SO THE ANIMALS ARE MOVING FROM ONE SIDE TO THE ANOTHER."

Before the sighting of 'El Jefe', researchers thought that jaguars in the north did not live more than 12 years. Because of hunting and the increasingly extensive fragmentation of their ecosystem, they are unlikely to survive much longer. In this regard, the executive director of NJP Roberto Wolf, clarifies that the encounter with this specimen was 'circumstantial': "we were not looking for it," he explains in an interview.

For years, scientists completely lost track of him. "Even the hypothesis was that he was no longer alive," says Wolf. Therefore, the surprise was even greater for the researchers.

For the jaguar po[CENSORED]tion in northern Mexico to be able to sustain itself, explains Gutiérrez, it is essential that there is a habitat in which the specimens can transit. Despite the hostilities around him, 'The Boss' sets a precedent: there is still hope for the species.

https://www.ngenespanol.com/animales/el-jefe-un-jaguar-de-la-frontera-entre-mexico-y-estados-unidos-reaparece-con-vida/