“El Jefe,” a jaguar last seen in Arizona nearly seven years ago, was spotted in the Mexican state of Sonora last year, researchers recently confirmed, rekindling hopes that the species can thwart the border wall that divides its natural habitat in two.
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El Jefe – “the boss” in Spanish – was seen in photos taken in November by a Mexican nonprofit, Profauna, which uses more than 150 motion-sensor cameras to track wildlife. With such a volume of photos, it took until this summer for researchers to make the discovery.
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The researchers cross-referenced the images with previous photos of him using photo analysis software and found a 100% match, identifying the feline by his unique markings. At first, “I was skeptical,” said Carmina Gutiérrez-González, research coordinator for the Northern Jaguar Project.
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“But after doing a detailed visual review, skepticism gave way to surprise and then to excitement,” she said in a statement, adding that “there is no doubt that it will is the same animal photographed in Arizona that many feared may have died when it stopped showing on surveillance cameras nearly seven years ago.
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El Jefe shot to fame after he was first photographed in 2011 in the mountains near Tucson, one of the few jaguars to be seen on the north side of the border since the species was ‘nearly extirpated’ from the south -west more than half a century. ago, the Wildlands Network, which is part of an initiative that aims to protect wildlife near the border, said in a statement.
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The jaguar – which, with a swaggering gait, was named after the schoolchildren of Tucson – is said to have lived primarily in the Santa Rita Mountains of Arizona. For a time, he appeared to be the only one of his kind in the United States, until another male was spotted nearby. El Jefe was around 2 years old when he was first spotted, which makes him at least 12 now – one of the oldest male jaguars ever recorded in Sonora, the Wildlands Network said.
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The recent sighting is “a sign that large-scale habitat connectivity persists between Arizona and Sonora, despite growing threats from development, mining, and the border wall,” said Juan Carlos Bravo, Director of Conservation Programs for Wildlands Network.
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Conservationists have long feared that border walls — including the one that stands along parts of the U.S.-Mexico border — are bad for wildlife, as they obstruct natural migration routes and break up natural habitats.
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Border walls are bad for wildlife
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Parts of the border wall erected under the Trump administration were placed on “extremely rugged mountainous terrain that includes some of the remaining corridors that jaguars use to move between the United States and the core of a small, vulnerable breeding population” of jaguars in Sonora, the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit organization that focuses on the conservation of endangered species, said in a statement following the sighting of El Jefe.
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The jaguar, whose scientific name is Panthera onqueis protégé in the United States under the Endangered Species Act. The animals historically inhabited large swathes of the Southwest, from California to Louisiana, but were hunted to near extinction.
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Environmentalists have also criticized plans for a proposed mine, the Rosemont Copper Mine in southern Arizona, which environmentalists say would disrupt prime jaguar habitat in the area.
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‘El Jefe’ is about to share its habitat with a huge copper mine
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“We cannot allow the territory of El Jefe to be carved out for a copper mine,” Russ McSpadden of the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement. “Arizona’s sky islands, including the Santa Ritas, are critical habitat for jaguars and key to their survival in the United States”
