This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
The mastodons, ground sloths, and sabercats are all gone. They all slipped into extinction around 10,000 or so years ago, along with an even wider variety of fantastic beasts and birds that fall under the category megafauna. But not all these charismatic Ice Age creatures died out. We spend so much time mourning the losses that we often forget the survivors that carry whispers of the Pleistocene world. Among these resilient beasts is the jaguar.
Jaguars are old cats. They first evolved in Eurasia sometime around three million years ago, from there spreading both west and east, eventually inhabiting a range from southern England to Nebraska and down into South America. Today’s range of southern Arizona to Argentina—over 3.4 million square miles—is only a sliver of their Ice Age expansion. And it wasn’t just the jaguar’s range that shrunk. Today the spotted cats are about fifteen percent smaller than their Pleistocene predecessors.
Nevertheless, jaguars survived while the American lion, the sabercats, and other predators vanished. How? In order to investigate this question, biologist Matt Hayward and colleagues looked at the jaguar diet and how the cat’s prey preferences changed over time.
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Drawing from 25 published studies documenting 3,214 jaguar kills, Hayward and coauthors found that jaguars are pretty finicky apex predators. The big cat’s menu spans 111 species—ranging from cattle to rodents to monkeys to turtles—but, contrary to what has often been assumed, the jaguar is not really a generalist that hunts anything and everything.
The most common parts of the jaguar diet, Hayward and colleagues found, are capybara, wild pig, caiman, collared peccary, nine-banded armadillo, giant anteater, and white-nosed coati. These species account for 16-21% of the jaguar diet. The stats also showed that certain prey species including peccaries, brocket deer, giant anteaters, and coatis were hunted 85% of the time when they were present in the jaguar’s range. Crunching the numbers a bit further, the zoologists found that jaguars seemed to especially target capybara and giant anteater. On the other hand, jaguars never preyed upon tapirs and almost never touched primates.
Jaguars come out of all this as a paradox. They are burlier than leopards, yet they prefer to hunt a narrow range of prey that falls in the shallow end of what jaguars should be able to tackle. This might have something to do with why the cats have shrunk. Jaguars aren’t large enough to take on tapirs alone, yet human hunting on mid-range prey—such as deer—has made such herbivores too rare to rely upon. So despite their size, jaguars responded by picking out smaller prey which Hayward and coauthors dub “suboptimal” for what the cats initially evolved to do.
The jaguar’s not the only shrunken survivor, either. Coyotes have gone through similar changes. The scrappy canids are Ice Age survivors, too, and they were significantly larger during the Ice Age. When all their competition disappeared, coyotes became smaller and ended up living on the fringes in a world heavily influenced by humans.
Flexibility made all the difference for these carnivores. Even though jaguars no longer prowl as much of the world as they once did, and are currently listed as near threatened on the IUCN Red List, they were able to persist where so many other carnivores perished by shifting their diets. “It may be that jaguars survived this mass extinction event by preferentially preying on relatively small species,” Hayward and coauthors write. The fossil record of cougars tells a similar story: By eating parts of carcasses other cats didn’t want, mountain lions were able to survive the tough times. And even though the cause of the loss of many Ice Age celebrities remains debated, the survivors are truly the animals we should be looking at in greater detail. How they succeeded may hold the secret to why so many other species failed.
Reference:
Hayward, M., Kamler, J., Montgomery, R., Newlove, A., Rostro-García, S., Sales, L., Van Valkenburgh, B. 2016. Prey preferences of the jaguar Panthera onca reflect the Post-Pleistocene demise of large prey. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2015.00148
[This post was originally published at National Geographic.]