Jaguar translocation in Brazil 251
was filmed by a night watchman using a mobile phone. A committee of experts comprising representatives of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, the City Hall of Juiz de Fora, local military police, the fire department, the local Brazilian army, the Centro Nacional de Pesquisa e Conservação de Mamíferos Carnívoros and the Instituto Estadual de Florestas began to monitor its presence and movements. On 27 April 2019, seven camera traps (Bushnell Trophy HD, Bushnell, Overland Park, USA) were installed within the Botanical Garden, and the next day the jaguar was recorded in various places (Fig. 1; Plate 1). During the following days, information about the presence of the jaguar (Plate 1) was disseminated widely in the media. In late April 2019, the jaguar was recorded in the parking lot of a hotel, in a residential neighbourhood square, in the parking lot of a church and in urban residential areas (Fig. 1). Two attacks on domestic fowl were recorded at point 5 of Fig. 1. The committee of experts then decided to capture and remove the jaguar to a safer location. On 3May 2019, five leg-hold traps and four box trapswere
set within the Botanical Garden. The jaguar was captured on 12 May in one of the box traps. We immobilized the jaguar (hereafter called Juiz), sexed and weighed it and took blood and hair samples and biometric measurements. Juiz was an adult male, c. 4–5 years old based on tooth wear. He weighed 51.6 kg, was 1.80 min lengthand hadnomarks that indicated injuries or aggressive encounters with other males, no ectoparasites or any other signs ofweakness or dis- ease. We fitted Juiz with a GPS/VHF collar (Lotek, Iridium Track M 2D, Newmarket, Canada) programmed to record his location every hour, and transported him by vehicle. We estimated his home range and evaluated his movement behaviour at the release site using autocorrelated kernel density estimation in continuous-time movement models in package ctmm(Calabrese et al., 2016)inR 4.1.0 (RCoreTeam, 2021)with 95% confidence levels. We visually inspected a semi-variogram to check his range residence behaviour.We used a camera-trap grid in Rio Doce State Park to evaluate his behaviour at the release site, and linear regression to inves- tigate any potential spatial or temporal association between his movements and nearby urban areas. Specifically, we examined whether Juiz was more attracted to anthropogenic areas or to areas covered predominantly by native vegetation, and whether any relationship changed with time after trans- location.We used the number of days after release as the pre- dictive variable and distances to nearby urban areas and to the Park limits as the response variables. There are no previous confirmed records of jaguars in
Juiz de Fora. To investigate whether the potential geographical origin of Juiz was a nearby fragment of the Atlantic Forest or of the Cerrado, we genotyped Juiz for 12 microsatellite loci and compared the results to a compre- hensive database developed previously (Kantek et al., 2021) and to 13 new jaguar samples encompassing individuals
FIG. 1 Locations in which the male jaguar Panthera onca (Juiz) was recorded in the municipality of Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais state, Brazil, during 27 April–12 May 2019.(1) Botanical Garden of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, (2) parking lot of a church neighbouring the Botanical Garden, (3) hotel in São Dimas neighbourhood, near the Juiz de Fora bus station, (4) public square of an industrial neighbourhood, (5) Portal das Torres neighbourhood, and (6) a residential condominium.
from four Brazilian ecoregions. We used the Bayesian clus- tering implemented in structure 2.3.4 (Pritchard et al., 2000) to assess which regional population had the highest assign- ment probability for Juiz (Supplementary Material 1). On the night of capture we translocated Juiz by vehicle
240 km from the capture area, and hard-released him on 13 May 2019 in a patch of forest c. 125 m from the Rio
PLATE 1 The jaguar Juiz recorded at the Botanical Garden, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, municipality of Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais state, Brazil, before being captured and translocated. Photo: Pedro H. Nobre.
Oryx, 2024, 58(2), 250–254 © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605323000662
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140
