In the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, in Arhuaco territory, several jaguars were sighted, between three or four, as part of the Conexión Jaguar program, which has been carried out for a year by ISA and which covers part of the Antioquian territory with sustainability programs associated with the protection of this animal, considered the largest feline in the Americas.
According to the entity, the finding was possible thanks to the installation of 24 camera traps throughout a territory of 17.000 km² where the feline moves freely.
The jaguar (scientific name Panthera Onca) has been included for 20 years in the red list of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as a “near threatened” species, but research by the Institute of Ecology of the Universidad Autónoma de Mexico, published in 2017 in the international journal Oryx, exposed that the jaguar is critically endangered and could disappear.
The research was led by the Costa Rican-Colombian scientist José Fernando González-Maya and revealed a worrying statistic: in all of the Americas there are only 64.000 individuals left, of which 57.000 live in the Amazon. The same study (published in the environmental journalism portal Mongabay Latam) reveals that in Colombia there are 1.500 individuals distributed among the Nudo del Paramillo, the Serranía de San Lucas, the Serranía de Perijá and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, already in danger of extinction.
The sighting, for this reason, is considered by ISA as a hopeful event, because the jaguar is an umbrella species, that is, where it is present there are other wildlife species of high value to the ecosystem, such as the blue-billed curassow and the margay, but which are also endangered.
Biological and spiritual value
Juan Fernando Patiño Díaz, leader of ISA’s Conexión Jaguar program, affirms that by obtaining photographic and video evidence of the jaguar, “it shows that the connectivity from Antioquia, from this corner of America, is working at an ecological, systemic and biological corridor level.” The recording was made possible thanks to an agreement with the Arhuaco community, an ethnic group for whom the jaguar is a spiritual symbol of power and protection of the territory and its habitat.
“The areas where the cameras were installed were defined by mutual agreement with the mamos, the spiritual leaders of this ethnic group, who have ancestral knowledge of this species,” Patiño said.
The challenges
Carlos Castaño Uribe, scientific director of the Fundación Herencia Ambiental, which developed the Conservation Project for Conexión Jaguar, said that the area where the specimens were captured by cameras is located to the southeast between the Sierra Nevada and the Serranía del Perijá, “in an area up to 1.500 meters above sea level, which is where they are at their most comfortable”. A territory threatened by deforestation, fragmented, with very few forests.
The challenge will be to get the Ministry of the Environment to support sustainability programs for the communities in the area so that, in partnership with them, the territory can be better protected.
The sighting gives encouragement to the program, which this year has COP 1,4 billion and seed capital of COP 5 billion through 2020. In Antioquia, the project includes the Bajo Cauca, Urabá and Nudo de Paramillo corridors and areas in the Northeast, such as the municipality of Amalfi, with a historical presence of felines.
In Cáceres (Bajo Cauca), in partnership with South Pole Group, a global organization that implements carbon emission reduction projects, Conexión Jaguar is working on forest recovery with 150 committed families, achieving the mitigation of 58 tons of greenhouse gas emissions in more than 1.000 hectares in the process of reforestation.
