At the foot of Sinaloa’s Sierra Madre Occidental range lies the municipality of San Ignacio. Much has changed since San Ignacio’s founding in 1633. But one thing remains the same: despite years of being hunted and feared, jaguars still roam the forests that surround the town.
The same can’t be said in many other places. Jaguars’ range once stretched from what is now the United States down to Argentina. Since the arrival of the Spanish, however, they have disappeared from more than half of the areas they once lived .
Many remaining populations are on the brink of disappearing. The destruction of their home forests, loss of the prey that live in those forests, and killings by cattle ranchers are just a few of the threats jaguars face. Despite the challenges, Mexico’s jaguars are a rare success story in the world of conservation, thanks in part to the work of researchers like Dr.
Yamel Rubio Rocha. Rubio is a biologist at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa (UAS) and the force behind FUSCBIO , a conservation nonprofit. Mexico is one of the few countries that actively monitors its jaguar populations .
Rubio has been a part of the effort since the earliest days of Mexico’s first National Jaguar Census (Cenjaguar) in 2010. The third jaguar census is currently wrapping up, with results expected in October. When I visited Rubio at Sinaloa’s Jaguar Biological Station in July, she and her team had just collected the camera traps they use to tally and study the big cats.
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