Stereotype wants the cats to smell the water, but not all felines have an atavistic aversion to bathe. The jaguar, for example, is an excellent swimmer: even capable of hunting in the water, in case of need it can travel to soil that the other great cats dream of. Do you want a fresh fresh example? A Brazilian jaguar has just beaten the swimming record of its species, improving it about six times, as told in a study published in Pupert on BIORXIV.
Marathon or relay? The jaguar in question lives in the surroundings of the Serra da Mesa, a dam (and an artificial lake) in central Brazil. The area is rich in fauna and therefore of photratraples, and the latter immortalized the animal first on the continent, then, four years later on a small island a couple of kilometers off the coast of the lake beaches. The jaguar has a very recognizable pattern of spots, which has made it possible to identify the animal in the two photos with absolute certainty.
This means that the jaguar must have started from the mainland after April 2020 (when it was photographed the first time), and reached the island in swimming. The team that studied it identified two possible routes to the island: a direct 2.3 km swim, or one in two stages, with a stop in a tiny islet halfway between the mainland and the island. In this case, the swim would have been 1 km, followed by a stop and then another 1.27 km.
The record of hope. Even the most conservative estimate of the jaguar swim, therefore, says that it traveled a stretch of lake of 1.27 km: the previous “longest swim” documented by one of these felines had been just 200 meters. It is therefore a sestupplicated record, made even more impressive by the fact that the jaguar has recently been spotted again on the mainland, which means that it has redone the swim in the opposite direction.
Good news. In addition to being an interesting curiosity, however, the jaguar record is also good news: the loss of the habitat is one of the main conservation problems of this species, which in the last century has lost about 50%.
The jaguar needs space, and dams and other works of river engineering can hinder their movements: the Brazilian feline record makes these works be more “permeable” than we feared.
