Far from the average jaguar

A high-fish diet is enough to turn these prowling loners into sociable team workers

- Stuart Blackman

Jaguars are classic aloof, solitary carnivores. Like most other big cats, they come together only for courtship and territorial disputes. But not in the wetlands of the Brazilian Pantanal where a shift in diet has led to striking changes in their social organisation.

The Pantanal is the world’s largest tropical wetland. Biologists have been using a combination of scat analysis, radio tracking and camera traps to study the behavior of jaguars in a remote region lacking roads and human settlements.