Changing Planet

Every summer the Onafari team collar as many jaguars as they can, and they've been just alerted to a new sighting perilously close to a ranch.

They want to sedate it for closer inspection.

In the intense heat these big cats need to find shade, and in this case, it's provided by a drainage pipe at the edge of a field, giving a clear line of sight to fire a tranquilizer dart.

Once the sedative has taken effect, the team can safely approach what they now see is an unexpectedly large cat.

This is a young male... ...and we have this small window.

It's about one hour to do all the things that we do.

So we measure it, we weigh it, set a caller as well, try to do as fast as we can.

The vet is also doing his study.

So that's the time to spend doing the ACG, the cartographic evaluation.

But along with these, we have all the biological samples like urine, fecal samples and blood.

As a young male that is insisting on staying in this area, hes got scratch marks all over the body.

It's also got some open wounds.

The male has a few deep puncture wounds from fighting... ...and these are the perfect places for maggots to thrive.

You can see that they're maggots of several stages, and we're going to analyze that as well.

This one seems in good health, despite his battle scars, likely from an encounter with Tupa, the dominant male whose territory this is and who we observed last year.

This male is carrying a huge responsibility on his back because he's two and a half years old, he was born here and he decided to stay in this place.

Which is weird!

We were hoping that he would be going because we have big animals here like Tupa, for instance.

But he decided to stay.

So we just talked as a team and we decided to fit a GPS collar on him, because we really want to understand the way that he move, the way that he spread all over the place, you know, the way that he guarantees his own territory.

By reducing this human-animal conflict, Onafari are contributing to the future survival of the jaguar.