In Brazil’s Pantanal, too many tourists may be the jaguar’s new predator

PORTO JOFRE, Brazil — When Oscar de Morais isn’t out tracking jaguars, you’ll find him aboard his houseboat moored along the banks of the São Lourenço River. He sits beneath a mosquito net on two stacked blue plastic chairs, watching Brazilian soap operas while a fan blows warm air his way. That is, until someone asks if he can show them a jaguar. Then his eyes widen, and he breaks into a grin.

Oscar is a guide for jaguar tours in the Pantanal. The Pantanal is the world’s largest inland wetland, spanning nearly 200,000 square kilometers (77,000 square miles) across Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia. Twenty-two years ago, when Oscar began ferrying tourists by boat to spot jaguars (Panthera onca), it was still considered an inhospitable no-man’s land — teeming with caimans, mosquitoes, snakes and piranhas. Back then, a bloody feud raged between jaguars and pantaneiros, the people who live in the region. Cattle ranchers were encroaching on jaguar hunting grounds, and when the cats killed cows, the ranchers retaliated. Soon, jaguar sightings had become rare.

Today, the Pantanal is hailed as a model for wildlife conservation through ecotourism. Oscar and a handful of others were among the first to recognize that jaguar safaris could be lucrative. Ranchers, too, began to see that the jaguars were worth more alive than dead, drawing in visitors from around the world. Ecotourism has since exploded. Lodges are booked years in advance. Nowhere else do jaguars live in such high densities.

“Back in 2009, tour operators on our farm were seeing maybe three jaguars a year,” says Mario Haberfeld, one of the founders of Onçafari, an ecotourism agency based at the Caiman Lodge in the southern Pantanal. Inspired by safari models in South Africa, Haberfeld and his team started to gradually habituate jaguars to the presence of vehicles.

“Now we have between 1,000 and 1,100 sightings a year, with between 98 and 100% of visitors seeing a jaguar,” he says.

Where Oscar lives — in Porto Jofre, almost 300 km (190 mi) north of Caiman Lodge, in the northern Pantanal — the shift has been just as stark: the number of jaguars habituated to humans has risen from 29 in 2013 to 130 in 2023, an increase of more than 400%, according to the Jaguar ID Project.

But success may be breeding its own downfall, some fear.

‘A victim of its own success’

“The Pantanal risks becoming a victim of its own success,” says Fernando Tortato, Brazil conservation program coordinator for Panthera, a global wildcat conservation organization. In the high season, it’s not uncommon to see 30 or more boats crowd around a single jaguar, each packed with tourists wanting the perfect close-up shot. “Overcrowding is definitely becoming an issue,” agrees his colleague Rafael Chiaravalloti, an environmental anthropologist at University College London. “Visitors are starting to complain. They say they can barely see the jaguar because of all the boats.”

The tourists aren’t the only ones annoyed by the growing crowds. Jaguars in the Pantanal roam hunting territories that span more than 100 km2 (40 mi2). They’ll often swim across wide rivers in search of prey. Chiaravalloti says he fears the boat traffic may stress the animals, disrupting their natural behavior.

“We hear people telling us of moments when jaguars don’t hunt or mate because there are too many boats around them,” he says. Other researchers he works with are currently studying how exactly the exposure to boats affects jaguar life. “We don’t have long-term data yet, only anecdotal evidence,” Chiaravalloti says. “But it’s important to act before damage is done.”

For Tortato and his colleagues, the warning signs are clear: the tourism model is under threat, unless something changes. Much like the Komodo Islands in Indonesia, the Galápagos Islands of Ecuador and the Maasai Mara in Kenya, the Pantanal is confronting a dilemma: Can tourism continue without overwhelming what makes it unique?

On a February morning, Oscar picks up a group of tourists under a hazy greenish sky. A flock of hyacinth macaws chatters loudly in a nearby tree as two tourists, clad in sun hats and quick-dry clothing, clamber into his wobbly boat. Oscar switches on his radio, ready to alert other guides if he spots a jaguar.

“Keep your eyes and ears on the riverbank,” he calls out, yanking the starter cord on the outboard motor.

He steers the boat through endless fields of aquatic plants. Sometimes it’s hundreds of meters before the plant cover gives way to solid ground; other times, open water stretches right to the edge. After about an hour, a clearing appears beyond a bend in the river. Oscar slows the engine, letting the boat drift forward. He squints, shading his eyes with one hand, and scans the riverbank. A young tourist imitates him.

“It takes a lot of luck to find one this time of year,” Oscar explains. It’s the rainy season in the Pantanal. While Europe is gripped by winter, moist winds from the Amazon, so saturated they’re known as rios voadores — “flying rivers” — drift southward. The monthly precipitation here can reach up to 240 millimeters (9 inches), or more than double what Rio de Janeiro sees in the typical February. Here, though, the flat landscape soaks up the water like a sponge. Starting in the north, floodwaters gradually cover up to 80% of the region.

For Oscar, this is the quiet season. Few tourists venture into the wetlands when they’re flooded, put off by the mosquitoes and the elusiveness of the jaguars during this time of the year. Only when the waters begin to recede around May do animals like capybaras, caimans, giant otters and jaguars gather around the shrinking rivers to hunt and drink. On peak days, Oscar might spot 20 jaguars in a single outing. It’s a paradise for tourists — but for how much longer?

The cost of sharing

“If people don’t get the experience they paid for, they will stop paying to go there,” Chiaravalloti warns. “Guides would have to reduce the prices to remain attractive — forcing locals to bring more tourists to the Pantanal and compete to offer them the best possible experience, instead of ensuring long-term sustainability of the system.”

He says the early signs of collapse are already visible.

While some argue that tourism systems naturally self-regulate, with poor experiences eventually driving down demand, the reality in global wildlife destinations tells a different story. In places like the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania or Komodo National Park, where wildlife tourism has led to overcrowding or habitat degradation, demand often remains disconnected from the reality on the ground. Tourists book trips months in advance, influenced by curated social media portrayals or outdated travel blogs. Meanwhile, operators, many of whom rely on tourism for their livelihoods, have every incentive to keep selling packages, even as the quality of sightings declines.

The danger is that wildlife doesn’t wait for the market to adjust. Tourist infrastructure may destroy wildlife habitats, and noise, trash and pollution may alter their behavior. Once sightings become unpredictable, operators may push even harder to deliver results, further accelerating ecological damage — and locking the system into a downward spiral.

Still waters

Today, though, the banks are empty. Oscar sighs and guides the boat further upriver. Few other boats are in sight. When one does pass, the drivers wave warmly. It’s common among the guides here to sharing information about jaguar sightings; that way, guides stand a higher chance of satisfying the tourists.

Still, the radio remains silent. For hours, Oscar steers his passengers through the watery labyrinth, past spots where he’s seen jaguars countless times, deeper into the wetlands.

Then, suddenly, just as the tourists begin to wilt in the heat, Oscar slows the engine and turns the boat around. He points into a thicket — an impenetrable wall of greenery. Only Oscar seems to have noticed anything. The dappled pattern is nearly invisible amid the tangle of vegetation. After a few seconds of strained searching, a pair of glowing amber eyes emerges. Then, gradually, a damp black nose, whiskers, a jawline, ears. A jaguar’s face comes into focus. Its pink tongue slides slowly across black lips. It yawns, revealing yellow, claw-like fangs.

The tourists grab their cameras. Oscar cuts the engine. The boat sits in silence, broken only by the clicking of shutters.

“Which jaguar is that?” one tourist asks.

“That’s Ousado,” Oscar replies. He can list more than 15 jaguars by name. “Patricia is my favorite,” he says. “Manath is the biggest.”

“And Nina?” asks another tourist, pointing to Oscar’s sweatshirt. A giant jaguar head is printed on it, beneath the name “Nina.”

“Nina’s lovely too, but not like Patricia. I’ve known her the longest. She’s had three cubs now.”

After 20 quiet minutes, Oscar turns the boat back toward home. Ousado watches them go, unbothered.

But the habituation of jaguars brings dangers, Chiaravalloti says: “As they are less afraid of humans, they get closer to the ranches and houses. They start killing more dogs and cows. There have also been incidents involving people.”

In April, for example, a local worker on a ranch was killed by a jaguar, an event that triggered headlines in the media and fears among local people. “Some local people start getting afraid for their kids. If people get afraid, they may return to the old methods: retaliatory killings.”

But how real is the danger of being attacked by a jaguar? Incidents such as the one in April remain rare, and according to Haberfeld, the ecotourism operator, there are means to avoid them. “We habituate the jaguars to vehicles, not to people. We never approach them on foot. If people would get off the car, they’d run.”

The risks, he explains, come when people start baiting jaguars with meat or fish to show them to tourists. “But compared to tigers or leopards in other parts of the world, human-wildlife accidents are very rare in the Pantanal.”

The question of how open-access resources, such as wildlife sightings, can be used without overexploiting them has occupied researchers’ minds worldwide for years now. The easiest measure, many argue, is privatization of land, allowing individual operators to enforce their own limits and rules.

For Onçafari, this appears to be working. “We only operate on private property, so we can control and implement the rules that we think make ecotourism sustainable,” Haberfeld says.

His organization limits the number of vehicles at any sighting to four. In some cases, such as when a jaguar is very young or trapped in a tight space, only a single vehicle is permitted. Another advantage is that Onçafari operates with cars, not boats. That way, they depend less on the banks that open to the riversides during the dry months, where the flotillas of boats gather.

“You can’t just let anybody do whatever they want, that’s when overtourism becomes a problem,” Haberfeld says. “But if done correctly, tourism can benefit the region a lot: we keep hiring more local people, and the region can develop both socially and economically.”

In a recent study, Tortato and Chiaravalloti suggest that limiting how tour guides share information about jaguar sightings might be another measure to regulate tourism.

“In the dry season, it would be best if they didn’t share the locations where they spotted a jaguar with other guides at all,” Tortato says. “That way, fewer boats would cluster. Besides, in that period of the year, sightings are almost guaranteed anyway.”

During the rainy season, Tortato says, it still makes sense to share sighting information, so that tourists stand a fair chance of spotting a jaguar, even if they’re rarely at the water’s edge.

Still, for many guides, silence isn’t an option. “People here are part of tight-knit social networks — they help each other,” Tortato says. “No one wants to keep a jaguar sighting from a fellow guide, even if that would be better for everyone in the long run.”

Chiaravalloti adds that “limited Information sharing can’t solve the problem alone. I think the solution has to be regulating the number of visitors, for example with a quota.”

Meanwhile, pressure on the São Lourenço River is increasing. Just a few months ago, the government of Mato Grosso state, which hosts this part of the Pantanal, announced plans to build a bridge across the river, linking the north and south of the region. That could be the start of further infrastructure development projects, such as the paving of the Transpantaneira, currently a dirt road crossing the Pantanal from north to south, making it easier for tourists to come.

“I think we’re getting close to a tipping point, and it’s best to act before we get there,” Chiaravalloti says.

Otherwise, he warns, the Pantanal, this unique landscape that Oscar calls home, might change for good.

An unlikely safari in Brazil is helping save the Pantanal’s jaguars

Banner image: a jaguar in the Brazilian Pantanal. Image by Leonardo Ramos via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Citation:

Tortato, F., Gottesman, A., Hoogesteijn, R., Martin, A., Dyble, M., & Chiaravalloti, R. (2024). Limited open information sharing and mobility promotes sustainability of jaguar tourism in Pantanal wetland, Brazil. Scientific Reports, 14(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-024-72906-x

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Xavier Bartaburu Editor

This story first appeared on Mongabay

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