Biologist tracks elusive jaguar

“A track. It looks like jaguar,’’ she exclaims, while climbing a steep slope. Squatting to examine the swipe of bare earth, she concludes that a big cat was moving downhill and slipped a little. She speaks into her audio recorder: “Signs of a feline. Let’s see if we find more tracks up there.’’

Isasi-Catala, 32, is carrying out the first study in Venezuela to use cameras equipped with motion sensors to estimate the size of a jaguar population.

So far, her results have yielded an estimate of one jaguar every 12 square miles in the heart of this national park southeast of Caracas — which suggests about 40 jaguars in the entire park if further studies confirm similar numbers in other areas.

Her search is driven by a sense of personal connection to elusive creatures that even when filmed remain mysterious and ghostly, just beyond reach. Isasi-Catala also sees a larger purpose in her research: helping the jaguars survive through the protection of a network of wildlife reserves and corridors across Latin America.

Jaguars are the largest land predators in the Americas. They once roamed widely from the southwestern United States to Argentina, but have lost more than 40 percent of their natural territory and have disappeared from Uruguay, El Salvador, and many other areas.

Heavy hunting for their spotted coats sharply reduced their numbers in the 1960s and early 1970s until the pelt trade was largely halted.

Today, jaguars are listed as a “near threatened’’ species. They are vulnerable due to expanding farmland and roads that are carving away at their habitat, and conflicts with ranchers who view them as cattle killers and shoot them on sight or poison them. No one has any good estimates of how many jaguars are left in the wild, and that’s why work like Isasi-Catala’s is important.

In Guatopo National Park, she often comes upon the stumps of trees felled by illegal loggers and the camps of poachers who hunt animals that are prey for jaguars. She saw National Guard troops arrest three hunters carrying shotguns, and suspects hunters or loggers were to blame for stealing one of her cameras.

In spite of the problems, she is encouraged that a healthy number of jaguars remain in the park — and if this “umbrella species’’ at the top of the food chain is alive and well, it’s a good sign the rest of the ecosystem is intact.