November Newsletter Online

Conservation in ACTION
We have recently completed the first stage of our Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Initiative, which integrates habitat mapping, native tree reforestation, and youth education. This high-impact project is made possible by those of you in the US, and the critically important US Neotropical Migratory Bird Act. We place an emphasis on the very birds which travel from your backyard in North America to the Central American Isthmus....

Paso Pacífico in the News
Nicaragua's been in the media a lot lately with news of the presidential election, the earthquake in Rivas, and the heavy flooding which displaced thousands of people from their homes. The spotlight on these events serves as a reminder that Nicaragua's rural poor are vulnerable to external factors....

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October Newsletter Online

Conservation in ACTION 
Globally important sea turtle arribada beaches like La Flor Wildlife Refuge (pictured above) receive tens of thousands of sea turtles each year. The greatest threat to successful nesting is high mortality among adults caught in fishing gear as turtles gather to mate....

Paso Pacífico in the News 
At the annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting last month, Paso Pacifico Executive Director Dr. Sarah Otterstrom addressed government officials, business executives, directors of major nonprofits, and other global leaders on Women and the Environment.

Dr. Otterstrom shared the success stories of Nicaraguan women who conserve wildlife, lead reforestation efforts, and combat climate change as they empower themselves, improve their community, and help the environment....

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Camera Traps Show Record Numbers of Jaguars

In Bolivia's Madidi National Park:

Researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) set up the camera traps to try and identify jaguars based on the unique patterns of their spots. Once the images were collected, the team ran them through software originally designed to recognize tigers by their stripes.

The 19 jaguars found by the project represent a record number for a single camera-trap survey in the country.

Read more about it at National Geographic Daily News.

The Jaguar Freeway

Smithsonian.com's Science & Nature, reports on "a bold plan for wildlife corridors that connect populations from Mexico to Argentina could mean the big cat's salvation."

In antiquity, killing a jaguar was often part of a religious ceremony or a mark of status. But as ranches and settlements sprang up across Latin America, jaguars lost their religious significance. Demonized as dangerous predators, they were routinely shot. The fashion craze for fur after World War II added to the carnage; in 1969 alone, the United States imported nearly 10,000 jaguar pelts. Only a 1973 international ban stemmed the trade. Killing jaguars is now illegal throughout their range, but enforcement is minimal, and the cats have been wiped out in El Salvador and Uruguay. Meanwhile, over the past century people have razed or developed 39 percent of jaguars’ original habitat across Central and South America.

...

Panthera’s Jaguar Corridor Initiative aims to connect 90 distinct jaguar populations across the Americas. It stems from an unexpected discovery. For 60 years, biologists had thought there were eight distinct subspecies of jaguar, including the Peruvian jaguar, Central American jaguar and Goldman’s jaguar. But when the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity in Frederick, Maryland, part of the National Institutes of Health, analyzed jaguar DNA from blood and tissue samples collected throughout the Americas, researchers determined that no jaguar group had split off into a true subspecies. From Mexico’s deserts to the dry Pampas of northern Argentina, jaguars had been breeding with each other, wandering great distances to do so, even swimming across the Panama Canal. “The results were so shocking that we thought it was a mistake,” Rabinowitz says.

Panthera has identified 182 potential jaguar corridors covering nearly a million square miles, spanning 18 nations and two continents. So far, Mexico, Central America and Colombia have signed on to the initiative. Negotiating agreements with the rest of South America is next. Creating this jaguar genetic highway will be easier in some places than others. From the Amazon north, the continent is an emerald matrix of jaguar habitats that can be easily linked. But parts of Central America are utterly deforested. And a link in Colombia crosses one of Latin America’s most dangerous drug routes.

...

“My vision was to ranch by example,” Kaplan says, “to create ranches that are more productive and profitable and yet are truly jaguar-friendly.”

Understanding the ranging habits of jaguars

Our friends at the Wildlife Conservation Society have had a great deal of success identifying individual jaguars with camera traps in Bolivia's Madidi National Park:

A record number of jaguars have been identified in one of the world's most biologically diverse landscapes. Using technology first adapted to identify tigers by stripe patterns, researchers for the Wildlife Conservation Society have identified 19 individual jaguars by spot patterns in the rainforests of Bolivia, a record number for a single camera trap survey in the country.

"We're excited about the prospect of using these images to find out more about this elusive cat and its ecological needs," said WCS conservationist Robert Wallace. "The data gleaned from these images provide insights into the lives of individual jaguars and will help us generate a density estimate for the area."

We're so excited to follow in their footsteps with our own Jaguar Conservation Initiative.

Coastlines & Waterways

We're pleased to partner with the Ocean Recovery Alliance and other organizations to empower citizen scientists to alert the world to hotspots of floating trash. The hope is that tracking and mapping floating debris, will help drive cleanup efforts, including the potentially profitable harvest of floating plastics for reuse.


Global Alert - Floating Trash from Ocean Recovery Alliance on Vimeo.

Global Alert - Floating Trash is a global project operated by the Ocean Recovery Alliance, and announced as a commitment at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2010. The platform allows for community reporting, like a "neighborhood watch" for floating trash hotspots in rivers, lakes the ocean, or along coastlines. This information empowers local communities to make improvements in their local waters vis-a-vis plastic waste and floating debris, and will hopefully inspire new technologies for removal, catchment, recycling and re-use of the waste when collected. www.oceanrecov.org

Hawksbill Habitat

Schoolchildren from Ostional, Nicaragua
named this Hawksbill Brasilia

Thought to be locally extinct as recently as 2007, the Eastern Pacific Hawksbill has been the subject of recent study using satellite telemetry. Our friends at ICAPO (the Eastern Pacific Hawksbill Initiative), working with other organizations, have just published their findings in the scientific journal Biology Letters.

After two years of turtle tracking, this team of turtle biologists has observed that, unlike what we know of their Carribbean and Indo-Pacific relatives, the Eastern Pacific Hawksbill population relies on mangrove estuaries for foraging habitat. Given that most Hawksbills have always been observed to inhabit coastal reefs, it's possible that among the preliminary findings of this study is the potential that we're watching an evolutionary adaptation indicating a different species emerging in the Eastern Pacific.

We're proud to have contributed to these efforts to better understand the critically endangered Hawksbill sea turtle, and we're especially pleased to see this exciting research has garnered a good deal of press.

LA Times:
Endangered hawksbill turtles make a surprise appearance Scientists find a population of endangered hawksbill turtles unexpectedly making a go of it in mangrove estuaries.

BBC Latin America:
Cómo se resolvió el misterio de las tortugas Carey
(This is a great photo essay.)

Huff Post Green:
Hawksbill Sea Turtles Not Extinct In Eastern Pacific

Science News:
Hawksbill turtles in funny places