Amazon jaguars: where the bloody hell are they?
Deep in the Amazon, an Australian team uses indigenous knowledge – and virtual reality technology – to track big cats.
Ever since he was a boy growing up in New Zealand with a fascination for geometric shapes and numbers, Professor Kevin Burrage has dreamt of the Amazon.
Rather than the jungle, Burrage’s life path has been a wild ride through academia, his time split between the Queensland University of Technology and the University of Oxford, where he has used the power of mathematics to revolutionise scientific understanding of the heart. But deep in the reaches of the world’s largest flooded rainforest, cradling a tumbler of single malt Scotch on the upper deck of the river steamer Pithecia, Burrage looks every inch a man in need of a pith hat. “This is without doubt the most exciting trip, scientific or otherwise, I have been on,” he declares with all the animation of recaptured youth.
His journey is as much Heart of Darkness as it is African Queen. Nights have been spent not in the luxury of Pithecia’s cabins but perched on the wooden seats of a five-metre riverboat with a roof made of thatched palm fronds. Or sleeping in the open under a mosquito net on a sandy riverbank beside piranha-infested waters.
For all these basic amenities there is some high-tech work at play here. Burrage is part of a research project organised by conservation group Lupunaluz Foundation, with QUT and big cat charity Panthera, to bring together virtual reality technology, mathematical modelling and local indigenous knowledge to map the jaguar populations of Peru. With the cooperation of Peru’s government and local universities, the data is being shared with international experts to help define a jaguar corridor stretching from Mexico through Central America to Argentina.
To declare an interest, my partner Vanessa Hunter and I have been involved in establishing the Lupunaluz Foundation and forging links with QUT to expand its conservation work with cheetahs in Africa, orang-utans in Indonesia and jaguars in Peru. At QUT, the driving force behind the jaguar project is professor Kerrie Mengersen, who’s also deputy director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers. For her, the Peru project is about more than demonstrating how technology can benefit jaguars; it is proof that the study of maths, statistics and science can offer a rich experience in the real world.
I first met Mengersen, 53, by chance through a mutual friend in the Sydney beachside suburb of Coogee. We began talking about efforts to raise funds to rebuild a women’s refuge in the jungle city of Iquitos, Peru. After the meal she went to an ATM and handed over $500, without saying a word. Nine months later, she is sitting on the floor of a hut in the remote Amazon, witnessing a ceremony involving traditional healers and village elders drinking a hallucinogenic plant medicine to close the circle between human life and the spirit world of nature.
Our research trip has been broken into two parts. Firstly to Imiria Reserve, a remote indigenous-controlled region near Pucallpa, 750km north-east of the capital, Lima; there, small villages fringe an extensive lake system ringed with fast disappearing jungle that, we hope to prove, provides important jaguar habitat. From Imiria we’ll venture north to the Pacaya Samiria National Reserve, a 21,000sqkm biodiversity hotspot that has been protected since 1940 but where there has been precious little study on the health and abundance of jaguars.
The jaguar is the dominant predator in the Americas, but its range has been halved since 1900. It is now considered near-threatened by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), its numbers cut by loss of habitat, interaction with humans and declines in its prey base. In Pacaya-Samiria, there have been three major floods and one catastrophic drought since 2009 that have had devastating effects on animals and local people.
On this trip our goal is to interview local people, capture prime jaguar habitat on immersive three-dimensional “virtual reality” digital recordings and use mathematical modelling to set baselines for conservation. The virtual reality recordings of the prey-filled narrow rivers, low-lying swamps and high-ground refuges will be shared with jaguar experts from around the world who can “view” the landscape in full definition without leaving the laboratory.
We start from the river-port city of Pucallpa but there’s a problem with boats. The speedboat we have booked is elsewhere on the river and the replacement is too small for our party which has swelled to 10 with two trucks of food and equipment. We toss up whether to take a bigger boat but we’d already paid so we settle on taking a second, smaller vessel to transport the gear.
We are accompanied on the first part of our journey by five policemen in a tinny with twin outboards. They have machine guns and bulletproof vests and their mission is to ensure our safe passage through a notorious stretch of river patrolled by bandits. When we reach this area, though, we run aground. Primed with tales of piracy, six of us are out of the boat dragging and willing for deeper water. Our police are watching from a distance, having decided it is too shallow for them to proceed. For the rest of the journey we are on our own.
The first thing to know about Caimito is it is so remote that people still get attacked by anacondas.
Four hours later, our steering broken, we limp into a river port and arrange for another boat to take us through a channel into the Imiria lagoon. Near midnight, under the light of a full moon, we glide into Caimito village after a 14-hour journey that was supposed to take six. The first thing to know about Caimito is it is so remote that people still get attacked by anacondas. Ramon Fernandez Ramos is living proof. He stepped from his stuck canoe in the very shallows we had just traversed and was struck at the heel by what he thought was an alligator. “It’s not an alligator,” cried Ramon’s son as the five-metre serpent wrapped itself around his body and started to constrict. Fortunately for Ramon, his son and uncle were able to pull the snake off and kill it.
Ramon was there to greet us at Caimito, where we made camp in the upstairs loft of a thatched hut. Three QUT scientists, two shamans, a photographer and I share a loft space on thin foam mattresses separated only by mosquito nets. It is a small luxury we know will soon give way to jungle floor.
Come morning, we have a village meeting and despite six months of preparation there are many questions to answer before we can proceed. The village leaders say they are used to government officials or researchers visiting here, taking information and giving nothing back to the community. After a brief discussion, they break for a private meeting to decide the fate of our expedition. What are we going to give back? We have said we are interested in jaguars but the village leaders want everyone to be involved, the fishermen, the artisan women, forest workers. Mostly they want medical supplies – paracetamol and something for gastro. We agree to keep talking and are given permission to proceed.
QUT spatial ecologist Erin Peterson explains what’s at stake. “All around the world we have large carnivores and other species that need to move long distances so they have big home ranges,” she says. “We can’t wait to make decisions about their conservation because their habitat is being destroyed as we speak. We can use these sexy new technologies to get information to biologists who aren’t in Peru. We can essentially take the forest to the biologist and get their expert opinion and put that into our models. But what we are not making use of right now is this huge reservoir of indigenous knowledge from people who see the jaguars on a daily basis.” She says the evidence collected so far confirms there are a lot of jaguars in the area.
The old men of the village reminisce about hunting jaguars with arrows before the arrival of logging machinery scared them deeper into the forest. It is soon revealed that a jaguar was heard last week at the edge of the village. There is talk of an area where the topography creates ideal conditions for large populations of small animals – a jaguar smorgasbord, and our new destination. Our young guide Santos, who was outspoken at our first meeting, is starting to drop his guard. He dreams of a business that takes tourists out on the lake in traditional houseboats. We discuss with the elders how documenting jaguar sightings could help with their tourism ambitions. The regional council is discussing how a master plan might set aside places for growing crops and conservation.
For Mengersen, the involvement of traditional communities is a vital part of the conservation effort. “Data can tell a story but there are lots of other sources and one of those really rich sources is the information from local people,” she says. “In Peru, we have a wealth of information from local people and that knowledge deserves to be told and be part of the decision-making about jaguars.”
Mengersen’s passion is the power of numbers and the need to bring a new generation to science. “For mathematicians and statisticians there is beauty and intensity in the development of theory and methods, but also this really exciting and rich opportunity to be involved in real-world problems,” Mengersen says. “These kinds of projects can open people’s eyes to the importance and the enjoyment and the excitement of doing maths.”
Kevin Burrage has always been a maths tragic. He’s mellowed with age, to the point that he no longer keeps meticulous records of cricket statistics as he did for many years. But on our expedition, not even the rigours of jungle life can interrupt his conceptual computations. In less than a week, with Mengerson, he produces a probabilistic model of jaguar populations in Pacaya Samiria that is within 10 per cent of the best estimates of researchers who have spent years studying jaguar prey in the national reserve. Government officials admit they have no credible estimate because funds have never been made available. “The mathematical model we have built is relatively sophisticated,” Burrage says. “It takes into account birth and death rates, hunting rates by humans, competition with other animals and availability of food.”
They take cows; they break into pig pens at night and snatch dogs from beneath verandas as their owners sit above them on the porch.
On the ground, real-life observations can be challenging, as we discover in the small outpost of Nueva Generacion, which is alive with jaguars. They take cows; they break into pig pens at night and snatch dogs from beneath verandas as their owners sit above them on the porch. Understandably, the 10 families here are prepared to fight back. Two jaguars were shot recently crossing the river; another was caught devouring a cow and butchered for the pot. But mostly, the jaguars are heard: the throaty whoo whoo whoo of a male calling to his mate and the roars of those asserting territorial rights.
The big cats have always enjoyed a special place in the region’s spiritual mythology, but tourists can still buy pelts, teeth and paws. Hunting has made jaguars wary and on this trip, despite reports of dozens of sightings, footprints and evidence of kills, we do not see any.
For Burrage, this provokes an epiphany: “We set out to see a jaguar in the wild but it hardly mattered that we did not as the other experiences were so rich.” The genius mathematician says he gained an understanding of how indigenous groups can create a world-view based on their isolated existence and the environment in which they live. “I gained a lot of insight into myself from living in a space in which the only horizon is the point at the end of the river,” Burrage says. “It both constrains and enlarges your thinking.”
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