In Brazil’s Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland, Paul Raad crouched in the undergrowth, scanning the ground for signs of jaguar activity. He wasn’t looking for the big cats themselves; instead, the veterinarian from São Paulo State University (UNESP) was searching for fresh jaguar feces. Spotting a recent sample, Raad carefully collected it, stored it in a sterile container, and sent it to a lab to be analyzed. It was one sample of dozens that he’s collected since 2022. The team of technicians at the wildlife postgraduate program at UNESP made a surprising discovery in the jaguar scat: the presence of the tapeworm genus Spirometra. While Spirometra have been widely documented in scat from wildlife in Asia and Europe, this marked their first detection in jaguar droppings in the Pantanal. “We found it in many fecal samples. [This tapeworm] wasn’t even the main target of the study, but it stood out so much — screaming, ‘Look, I’m here’ — that we ended up prioritizing it,” Felipe Fornazari, a UNESP professor and supervisor of Raad’s master’s research, told Mongabay. Paul Raad examines a Spirometra spp. tapeworm collected from the feces of a jaguar from the Brazilian Pantanal. Image © Eduardo Rossi/UNESP. It was an important discovery. Although parasites evoke negative connotations, researchers see them playing a key role in jaguar conservation. Jaguar populations are at risk from retaliatory killings by farmers, who see them as pests endangering livestock, especially in the Brazilian Pantanal, where about 90% of the land is privately…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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