Though smaller than its tiger and lion cousins, the jaguar is the biggest and deadliest predator and cat in the New World.
The Jaguar Is the Predator, While Most Everything Else Is the Prey
The jaguar is a marvel of cat engineering. Its sleek, agile, muscular body allows it to be equally at home running, climbing and swimming. It is well equipped to hunt down and kill fast, flighty things like peccaries, caimans, and deer.
When Face-to-Face with a Wild Jaguar, Don´t Pull Its Tail
If you´ve ever had an African or Asian leopard bearing down on you, you may have noticed the resemblance to the jaguar. Leopards and jaguars are both adept at slicing up their prey into mincemeat.
As owners of angelic-looking house cats will attest to, cats and even kittens are easily able to inflict unpleasant, stinging scratches if provoked, so it is only with the greatest of care that Amazon Forest strollers should approach a jaguar, which is the equivalent of encountering a house cat times 50.
Shhhh. Can We Talk About the Sex Life of the Jaguar?
Jaguars reach their sexual maturity at the, to us, tender age of 3. The female jaguar typically has one litter of cubs per year, with the little darling hell cats numbering from one to four. The typical jaguar lives to the respectable age of roughly 22-- not a great amount of years but better than nothing.
Adult jaguars weigh between 124 and 211 pounds, with some even weighing up to a hefty 330 pounds. As might be expected, the males are slightly heavier than the females -- carrying perhaps 10-20% more body weight. The size depends much on the eating habits of a jaguar as well as how male it is. The typical self-preferred length of jaguars is between 5.3 and an even 6 feet, meaning that a 6-foot jaguar is perhaps a happy jaguar camper.
What Did the Ancient Mayas, Incas and Aztecs Think of the Jaguar?
The ancient Egyptians believed that the eyes of cats were the gateway to the spirit world. In the Amazon Forest the jaguar´s reflective, almost ghostly eyes were believed to have a mystical connection to the spirit world. The Mayas and Incas of the ancient yesteryear world viewed the Jaguar as a divine creature and furthermore believed that the skin of Jaguars represented the night sky. As for the always blood-thirsty Aztecs, they were never known to let a blood-letting opportunity slip by them and, unsurprisingly enough, used to feed the hearts of their sacrificial victims to jaguars.
Other articles in this series:
Piranha, Little Attacker of Humans
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