Scientists have recorded what they believe to be the first wild footage of courtship and mating in one of the world’s most elusive and mysterious predators.
The black panther is an almost mythical beast. This all-black form of the jaguar – the biggest cat in the Americas – has lent its name to Marvel superheroes, political movements, footballers, wrestlers and even notorious murderers. And yet most of our knowledge of its social behaviour comes from studies of captive animals.
Ninety per cent of jaguars are sandy-coloured with black and orange rosettes, but the rest possess a variant of a single gene that leads to an abundance of a dark pigment called melanin in the skin and fur.
There is evidence that these melanistic animals are better camouflaged for hunting in forests during the day, while spotted individuals tend to be more nocturnal and occupy more open habitats. Melanism may also come with a cost, though. Black jaguars lack the white ear-spots of spotted individuals that are thought to play a role in visual communication.
But on the evidence of the new footage, recorded by a camera trap set up in Brazil’s Serra do Pardo National Park, the lack of ear-spots may not be a significant barrier to a fruitful love-life. Because it shows courtship and copulation between a melanistic female and a spotted male jaguar.
“The behaviours we observed looked very similar to what’s been described for spotted pairs in captivity,” says Thomas Luypaert of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, who was first author of the research paper published in the journal Ecology and Evolution. "We saw the classic sequence of jaguar courtship: the female signalling readiness, the male mounting, nape-biting and licking, vocalisations, and female rolling.
“Of course, it’s just a single observation, but it suggests that the visual differences of melanistic jaguars may not strongly affect mating behaviour.”
Intriguingly, the melanistic female in the video has swollen nipples, which suggests she is lactating to a litter of cubs. If so, she is unlikely to be in oestrus. Luypaert and his colleagues suspect she is employing a ‘hide-and-flirt’ strategy, in which she conceals her litter and mates with males to confuse them about the paternity of her cubs in order to protect them from male aggression.
Edu Fragoso, who works on jaguars with the Brazilian NGO Onçafari and was not involved in the research, describes the study as a “pioneering publication”, adding that it was “very lucky that the animals stopped and displayed the mating behaviours right in front of the camera trap.”
However, he points out that the footage is not the first to capture a melanistic jaguar mating. His own camera-traps recorded a similar event in 2022.
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