United States Acts on the Year of Biodiversity, Sets Up Land and Recovery Plan for Jaguars After 12 Years of Inaction

GREEN IS GOOD
by Margaret Smith

The UN recently declared 2010 the Year of Biodiversity, and it looks like the United States just made the first step to promote that cause. After more than a decade of resistance, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced on Tuesday that it will finally start protecting the habitats of jaguars in the U.S.

Jaguars have been listed as an endangered species since 1997. For various reasons, however, the government never designated a habitat for them or developed a formal recovery plan, as is part of the normal protocol for most endangered species.

Why the jaguar has been given differential treatment is still unclear, and the federal government has given different reasons. First, in 1997, the agency said that in order to protect the jaguar's habitat, they would have to make public maps of the animal's range and this would make them more vulnerable to poaching. When the subject was up for review in 2006, the Fish and Wildlife Service then argued that jaguars were mostly found in Central and South America now and saving their land in the United States wouldn't largely affect their survival.

After the U.S. District Court of Arizona issued a report last March ordering the Fish and Wildlife Service to reevaluate their decision with answers based in science, though, the agency decided to reverse its previous decisions.

In the United States, jaguars have historically inhabited most of the Southwest region, residing in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and possibly as far as Louisiana. Only four or five jaguars have been spotted in the U.S. since 1996, though, while there are currently about 5,000 living in Mexico and more living farther south in Paraguay and Argentina. The notion now is to enable the jaguar to survive if it starts settling north again.

The first move from the service is to review and publish a description of the land these big cats will need in order to survive. The Fish and Wildlife Service is working on a formal plan discussing how jaguars can start making a recovery in America.

"The service is determined to use the best available information about listed or candidate species, especially when it will assist us in re-evaluating our past decisions and enhance protections that might lead to the recovery of species in peril," said Benjamin Tuggle, the Fish and Wildlife Service's Southwest regional director, in a statement.

An information-gathering period began yesterday and will close March 15. The Fish and Wildlife Service hopes to use the information and unveil their proposal by next January.

GREEN IS GOOD

Photo courtesy of dingopop's photostream on Flickr.

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