All animals → Jaguar

Jaguar

Panthera onca · medium

The jaguar has the strongest bite relative to size of any big cat, and it uses it differently from the others. Lions and tigers suffocate large prey with a throat hold; a jaguar frequently kills by biting directly through the skull between the ears, or through the armoured neck of a caiman. Its name is generally traced to an Indigenous word describing an animal that kills in a single bound.

It is also the most aquatic of the big cats, comfortable swimming rivers and hunting turtles, fish and caiman at the water's edge. Where leopards avoid water, jaguars use it.

The coat looks like a leopard's at a glance, but jaguar rosettes are larger and enclose small spots inside them. Melanistic individuals — the so-called black panthers of the Americas — are not a separate species and still carry the pattern, visible in the right light.

Jaguars once ranged from the southwestern United States deep into Argentina. That range has contracted substantially from both ends, and conservation now focuses on maintaining corridors so the Amazon stronghold stays connected to smaller outlying populations rather than leaving them isolated in fragments too small to sustain a wide-ranging predator.

Where it lives

Worml lists the jaguar as native to 17 countries — Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela. Its habitat is tropical rainforest, wetland and dry forest.

Ranges here are reduced to whole countries for playability and exclude introduced populations — see about the data for what that simplification leaves out.

In the game

Jaguar is rated medium. To solve the round you need to find any 9 of its 17 listed countries. How scoring works →

Play today's puzzle →