A jaguar on the Piquiri river – credit, Charles J. Sharp from Sharp Photography CC 4.0. BY-SA via Wikimedia

Imagine sitting in southern Texas and knowing that in less than a day you could drive to se the world’s third largest cat.

That is absolutely the reality in Mexico today, following a second national jaguar population census which found this charismatic cat is actually increasing in numbers across the country, reaching around 5,300 animals.

Gerardo Ceballos and colleagues conducted the first census in 2010, hoping to grasp more or less the gravity of the risk of extinction faced by the jaguar. They were estimating they’d find around 1,000 in the whole of Mexico.

But rather than the risk of extinction, their results conveyed a different narrative. They found four-times as many cats as they expected.

“It was a great surprise, terrific news,” Ceballos said. “Obviously 4,000 means the species is still in danger of extinction, but 4,000 is a lot better than 1,000.”

Then in 2025, Ceballos completed a second survey, employing over 50 national and local research institutions and community leaders, who together set up 920 motion-activated camera traps.

Staggered again, the count showed that in 15 years, jaguar numbers had increased 30%. It turns out that even though the twenty-teens saw hundreds of thousands of acres of forest cleared, there were almost as many jaguars in Mexico as there are cheetahs on the entire African continent.

“The fact that the country has managed to maintain and increase its population over the last 14 years is extraordinary,” Ceballos told the Guardian. “For me it’s great news for the country. Mexico and the world need good news.”

The populations came in as follows: the Yucatán peninsula region had the most (1,699), followed by the south Pacific area (1,541), north-east and central Mexico (813), the north Pacific (733) and the central Pacific coast (540).

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The jaguar is a compact, muscular predator, with exceptionally strong jaws that allow it to pierce the shells of turtles and the hides of crocodilians. They’re good tree climbers, avid swimmers, and will even hunt in the water. Like tigers, it employs a stalk and ambush hunting strategy, and is considered peerless in terms of its catch rate.

In short, and by comparison, the jaguar is maybe the most versatile and adaptable of any of the big cats.

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This gives the animal an advantage in the gradually shrinking forests of Mexico.

Ceballos told the Guardian that the spotted hunter would face multiple threats, including from the continued construction of new highways across Mexico, as well as habitat loss and zoonic diseases being passed to them via livestock which they occasional poach.

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