Jaguar takes out hefty caiman in dramatic series of photographs
Jaguars are the biggest and burliest of the New World’s big cats, and rank third behind lions and tigers among the largest in the world. Packed in muscle and wielding some of the strongest jaws for their size in the cat family, they sit comfortably atop the Neotropical food web, and while elusive as heck, they sometimes permit human beings to witness them fulfil their trophic status in dramatic fashion.
Photographer Chris Brunskill caught the sequence of a lifetime along the Three Brothers River (Rio Tres Irmaos) in the Brazilian Pantanal earlier this week: a jaguar taking down what Brunskill called in a Facebook post “the biggest jacare caiman I have ever seen during my time on the river in Pantanal”.
The shoreline struggle between big cat and (big) caiman lasted some 20 minutes, but this wasn’t exactly a tit-for-tat battle: it was a predatory exercise by a born-and-bred crocodilian-hunter.
Brunskill’s epic photos show the jaguar administering some fierce throat chokeholds, but the photographer reported on Facebook that the killing bite – in typical jaguar fashion – was delivered to the back of the caiman’s skull. This is how these low-slung, rosette-splattered, heavy-headed bruisers commonly dispatch larger prey, from capybaras to the odd black bear.
In his post, Brunskill said the jaguar, which he tracked for roughly an hour before it nabbed its reptilian repast, had made an unsuccessful sortie upon a group of capybara (the biggest rodents on earth) not long before.
A few jaguar attacks on caimans have previously been caught on film, including this well-publicised ambush of an oblivious mudbank-basking victim:
And then there’s this one, which captures a jaguar’s diving leap and underwater strike to wrestle out its