Two Hungry Jaguars Are No Match for This Plucky Otter

On a particularly hot afternoon last October, two jaguar^[1]
sisters named Medrosa and Jaju went down to the river to drink.

But before they had reached the waters of the Corixo Negro, a
giant
otter^[2] loudly voiced its
displeasure.

“The sisters’ mother, Patricia, is an excellent caiman hunter,
but we have no record of her standing against giant otters,” Rafael
Hoogesteijn, jaguar program conflict director for the wildcat
conservation group Panthera^[3], wrote on their
blog^[4].

“So the young females may have feared the otter because of never
seeing their mother face its kind before,” says Hoogesteijn, who
filmed the encounter.

The two predators are such worthy foes, there’s only one
recorded case of a jaguar killing a giant otter.

“In fact, the only way jaguars can catch otters is by using the
element of surprise.”

Ailton Lara, director of the Pantanal Jaguar
Camp^[5], has also observed that
“otters are much faster than a jaguar when they are in the
water.”

A few weeks before the solo otter standoff, Lara saw a jaguar
trying to catch a family of otters along the São Lourenço River.
The otters made loud calls and started surrounding and splashing
the jaguar, nicknamed Ague, in a show of intimidation (seen in the
video above).

“Their tactics were working, you could tell by the way Ague was
continuously flicking her tail that she was afraid,” he says.

But why are jaguar and otter interactions so rarely seen?

For one, both species have been so heavily persecuted that in
the past, there were simply fewer of them, Luke Hunter, Panthera’s
chief conservation officer, said by email.

“Today, that situation has been transformed” as conservationists
work to increase the animals’ numbers in the region.

Payan adds that South American tourists are not as accustomed to
watching wildlife dramas unfold.

“You see so many interactions between, say, lions and hyenas in
Africa,” he says. “Well, this is similar stuff, but in South
America, and I’m so excited that it has been captured.”