Part of the Gila River Festival.

Speaker: Michael J. Robinson
Location: Silco Theater
Suggested Donation: $10

Jaguars are the third-largest cat species in the world and they evolved in North America eons ago before expanding their distribution to Central and South America. Jaguars lived in the United States until people killed them off for their beautiful pelts and to eliminate a threat to livestock. At present, just two male jaguars born in Mexico are known to live in the wild in the U.S., in southeastern Arizona’s sky island mountain ranges. Like previous jaguar populations in the U.S. that disappeared long ago, the semi-isolated jaguar population in northwestern Mexico is highly imperiled and in part by its low genetic diversity. Reintroduction of jaguars to the best remaining habitat in the U.S. – the Gila National Forest – would begin the process of jaguar recovery on the continent where these remarkable felids originated, and would also provide a genetic lifeline to jaguars in northwestern Mexico to which the future U.S. jaguar population could be connected.