Jaguar in Sierra del Merendón mountains – Credit: Panthera-Honduras
Just weeks ago, a jaguar was captured on camera in Honduras’ Sierra del Merendón mountain range for the first time in a decade as part of high-tech monitoring and conservation efforts from Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization.
Taken among cloud forest at over 6,000 feet in elevation on the range’s highest peak, the images capture an impressively healthy male jaguar just two meters from the exact location of the park’s first-ever jaguar sighting—recorded 10 years and 2 days earlier.
They “cloud” moniker this cat has picked up in the media isn’t a reflection of speciation, such as the leopard and the clouded leopard, but merely because of its habitation atop the highest of heights in Honduras.
The discovery also marks the highest elevation at which a “cloud jaguar” has been documented in Honduras, with the species most commonly found below 3,000 meters, and provides rare evidence that jaguars are still moving through this high-elevation corridor between Honduras and Guatemala.
More than anything, the 2026 images suggest that a decade’s dedication of anti-poaching ranger patrols, conservation technology investment, and prey reintroduction, including peccaries and iguanas by Panthera and partners—as well as Honduras’ vow to eliminate deforestation by 2029—are showing wonderful signs of success.
The sighting is particularly significant given Honduras has one of the highest deforestation rates in all of Latin America. Today, the Merendón range is a critical passageway within the Jaguar Corridor, which connects habitats from Mexico to Argentina and enables species to roam, find mates and maintain genetic diversity. Jaguars have already been lost from nearly half of their historic range and are Near-Threatened on the IUCN Red List.
CAUGHT ON CAMERA:
Despite that, they may be the most successfully conserved member of the Panthera genus, thanks in no small part to the organization of the same name.
The original 2016 jaguar sighting was one impetus for Panthera’s launch of a binational conservation initiative between Honduras and Guatemala. Panthera hopes to further improve the jaguar’s odds of survival in working to establish new protected areas in Honduras in partnership with the Rainforest Trust and partners.
This news comes on the heels of the United Nations’ COP15 for the Convention on the Protection of Migratory Species in the Brazilian Pantanal where Panthera supported adoption of a unified international framework for jaguar conservation and habitat connectivity.
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