Photographs show a mother jaguar and her baby engaging in a game of tug-of-war with a freshly captured anaconda.
The natural environment of the Pantanal in Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay where the footage was shot is home to the biggest tropical wetland area in the world.
British visitor Emma Greenwood saw the incident and reported it to Mail Online, saying, “Jaguars are incredibly discreet when they catch a kill and carry it away into the bushes.” Yet, this mother and her youngster hung out on the sand for a considerable amount of time.
Game face on: The mother and cub were first spotted by the water’s edge, as they were on the hunt for anacondas
Dinner is ready: After catching an anaconda, the pair dragged the snake onto the sandy banks of the river
It’s likely the same playful duo, since there are just 15,000 wild jaguars remaining in South America.
The green anaconda (Eunectes murinus) is the heaviest species of anaconda and one of the biggest snakes overall. A yellow anaconda, a relative of the green anaconda that may still grow to over 15 feet in length, is most likely the culprit here.
It seemed to me that the mother was amused by the cub’s antics and was willing to let him play with her. Maybe she was giving the cub a chance to hone its killing skills.
These jaguars need all the anaconda they can get with population trends decreasing as they face a number of threats, including habitat fragmentation and illegal killing.
The anaconda is one of the world’s largest snakes, a heavy-duty, muscular constrictor built to take down animals by squeezing them to death. However, this terrifying reputation doesn’t stop jaguars from hunting them. Jaguars have been known to take down large reptiles such as caimans, but seeing them with an anaconda is quite a rare sight.
In the Pantanal, the biggest tropical wetland on Earth encompassing around 75,000 square miles across Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay, these two apex predators live side by side. One of the finest areas to see jaguars is in this region, which is also a biodiversity hotspot and home to one of the world’s largest jaguar populations. In addition to the largest parrot in the planet, gigantic otters, cabybaras (the largest rodent in the world), ocelots, and giant anteaters also make their homes here.