Boaters spot at-risk predator with cub — the first at Argentina park in decades
On a sunny day in Argentina, an at-risk predator paused to sit along a riverbank. Its cub appeared by its side, and the pair looked across a national park. But they weren’t the only ones looking around.
Stunned boaters noticed the baby animal. It turned out to be the region’s first in decades.
Darío Soraire and Pablo Luna, boat tour guides, took some tourists to a viewpoint in El Impenetrable National Park on July 30 and were boating back upriver when they spotted a pair of jaguars atop a steep riverside cliff, Soraire said in a video shared by Tompkins Conservation.
Immediately, the guides knew they’d seen something significant. They took several photos of the jaguars and reported the sighting to Rewilding Argentina, an organization working in the park.
Conservationists identified the jaguars as Nalá, a captive-born female released into the park in 2024, and her baby, the organization said in an Aug. 6 news release shared with McClatchy News. A photo shows the mother and her cub, estimated to be “around five months old.”
The jaguar cub is “the first offspring of the species seen in decades in the Argentine (Gran) Chaco,” the biodiversity region surrounding El Impenetrable National Park, the organization said.
Female jaguars were last seen in the Argentine Chaco in 1990, leaving a “dwindling all-male population,” Tompkins Conservation said. That changed in 2024 when conservationists released four female jaguars “in hopes of providing a genetic lifeline” for the species.
The jaguar cub seen in July is an early sign that this conservation strategy might be working, the group said. Conservationists described it as “a triumphant return of the keystone species, destined for local extinction until now.”
Generally, jaguars are considered near-threatened, but in Argentina, “the situation for jaguars is critical,” conservationists said. “The species has lost over 95% of its original range; the remaining 200-250 estimated jaguars in the wild are surviving in fragmented populations or alone.”
Sebastián Di Martino, the conservation director of Rewilding Argentina, a partner organization, said in the release that “wild jaguars are holding out in isolated pockets of Northern Argentina, but they need genetic diversity and connectivity to thrive.”
“Creating a breeding population not only brings us one step closer to the jaguar’s recovery, it offers the blueprint to extending their comeback throughout the Gran Chaco,” Di Martino said.
El Impenetrable National Park is in northern Argentina and near the border with Paraguay.
Google Translate was used to translate the video from Tompkins Conservation.
This story was originally published August 6, 2025 at 1:02 PM with the headline "Boaters spot at-risk predator with cub — the first at Argentina park in decades."
