In 2010, Gerardo Ceballos and a group of other researchers set out to answer a burning question: how many jaguars were there in Mexico? They knew there weren’t many. Hunting, loss of habitat, conflict with cattle ranchers and other issues had pushed the population to the brink of extinction.
Ceballos and his team from the National Alliance for Jaguar Conservation (ANCJ) thought there were maybe 1,000 jaguars across the country. They decided to carry out the country’s first census of the animal to find out exactly how many there were. They found 4,100.
