White-lipped Peccaries

Two white-lipped peccaries step out of the thorn scrub and onto a road in Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco, Bolivia. A pair like this is usually the visible edge of something larger, because the rest of the herd is still in the brush.

Among Neotropical forest mammals, this way of living is unusual. Most forest ungulates move alone or in pairs, while white-lipped peccaries form large, permanent herds of males and females together.

Peccaries are a mainstay of the jaguar's diet here, alongside armadillos, brocket deer and red-footed tortoises, and they sometimes turn on the cat. At the Caiman Ecological Refuge in Brazil's southern Pantanal, Rampim and colleagues documented three occasions in 2016 and 2017 when a herd cornered a female jaguar, clacking canines and squealing until she climbed a tree or backed into a culvert. Nineteen camera-trap videos recorded the longest of them, a female and her cub held in a tree overnight and kept from a kill they had already made. The same team separately counted 40 occasions since 2013 on which a jaguar fled or climbed a tree at the sight of peccaries.