Action | Student News
Room for the Jaguar?
Dalia Amor-Conde Strives to Preserve Travel Cooridors
Between Panama and Mexico
by Michael Tennesen
The sun has already burned away most of the morning mist as Dalia Amor-Conde boards a boat in the ancient island city of Flores in northeastern Guatemala and heads out across the dark waters of Lake Peten Itza.
Unlike most visitors to Flores, Amor-Conde's destination today isn't the towering Mayan ruins of nearby Tikal. Instead, her boat speeds in a different direction toward a distant, low-lying speck of land—a tiny, forest-shrouded island that is home to the Asociation de Resciate y Conservacion de Vida Sivilestre (ARCAS) and its world-renowned Peten Rescue Center.
Since 1989, hundreds of rare and endangered tropical animals have been confiscated from illegal traffickers in the Mayan Biosphere Reserve or rescued from humans who illadvisedly tried to raise them as pets, and rehabilitated at the center.
Amor-Conde, a doctoral student in the University Program in Ecology at the Nicholas School, is a member of an interdisciplinary research team that studies jaguars.
Fernando Martinez, the director of ARCAS who also is lead veterinarian for jaguar captures, greets her as her boat arrives at the island's floating dock. He leads her through the facility, past parrots, toucans, scarlet macaws and monkeys, to the back of the station where he's housing a new arrival: A jaguar raised by humans that is too tame to return to the wild.
Mosquitoes buzz around Amor-Conde's eyes and sweat drips from her forehead. But neither the bugs nor the heat can diminish the thrill of her first sight of the animal as it pads back and forth, its muscles rippling, behind a chain link fence. For a moment jaguar and humans stare into each other's eyes.
"Looking into the eyes of a jaguar is a transforming experience," Amor-Conde says. "It engages you.You feel like you cannot let this species and its jungle disappear."
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photo captions: Dalia Amor-Conde; Jaguar; Dalia with Fernando Colchero.