A black jaguar was recorded in mating in the wild

INa Feisty First, a black jaguar was recorded by coupling in the wild. This NSFW clip was captured in Serra Do Pardo National Park in the Brazilian Amazon.

It is difficult to document the jaguars apart from captivity because they are very elusive and solitary predators. But during an expedition to follow biodiversity in the sub-studied areas of the Brazilian Amazon, the researchers captured this six-minute video clip from the two cryptic cats. Their results were recently reported in the newspaper Ecology and evolution.

“We have struck the proverbial jackpot,” said the author of the study Carlos Peres, conservation biologist at the University of East Anglia, in a statement. “If they had moved a few meters, we would have missed everything!”

During the study of the clip, the researchers studied how two key aspects could influence Jaguar coupling: Coat the color and the wild and captive parameters. The dark coat of the female, which results from a genetic mutation, can also influence mating behaviors or fertility. (Dark layers as this one tends to be more widespread in wet environments like the Amazon and to assign about 10% of the jaguars around the world.) Video also helps to answer questions about the question of whether jaguars living in the wild companion differently from their captivity counterparts, where jaguars have generally have a low reproductive success.

Overall, the recorded meeting suggests that the Jaguar nuptial parade seen in captivity is similar to the rituals that occur deeply in the jungle, and that the black coat of the female did not seem to influence the interaction. The details of this clip, as well as future research, could help guide matchmaking and the time of artificial insemination in captive breeding programs.

The team could also have identified the female jaguar playing a reproductive tip previously documented in jaguars and other great cats – it seemed to present certain signs of lactation, including swollen nipples, suggesting that it was not really fertile at the time.

This intelligent cat may have exploited the strategy of “hide and firm”: male jaguars sometimes kill unrelated cubs in order to mate with their mothers, so that women with recent rats can hide their offspring and mate with males to wake up to confuse them with regard to their own paternity status. Coupling outside of ovulation could also be used to “exhaust the reserves of sperm of men, thus reducing the success of fertilization in rival women”, according to the article.

This romantic revelation is only the tip of the iceberg. Researchers still do not have a good understanding of the behavior of most Amazonian species in the wild. But the filming of these jaguars at the right time provides a non -invasive glance in their mysterious private life.

Watch the video here.

Lead image: Adrian Dockerty / Shutterstock

• Molly Glick

  Published on September 4, 2025

  Molly Glick is the editor of the newsletter of Nautilus.