That is so cool. The two black jaguar sisters at my zoo used to go swimming when they were young, but will not go in their pool anymore. I love seeing jaguars (or any cat) in the water.
During my visit, the melanistic jaguar repeatedly dived into the pool in an unsuccessful attempt to catch a fish. (There were some large, impressive pacu in the pool.) I was informed by a regular visitor, that this animal occasionally succeeded in catching a pacu and, when she did, she always shared it with her sister, a spotted jaguar. Apparently, the spotted jaguar had never managed to catch one of the fish.
This is the only zoo where I’ve ever seen jaguars swimming underwater and I have never seen such active jaguars in any other zoo. It is a very impressive exhibit, but I did feel sorry for the pacu, though, as they never had a moment’s peace..........
Yeah, she got real good at it around March. She figured out to just stay on the log and jump down at the right moment. She went from catching maybe a fish a week to 3-4 a day. She put on 10 lbs in 2 weeks!
The zoo is trying to ship out the Pacu and put in smaller, more agile fish now.
I'm sorry if this sounds a little obvious but does breeding of a melanistic Jaguar and a spotted jaguar work somewhat the same as a regular and white bengal tiger breeding?
@dragon(ele)nerd - That is not obvious at all and a very interesting topic. Melanistic leopards work the same as white tigers but not melanistic jaguars. In leopards, melanism is a recessive gene while in jaguars melanism is a dominant gene. What does this mean?
A recessive gene will only show if the animal has a matched pair of the recessive gene, a dominant gene will show if the animal has a mixed pair of the genes (known as heterozygous).
So, a black leopard always has two black genes while a typical yellow leopard could have one of each gene or two yellow genes.
Conversely, a black jaguar could have two black genes or one of each gene while a typical yellow jaguar will always have two yellow genes.
Yeah, she got real good at it around March. She figured out to just stay on the log and jump down at the right moment. She went from catching maybe a fish a week to 3-4 a day. She put on 10 lbs in 2 weeks!
The zoo is trying to ship out the Pacu and put in smaller, more agile fish now.
