Published on jzar.org am 30.04.2022. | By: María J. Duque-Correa, Rebecca Biddle, Stuart Patterson & Nicholas Masters
Most jaguars in the EAZA Ex-situ Programme (EEP) die at a very high age, when they are already geriatric. They live up to 25 years.
Note: Now, it is interesting to see how long jaguars live in the wild to compare. The WWF currently states “up to 12 years“. Eisenberg (2014) indicates that Macho B – currently 16 years old – is the oldest jaguar ever documented in nature. This, together with the fact that most jaguars included in the study were already geriatric at the time of their death, stresses that jaguars under human care, in this case in zoos, live much longer than those in the wild because geriatric animals have little chance of surviving in the wild as hunters. The study also mentions that these results coincide with those of a comparable study from North America.