Find Their Food: Favorite Foods

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Favorite Foods

Since jaguars live in a variety of places and habitats, biologists are interested to know how that affects their feeding patterns. Do jaguars depend on prey species that inhabit all the places that it does? Or do they change their diet depending on what food is available?

In this exercise you will investigate those questions by working with jaguar feeding data from three research areas. Click on the links in the map to see more information about each of the three sites.

Species	Approximate weight (kg)	Cockscomb Basin, Belize	Corcovado National Park, Costa Rica	Hato Pinero, Venezuela
Armadillo	4	54%
Paca	10	90%
White-lipped peccary	19		47%	12%
Collared peccary	9		21%	26%
Peccary (sp. unknown)	27	5%
Capybara	40			21%
Giant anteater	31			10%
Caiman	32			7%
Two-toed sloth	5.7		12%
Three-toed sloth	4.3		6%
Collared anteater	4.3	9%	6%
White-tailed deer	85			5%
Red brocket deer	29	7%
Crab-eating raccoon	5			5%
Agouti	4	4%
Opossum	1.5	3%
Olive Ridley turtle	30		6%
Other		9%	2%	14%
Total		100%	100%	100%

Using the data from the three studies, construct a graph showing the frequency of different species in jaguar scats in the three locations.


	When you've drawn your graph, examine it carefully and look for patterns in the data. These may be some of the questions that you try to answer: What are common species among the three sites? Are different sized prey favored in each site? Why? Is there a greater diversity of prey in any of the sites? Turn in your graph and analysis to your teacher.

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