The Mammal Census of Barro Colorado island

The census started 25 years ago and photographed the mammal life in the jungle of Barro Colorado island.

Dr. Jacalyn "Jackie" Willis and her husband, Mr. Gregory "Greg" Willis came from the North of the American Continent more than twenty years ago to study the mammals of the tropical forests. The story began in 1983 when Greg sighted a jaguar (Panthera onca) when he was visiting Barro Colorado Island with his wife.
Without a camera to document the feline, they devised years later to place photographic and video cameras in many strategic points of the island where possible felines could be captured by the lenses and thus originated the Barro Colorado Island Mammal Census, which celebrates its 25 years of execution next year.

Dr. Jackie Willis is director of the Center for Professional Sources in Science and Mathematics (PRISM) and a researcher at Montclair State University of New Jersey in the United States, in the eighties she was interested in taking He carried out his studies on mammals at the famous Barro Colorado Island Biological Station, since it is probably the island where the forest is most studied by scientists of tropical biology.

The Barro Colorado Island Mammal Census project is an interesting opportunity to understand and make known the reality of our Panamanian mammals in the tropical forests that every day combat logging and poaching.

The project started with a single camera inside a unit connected to it and with the ability to activate the camera to allow taking a snapshot of the animal moving one meter away in front of the unit.

Census per year the populations of mammals such as ocelots (Leopardus pardalis), single cats (Nasua narica), ñeques (Dacyprocta punctata), saínos (Tayassu tajacu), jaguarundis (Herpailurus yauarondi), margays (Leopardus wiedii) and others, allows us to know the dynamism of their populations in tropical forests, the social and individual behavior of these mammals, the number of animals that we can find per year on the island and to understand, with better precision, how climate change affects the mammals of the tropics.

A large number of ñeques, which can be found throughout the year in the island's forest looking for fruits and burying seeds, the behavior of ocelots in front of their young and other relatives, saínos and cats only browsing near the cameras can be captured in photographs and video tapes and, in this way, be able to learn more about their life in societies.

In almost 25 years of project on the island, it has been possible to photograph pumas and only a few times margays, which have been attracted by a perfume fragrance placed as bait on the island's trails. A jaguar has never been sighted again, much less photographed or videotaped since its appearance in the 1980s.
Dr. Jackie and her husband are convinced that there may be a presence of jaguars on the island, due to the location of Barro Colorado in the middle of the Panama Canal, surrounded by fresh water from the artificial Gatun Lake.

Jaguars have the ability to swim and travel to the island from the mainland, where the Soberanía National Park is located or vice versa.

This is the reason why these two scholars of the biological sciences attribute that there is no documentation on jaguars within the hundreds of hectares of the natural monument.
Thanks to the Mammal Census project and the invaluable unconditional help of Dr. Willis, Panamanian students such as Ricardo Moreno, Enzo Aliaga-Rossel, Jesús Centella and myself, who have studied biological sciences at a higher level, have helped us attending the Mammal Census being a great opportunity to learn about field biology in the tropical forests of our Panama.