You may remember Omar Figueroa, he's the jaguar expert who was called in late last year when Max the Jaguar, escaped from a residence in the La Democracia area, he trapped Max and put him down.
But that is hardly representative of his work. Figueroa is doing the most comprehensive study on jaguar in Belize ever, tracking their movements across a broad swathe of the country.
The study is groundbreaking and it has earned him a prestigious international honour. Figueroa is the winner of the 2010 Rabinowitz Kaplan Prize for the next generation in wildcat conservation.
It is the first time the prize has been won by someone in the Americas - and Howard Quigley of the Panthera foundation discussed how special and singular an honour it is:..
Howard Quigley, Panthera foundation
"What Omar project has the potential to do is to look at not just the jaguar landscape. When this research is completed even now we were just discussing some of the movements of individual jaguars, how they use river corridors, how they cross roads, how they move around human, around towns and villages and those sorts of things. You don't see them until you get those points on the telemetry and when you have that you start to understand how they become part of a landscape. The unique thing here is that Belize has jaguars. They also have a road corridor say between Belize City and Belmopan. They have a corridor from the northern part of Belize to the southern part of Belize that we know is critical to the survival of jaguars. So what Omar's research does is it provides us with so much more than so many of these other studies. We can actually see how jaguars and humans can share the landscape. He was up against people who were working on snow leopards and tigers, these very charismatic species. What stood out was that his nomination included all levels of what it takes to do large cat, large carnivore conservation and it's about time that somebody in the Americas was nominated for something like this. But I think it also shows you how unique A person that Omar is, not just for Belize but for the rest of the world. He was competing with the rest of the world for this prize so."
The prize comes with a $15,000.00 dollar grant.
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