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Homing in on the jaguar

Kerrie Mengersen recreates South American jungle habitats in virtual reality to understand better the threatened jaguar.
  1. Kendall Powell

    1. Kendall Powell is a freelance writer in Boulder, Colorado.

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Kerri Mengersen on a canoe in Peru

Kerrie Mengersen, a statistician at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, takes to a canoe on an Amazonian lake during a research trip to Peru. Credit: Vanessa Hunter/QUT

As part of my work as a statistician, I research virtual habitats, including models of areas likely to be inhabited by jaguars. Here, I’m on Lake Imiria in Peru, in a wooden canoe made by Indigenous Shipibo villagers. Our team went out early in the morning to spot jaguar prey such as capybaras, peccaries and turtles, and to search for jaguars — or at least try to detect their calls or footprints.

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Nature 574, 730 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03273-1

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 21 January 2020: An earlier version of this article incorrectly located Kerrie Mengersen’s team at Queensland University.

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