08/22/2026
Scientists spent 18 years and 350,366 camera trap nights trying to photograph a jaguarundi in Texas. They photographed bobcats, ocelots, coyotes, hog-nosed skunks, and a wide range of other carnivores across 16 properties and two highway corridors covering 405 square miles of South Texas. They did not photograph a single jaguarundi.
Across the border in Tamaulipas, the same type of cameras found one in 72 nights. Six hundred and eighty-five cameras watching the animal's best remaining habitat for 18 years did not see it once, while cameras across the border photographed it 126 times.
Jason Lombardi and colleagues at the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute at Texas A&M University published the results in Ecology and Evolution in 2022. The paper's subtitle said what 18 years of empty cameras proved: making the case for extirpation and initiation of recovery in the United States. The last confirmed jaguarundi record in the country was a roadkill specimen collected outside Brownsville, Texas, in 1986. Nobody has produced a photograph, a specimen, a track cast, or a verified sighting since.
The control data from Mexico is what makes the Texas absence conclusive. On two properties in the northern Sierra of Tamaulipas, the same survey methodology detected jaguarundis within 72 trap nights, roughly three days. The cameras recorded 126 photographic detections across 15,784 trap nights. In Texas, 350,366 trap nights produced zero. Lombardi's team stated it directly: based on survey effort and results from Mexico, we would have expected to detect jaguarundis over the course of the study if still extant in Texas.
The border is not the barrier. The Rio Grande is shallow enough in places that a cat could cross without getting its belly wet. The difference is the landscape on each side. The Tamaulipas detections came from the northern Sierra foothills where native thorn scrub remains intact across large unbroken tracts. The Texas side of the same latitude is a different landscape now. A century of agriculture, citrus, ranching, and residential growth converted most of the lower Rio Grande Valley's native brush into the productive working land it is today. The jaguarundi needed the dense continuous brush that once covered both sides of the river. It still covers the Mexican side. The Texas side became something else, and the cat quietly disappeared from it without anyone noticing until someone spent 18 years checking.
The paper recommended that state and federal agencies officially recognize the jaguarundi as extirpated from the United States and begin the recovery actions mandated in the federal jaguarundi recovery plan. Those actions include identifying suitable habitat in Texas, identifying robust source populations in Mexico, and eventually reintroducing the species. The jaguarundi still lives 20 miles south of the border. It was photographed 126 times in Tamaulipas during the same years it was photographed zero times in Texas. The cat is not extinct. It is just no longer here.
Three hundred and fifty thousand camera trap nights. Eighteen years. Six hundred and eighty-five sites. Zero jaguarundis. Sometimes the most important finding in wildlife science is confirming that the animal you spent two decades looking for is gone.
Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: Lombardi et al. (2022), Ecology and Evolution / Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute / The Revelator / East Foundation / Michael Tewes.
