Jaguars Attacks on Humans in the Brazilian Amazon

preprint OA: closed
Full text JSON View at publisher
Full text 2,017 characters · extracted from oa-doi-fallback · click to expand
This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Attacks on humans by large carnivores are well documented globally, yet jaguar (Panthera onca) attacks are widely considered rare. We reassessed this assumption by compiling all known records of jaguar attacks on humans in the Brazilian Amazon between 1950 and 2025. A total of 84 cases were identified through a combination of field documentation, local news sources and scientific literature. The majority of attacks occurred in rural areas and involved adult men in a total of 71 men, children (n = 8) and adult women (n = 4). Most of whom were unaccompanied (52%) and engaged in extractive or subsistence activities. Fatalities were more frequent when victims were alone (n = 31) or lacked defensive tools (n=35). Approximately half of all cases were apparently unprovoked, yet 42 jaguars (48.3%) were killed during or after the attack. Jaguar attacks in the Amazon (1.12/year) remain far less frequent than those involving pumas, lions, tigers, or leopards, yet they are more common than previously recognized. Our findings challenge the long-standing perception of rarity and emphasize the need for targeted strategies to reduce risk and foster coexistence in forest-dependent communities. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2M63D Life Sciences anthropogenic pressures, human-wildlife conflict, mitigation, large carnivores, Panthera onca, predator behavior, rural safety, subsistence livelihoods Published: 2025-09-25 16:06 Last Updated: 2025-09-25 16:06 CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Conflict of interest statement: None Data and Code Availability Statement: Not applicable Language: English

Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

Ask this paper AI returns verbatim quotes from the full text · source: oa-doi-fallback

Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works

Citation neighborhood (no data yet)

We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. This is a recent paper (2025) — citers typically take a year or two to land, and the OpenAlex reference graph may still be filling in.

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-05-20T01:45:00.602351+00:00