The national animal of Brazil is the jaguar (Panthera onca), known in Brazil as the onça-pintada. Brazil's federal government formally recognised it on 16 October 2018, through Portaria Nº 8, as the Brazilian symbol of biodiversity conservation, and the same order created a National Jaguar Day. Long before that, the jaguar had appeared on the 50-reais banknote, issued since 1994, and in Tupi place names, stories and military emblems. It is the largest cat in the Americas, and Brazil holds roughly half of the world's wild jaguars, most of them in the Amazon and the Pantanal.
Portaria Nº 8 of October 2018: How the Jaguar Became Official
Brazil's legal national symbols are few and old. The 1988 Constitution names four, and Law 5,700, dated 1 September 1971, sets out how each is used: the flag, adopted on 19 November 1889, four days after the Proclamation of the Republic; the coat of arms; the national anthem; and the national seal. No animal appears among them, and for most of the country's history the jaguar's status was traditional rather than legal.
Brazil has since added living emblems through narrower acts. A presidential decree of 3 October 2002, signed by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, named the rufous-bellied thrush, the sabiá-laranjeira (Turdus rufiventris), as the bird symbol of Brazilian fauna, describing it as popularly considered the national bird. The brazilwood tree, the pau-brasil that gave the country its name, was declared the national tree by Law 6,607 of 7 December 1978.
The jaguar's turn came with Portaria Nº 8, published in the Diário Oficial da União and dated 16 October 2018. Its wording recognises the onça-pintada "as the Brazilian symbol of biodiversity conservation" and establishes a National Jaguar Day. The choice of words matters: the jaguar was not made a symbol of the state, like the flag, but of Brazil's natural heritage, and its official role is to stand for the conservation of species and habitats. That is why the jaguar is listed as Brazil's national animal in reference works while the 1971 symbols law remains unchanged.
The jaguar is the top predator in every Brazilian biome where it survives, it is the animal most Brazilians picture when they think of their wildlife, and Brazil carries more responsibility for its survival than any other country.
From Tupi Îagûara to Onça-Pintada
The word jaguar itself is Brazilian in origin. It comes from the Tupi îagûara, a word that could mean a big cat and, after Europeans brought dogs to the Americas, a dog as well. To tell the two apart, Tupi speakers began calling the cat îagûareté, the "true jaguar", which survives in Portuguese as jaguaretê and in the Spanish yaguareté used in Argentina and Paraguay. Other Tupi-derived names still heard in Brazil include canguçu, from a phrase meaning "big-headed jaguar", and jaguarapinima, "spotted jaguar".
Brazilians most often say onça-pintada, the "painted" or spotted onça. Onça is a European word, traced through Italian and Latin to the Greek word for lynx, and the adjective separates the jaguar from the onça-parda, the brown puma. The Tupi word jaguar became the usual name in European Portuguese and in English, French and Spanish, while Brazil kept the European word.
Built for Rivers: The Jaguar's Size, Bite and Swimming
The jaguar is the third-largest cat in the world, after the tiger and the lion, and the only living member of the genus Panthera native to the Americas. Brazil has a special place in its scientific history too: when Carl Linnaeus described the species in 1758, the type specimen on which the name Panthera onca rests was a jaguar from Brazil. Since 2017 the jaguar has been treated as a single species with no living subspecies. Body length runs from 1.12 to 1.85 metres, plus a tail of 45 to 75 centimetres, the shortest of any big cat. Size increases from north to south, and Brazilian jaguars are among the biggest: males in Brazil and Venezuela average about 95 kilograms, females about 56 to 78 kilograms, and exceptional males have been recorded at 158 kilograms.
Its coat is pale yellow to reddish tan with black rosettes, which often contain one or more dots, an easy way to tell it from the leopard. Melanistic black jaguars occur too, more often in dense rainforest. The jaguar has the third-highest bite force of any cat, and it uses it in an unusual way: it often kills mammals by biting directly through the skull, and it can pierce the shells of the yellow-spotted Amazon river turtle and the yellow-footed tortoise.
Unlike most cats, the jaguar is at home in water. It hunts in rivers and swamps, has been recorded swimming at least 1.3 kilometres between islands and shore, and can carry a large kill while swimming. Across its range it prefers prey of 45 to 85 kilograms, with capybara and giant anteater the most selected. In the Brazilian Pantanal its diet leans heavily on aquatic reptiles and fish, including caiman, thorny catfish, small-scaled pacu and red-bellied piranha. It is a stalk-and-ambush hunter rather than a chaser, and it is largely solitary, although male coalitions that defend territories together have been recorded in the Pantanal. Attacks on people are very rare: the first official record of a jaguar killing a human in Brazil dates only to June 2008.
Six Biomes, Very Different Fortunes
Brazil is thought to hold about half of the world's wild jaguars, and the species occurs in every Brazilian biome except the Pampa of the far south, where it has died out. Estimates cited on Portuguese Wikipedia put the national total at up to 55,000 individuals, with an effective breeding population below 10,000. Those numbers hide a sharp contrast between regions.
The Amazon holds more than 10,000 adults at an average of one to two jaguars per 100 square kilometres. The Pantanal, the vast seasonal wetland shared with Bolivia and Paraguay, has some of the highest densities recorded anywhere, around 6.5 to 7 per 100 square kilometres, which has made riverside reserves such as Encontro das Águas State Park in Mato Grosso a destination for wildlife tourists hoping to see one. The picture is far worse elsewhere. The Cerrado savanna is estimated to hold no more than 323 adults in 11 subpopulations, the dry Caatinga of the northeast no more than 250, and the Atlantic Forest only 156 to 180, with no population there considered viable for 100 years.
Home ranges tell the same story. A male in the Pantanal may need only about 25 square kilometres, while males in the Atlantic Forest and Cerrado have been recorded using 591 and 807 square kilometres, because prey is scarcer and forest is broken up by farms and roads. Our guides to the Pantanal wetlands and the Atlantic Forest explain why the two landscapes differ so much.
On the 50-Reais Note and in Brazilian Stories
The jaguar's most familiar appearance is on money. When the real was introduced on 1 July 1994, its five banknotes each carried a Brazilian animal on the reverse: a hummingbird on the 1 real, an egret on the 5, a macaw on the 10, the jaguar on the 50 and a grouper on the 100. The hawksbill turtle on the 2-reais note (2001) and the golden lion tamarin on the 20 (2002) followed later. The redesigned second series kept the jaguar, and the new 50-reais note entered circulation, together with the new 100, on 13 December 2010.
The cat runs through Brazilian culture in other forms. The cartoonist Péricles de Andrade Maranhão created the "Amigo da Onça", the false friend who embarrasses people at the worst moment, and the phrase is still everyday Portuguese for a treacherous companion. João Guimarães Rosa's story "Meu Tio o Iauaretê" follows a jaguar hunter who gradually turns into a jaguar himself. The Brazilian Army often uses the jaguar as a mascot, especially in Amazon units such as the 61st Jungle Infantry Battalion at Cruzeiro do Sul in Acre. In the Pantanal, jaguar hunting with the zagaia, a spear made for the purpose, once carried great prestige among ranch workers.
Skins, Ranchers and the 2009 National Action Plan
That prestige became a threat. In the 1960s more than 15,000 jaguars a year were killed for their skins in the Brazilian Amazon alone, a trade that declined after the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species was agreed in 1973. The jaguar is now on CITES Appendix I, which bans international commercial trade, and hunting it is prohibited in Brazil. The IUCN has listed the species as Near Threatened since 2002, while Brazil's own environment ministry list of 2014 classes it as Vulnerable nationally and critically endangered in states such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Paraná.
The main pressures today are deforestation, the loss of prey and killings by ranchers in retaliation for attacks on cattle. Brazil adopted a national action plan for the jaguar in 2009. The species occurs in at least 91 Brazilian protected areas, and 20 of them, including indigenous lands, were named priorities for its conservation. Linking these reserves with forest corridors is the central aim, because isolated populations such as those at Sooretama in Espírito Santo, with fewer than 20 animals, cannot survive alone.
Brazil's other unofficial national emblems include its favourite game; for the story of football and capoeira, read our guide to the national sport of Brazil.