The Bold One

There is a jaguar in Brazil's Pantanal named Ousado, which translates roughly to "The Bold One," and he has earned the title by hunting caimans in a way most large cats would find frankly insane. Rather than pouncing from the bank, he slips underwater and stalks his prey from beneath the surface, surfacing to ambush a caiman before dragging the thrashing reptile back into the water to finish the job. A caiman is a crocodilian relative armed with a mouthful of conical teeth. Ousado takes it swimming.

This is less absurd than it sounds. Jaguars, unlike most big cats, are enthusiastic swimmers, and the Pantanal—the world's largest tropical wetland, sprawling across parts of Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay—has made caimans a staple of their diet. Their bite is the strongest of any cat relative to size, and they favor a signature kill: a puncture straight through the skull, between the ears, rather than the throat-clamp most predators use. When you're biting through the armored head of a reptile, going for the brain is the efficient choice.

Ousado's fame, though, comes from more than technique. In 2020 the Pantanal burned in one of its worst fire seasons on record, with roughly a quarter of the wetland scorched. Ousado was found with third-degree burns on all four paws—a death sentence for an animal that hunts by stalking and swimming. Veterinarians treated him using an unusual method pioneered in Brazil: sterilized tilapia skin, applied as a biological bandage. Fish skin is rich in collagen, holds moisture well, and can be left in place for days, reducing the need for repeated dressing changes on a patient who would very much rather not be handled. The technique had been developed for human burn victims in northeastern Brazil, where conventional dressings were scarce. It worked on the jaguar too.

He returned to the rivers, resumed hunting, and has since sired offspring, which is why camera crews keep catching his underwater ambushes on film. There is something satisfying about the arc: a cat whose paws were once burned raw now uses those same paws to disappear beneath the water and haul out reptiles twice as heavy as most people would attempt to lift.