Jaguar Beach Battle (Full Episode) | DOCUMENTARY SPECIAL | Nat Geo Animals

FILIPE: There's a phenomenon happening on a beach in Costa Rica. This beautiful young lady that's right in front of me is the olive ridley sea turtle. For a few months a year, just before the full moon, tens of thousands of mother sea turtles land here to lay their eggs. Waiting for them are the biggest cats in the Americas... Jaguars. There's three discarded shells just in this 20-foot radius. I'm Filipe DeAndrade and I've found a place that challenges what we think we know about wild animals. So, you've got three different big cats on one kill, is that normal? LUIS: No, but in Nancite, it's possible. FILIPE: I'm teaming up with local experts who know this beach and its animals better than anyone. He's within feet of a jaguar as it's eating a sea turtle, and filming this with his cellphone. We're gonna find out how the tug of war between jungle and sea... All come together to create one of the most dynamic wildlife events on earth. We're gonna set up in the clearing over here and just wait for him to come back. The first time I ever set foot on this Costa Rican beach, called Nancite, I knew I was somewhere special. This is where two worlds collide. First there's the famous sea turtle arribada, that's Spanish for 'arrival.' On just a few special nights, tens of thousands of olive ridley sea turtles come ashore to lay their eggs. And then there's the jaguars... they come out of the forest to prey on the sea turtles. These big cats are extremely elusive and avoid humans at all costs. So, I decided to set up trap cameras throughout Nancite... I have these all over the woods just to be able to see jaguars doing things that people haven't seen jaguars do before. And what I got blew me away. This beautiful cat is named Amanda. She's the first jaguar I've ever documented. Feeding on a turtle out in Nancite. This is a unique predator prey relationship, happening on a beach, around two miles long. But if I am going to tell this story, I need the help of a local expert. I team up with a biologist named Luis Fonseca, who's been studying the relationship between sea turtles and jaguars out in Nancite. He spots something even more unusual on our camera traps. FILIPE: This time around, from the footage that we captured. LUIS: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. FILIPE: Hold on. You're saying that, just so I can wrap my brain around this, that a jaguar killed, and then two separate pumas came back on it. So, you've got two different species of big cats, three different big cats on one kill. Is that normal? FILIPE: Nancite is not normal, so I guess that makes sense. It's wild to think that in the span of 12 hours, a jaguar and two pumas fed on one sea turtle, but that's the kind of place this is. Adding to Nancite's mystique are some legendary personalities. Luis has been conducting his research for the last 12 years on Nancite. He has a research assistant, Wilberth, who's done something miraculous using only his cell phone. You hear of Wilberth long before you meet him. He is a legend in Costa Rica. This is one of the few people in the world that has documented the jaguar within a few feet of it feeding. FILIPE: He's literally feeling and smelling the breath of the largest cat in the Americas as it's feeding. FILIPE: Wilberth is within feet of a jaguar as it's eating a sea turtle, I would never step out of the vehicle in Africa and approach a lion as it's feeding. He's getting angles that I could only ever dream of. And the only reason he's able to do that is because he spent the last seven years almost every single day in this area walking alongside the jaguar. They look at him as part of Nancite. He's not encroaching on their territory. He is part of their territory. and that is a luxury that you can only have by spending every single day out here. What's happening here is unlike anything I've ever seen. So, I'm heading back to Nancite to get the whole story, hopefully on film, turtles, jaguars, everything. The mass turtle nesting event only happens from July to December which gives me very little time left to capture this. So, if I'm going to do it I have to do it now. Getting out to the beach of Nancite sounds easy enough, but in the jungles of Costa Rica, nothing comes easy. Nancite is located in Santa Rosa National Park, which is in the north-western region of Costa Rica, just under Nicaragua. That means incredible wildlife, but no decent roads. Nancite itself has pretty much the limit of where you can go landscape wise here in Costa Rica and if you don't believe me, you can see that we're already stuck trying to get out here. the problem that we're facing right now is that we're in the mangroves, and we're in three feet of water. All the camera gear, all the food is in the car and we're still about a 45-minute hike away from the trailhead. so right now, we just got to get everything out of the truck and make it lighter, carry it over to where it's dry, and see if we can get everything in tonight. We have to utilize every single night we have here to try and film the cat. You really have to want to come to Nancite. You know, you don't pay an entry fee and just end up here, and there's not a tour guide. you're here for a specific purpose. We just came across our first jaguar print. And that's a clear giveaway that he's in the area. We're not even at Nancite and we've already got signs of cats so that's very promising. For us who are trying to navigate through Santa Rosa, the jungle can be a real challenge, but for the animals that call this place home, it is paradise. The park covers around 150 square miles, and a diversity of habitat. It is part of a World Heritage site, the Guanacaste Conservation Area. There are around 250 bird species and 115 different mammals. If you can't see all the animals, you can most certainly hear them. I finally made it out to Nancite, and I don't want to waste any time. So, I'm heading out to the beach with someone I consider to be the Jane Goodall of sea turtles. Oh wow! VANESSA: There she is! FILIPE: Vanessa Bezy has been studying the mass nesting event for the last eight years. We come up on a single turtle laying eggs. It's not an arribada but solitary mothers do come up to nest from time to time. I'll take it as a good sign. VANESSA: Yeah, it looks like she just started laying. There's a couple eggs in her nest. FILIPE: You can already see? VANESSA: Yeah. FILIPE: Can you tell how many eggs? VANESSA: One, two, three, four, five. Oh, six or seven eggs in there already. FILIPE: Really? So, this is her labor room. VANESSA: Yes. FILIPE: She has to be completely exhausted by the time she's done doing this, and then she still has to make her way back in the water. VANESSA: She does. Now that she's laying, at this point, they're essentially in a trance. Any work that we do with turtles, we usually wait for them to start laying. Usually, we measure that carapace length and width, so the length of her shell. FILIPE: Yeah. VANESSA: We will typically count the number of eggs to know how many eggs she's laying. VANESSA: And that is really important for us to understand how we can quantify how many turtles there are in the population and the health of the population. We've got almost a full nest now. VANESSA: She's coming along. FILIPE: She's been in here for a while, huh? From the time she crawls up the beach, finds her nesting site, digs the hole, lays the nest, heads back to the water, it might be an hour, an hour and a half before she's back at sea. Oh, look, she's about to cover her nest. FILIPE: She's about to start covering. VANESSA: Look at her flippers. Look at that. FILIPE: I'll never forget the first time I met Vanessa a few months ago. She showed me my very first arribada. Nancite is one of around ten arribada sites in the world. It still baffles biologists, how tens of thousands of sea turtles can mass synchronize and come together to one location to lay their eggs all at the same time. Since sea turtles are endangered across the world, it makes every single arribada site that much more important. If I'm going to film jaguars hunting turtles, the arribada is going to be my secret weapon. The problem is, there's no guarantee it will happen at all. Conditions have to be just right. And I'm learning that Nancite is having a bad year. FILIPE: Nancite in Costa Rica is one of around ten sites on earth where mass sea turtle nestings, the "arribada" occur, and the only one where jaguars have been filmed taking advantage of it. Considering that both the jaguar and the olive ridley sea turtle populations are decreasing, every single arribada site is important. But right now, we've got a problem. LUIS: In October, no arribada. FILIPE: You guys missed the Arribada entirely in October? LUIS: Ya. FILIPE: Last month a tropical storm hit hard in Nancite. Luis is telling me that the turtles never showed up for the arribada. And that could be a problem for us! Do you think this completely changes the behavior of the turtles and the other animals? FILIPE: The high tide. FILIPE: It drowns out the eggs. LUIS: Yeah. FILIPE: Yeah. Wow. So the water, because it's coming up so high, it's actually drowning the nest site, huh? FILIPE: That is wild, man. Well, I want to take a look at the rest of it. I want to see just how high this waterline comes. LUIS: Okay. FILIPE: If the turtles can't find room to nest, they may not come this month too. And if the turtles don't come, then the jaguars won't either. All I can do is be ready. I'm gonna head out and set up my camera traps where I think the jaguars are moving. We're heading to the forest right now, and I'm with Wilberth who knows this area better than anyone. And one of the things I love about big cats is that they're going to take the path of least resistance just like us. So we're going to set up some trap cameras in the area, and I just want to get cats being cats, not necessarily hunting, not going after a meal, but just cutting through the forest. FILIPE: Okay. FILIPE: Wilberth is saying that this is the path that the jaguar takes to come out of the mountain and on to the beach. So, we're going to set up some trap cameras in this area. The interesting thing about jaguars is that they're naturally curious. If they see a camera trap they'll usually come right up to it and that'll give us a really good profile of the cat. A little bit more. The best part about these trap cameras is it's like Christmas morning because I'm anticipating checking the camera and having a cat, and nothing feels better than capturing a cat. All right. Tres mas? WILBERTH: Tres mas. FILIPE: Alright, so we have three more trap cameras, so we have to be really deliberate about where we put them. Oh, my gosh, there's another kill back here. This looks like a turtle graveyard. just in this 20-foot radius right here that the jaguar dragged the turtle into. Look at that, nothing goes to waste from that kill. This is the most recent one right here. The smell is kind of getting to me right now, but, oh, man, this is not that far off from fresh kill right here. This is a huge lead. It tells us that these cats are dragging the turtles off the beach and into the mangroves right here. They might be doing this to hide it from other animals that would steal the kill. I'm betting that the cat comes back to this spot again, so I'm gonna put all my eggs in this one basket. I feel good about it. The camera traps will hopefully document jaguars moving through the forest, maybe even with a kill. Camera traps are a great tool, but I need to spot a jaguar with my own eyes and film it in high resolution. I have to set up a hide on the beach and stake it out every night. Waiting for the arribada to happen so that I can get the jaguars. My camera assistant Alonso is joining me. He's a local researcher and knows this area incredibly well. I'm trying to do this as quickly as possible because I hate using light more than we need to. Since the animals I'm filming are active at night, I'll have to be nocturnal. I'm using a special low-light camera. That can film at four million ISO. ISO basically stands for the artificial light that a camera uses to see an image. So, with enough moonlight this camera can see in the dark. It does have some limitations however, as the moon recedes, so does my light source. With the arribada generally happening between a full and three quarters moon, that limits my time to be able to capture the jaguar taking a sea turtle. ALONSO: Being in a hide is one of the hardest thing that I have done in my life many times because you have to be completely silent. You can't use lights. You can't move very fast. You can't make any noise. You're very limited to just wait for something to happen. FILIPE: Six hours in here. We just got our first turtle. Wilberth is going up to her right now, taking the measurements, seeing if she has a tag, but no jaguar yet. Night one, no arribada. But as Vanessa showed me turtles sometimes come up in solo, and can get taken by a jaguar. So, Wilberth and I decide to head out and search for any sign of jaguars. We came across an old kill, but it doesn't look like the work of a big cat. FILIPE: Crocodile? FILIPE: Okay, so you're saying that the crocodile is killing the turtle out in the water, and then bringing it over here. And that makes sense because you can see the predation marks. You can see the crocodile teeth marks right here. And what we have here is wild to think about because the jaguar, of all big cats, has the strongest bite force. The crocodile has the strongest bite force of any animal in the world, and that's around 3,000 pounds per square inch. So, these poor turtles are up against two of the strongest bite forces in the animal kingdom. These creatures that have been on the planet for 65 million years are being punctured by two apex predators: the crocodile and the jaguar. So, with no signs of cats on the beach, we're heading back to the camera traps in the mangroves. This is the last kill right here and these are the remains of it. It's obvious that something was in the area. This means we might have captured something coming back to feed on this kill. I'm just hoping that the camera traps did their job. 26 videos. With 26 new clips and obvious signs of predation, I'm hoping that we got our first shot of a jaguar. So, I head back to basecamp to review the footage with Luis and see what we got. Ohh my gosh! FILIPE: Luis and I are looking over the trap camera footage, and the results are better than I'd hoped. This is the first male jaguar I've ever documented, and Luis thinks he's seen him before. FILIPE: Yea. Biologists keep track of each individual jaguar that they pick up on camera traps. And they have an interesting way of profiling them. They can tell who's who by the unique pattern of spots, technically called rosettes. You can pretty much think of it as a fingerprint. No two cats have the same pattern. Ahh, see that one part right there, that's right there. FILIPE: Wow, that's Alonzo. Alonzo is the first jaguar to come back to that kill site. He's three years old and big enough to be considered the alpha male in the area. He's right in the middle of eating, when something else grabs his attention. It's another male jaguar, older and even bigger. Male big cats across most species are notorious for fighting over food. But what happens next is unlike anything I'd ever seen. Two males... unrelated... sharing a kill. I've never seen big cats behave this way. This newcomer is no stranger either. Luis has profiled him too. Yeah. Wow. LUIS: Vincente. FILIPE: Vincente. So, Alonzo and Vincente. Have you ever seen two males like that? FILIPE: Yeah, for a big cat you wouldn't think it's possible for them to share. FILIPE: This might prove Luis' theory: that when there's enough to go around there are no fights over food and everyone is happy. But with that turtle completely consumed that means that there's two large male jaguars out on the beach hunting. And with the potential for an arribada any night, they're sure to be sticking around for more. I decide to get back in the hide as quick as I can. But on the way out I spot something. Oh my God, there's a turtle right there. Look, look, look. Oh no, look at this poor turtle. This is exactly what Luis was saying about the tropical storm. A lot of the beach was lost and now the tide is coming right up to the mangroves. This turtle is having a hard time finding any dry sand to nest in. We just found her walking through the mangrove right here. I don't know how long she's been walking but this female is obviously confused. She must be completely exhausted. FILIPE: All right. What do you want to do? It's your call. You're the research assistant, so I'm not going to do anything unless if you tell me to get involved. FILIPE: Remove some branches. FILIPE: So, with a little help from Alonso the turtle is now making her way back into the ocean without laying her eggs. What makes it really, really tough too, like this is one of two spots in Costa Rica and two out of less than 10 in the world where an arribada happens. And right now, we're seeing the effect that that storm had on this location. Now, I'm concerned about the bigger picture. If the turtles do come to nest for the mass nesting event but there's no room for them to bury their eggs, what will they do, and what happens to their population? FILIPE: The sea turtle arribada is our best chance at documenting the jaguar. So, Alonso and I are gonna do another night in the hide hoping for the mass nesting event. It's a little bit later than I'd like it to be to get started in here, but that's all right. We're going to set up our nice, cozy little situation for the rest of the night in here. Going on six hours, so far we've seen four turtles. They're kind of struggling to find enough sand that's both beyond the high tide line, but not in the grass. If a couple of turtles are struggling to look for decent areas to dig, then I can't imagine how an arribada will play out where there's tens of thousands of turtles on the beach at one time. There's no guarantee of exactly when an arribada will happen and I can't just ask the turtles when they feel like coming up... Biologists say the arribada usually happens around a three-quarter moon. It's now a week past that and we've only gotten a couple turtles coming up at a time. So, I'm going to go do a little bit of scouting. I want to put up the drone really quick here because I want to see if any more turtles are coming over to the shore, and the best vantage point that we have is from the air to see if they're starting to accumulate and if they're going to be coming up on to the beach for the arribada. I think just by doing one or two flights scanning the beach line, it will give me a really good indication if an arribada is likely to start. All right, ready? You might want to give me a few feet here just in case if it comes crashing back towards you. I've got one beautiful female framed up right now. They can travel up to 5,000 miles round trip, and so the reason she's back is to lay eggs on the same beach possibly where she was born. It's just such a wild thing to be filming her because she's a nomad. She's a world traveler, but then as I pull out, I can see that she's not alone. She's joined possibly by her sisters, or other females that were born on the same exact beach, but the really, really exciting part in all of this is that there's turtles in the water right off the shore. It's exciting to see the turtles in the water right now because it means they're gathering in the area. But it's still not enough turtles to be a sure sign of an arribada. We arrange for a boat to come pick us up off Nancite to get a closer look and film them in the water. We've got turtles surrounding the boat right now. We've already seen three. We've drifted a little bit, and now we've got about four more in the area. So, it's just going to be a nice exploration dive, see what we can get. They haven't dove in this area yet, so I think this is a first for everyone which is always pretty exciting because you never know what you're going to get on these types of things. I'm just ready to get in the water. Right away, some of the turtles are just curious about what I am and come right up to me. So far, I've only filmed them on the beach where they can look really slow and sometimes awkward. But filming them in their true habitat proves how graceful they are and how effortlessly they can move. I can see why they're such great voyagers, capable of navigating the oceans and returning to the same beach where they were born to lay their own eggs. That was incredible. The dive doesn't last long until I get a call from Wilberth. Hundreds of turtles are coming on to the beach in daylight! Yeah, let's go quickly. This could be the arribada I've been waiting for. So, I have to get back to Nancite as quickly as I can before the sun goes down. FILIPE: As the sun sets on Costa Rica's Nancite beach, the full scope of the situation hits me. This is the moment The arribada is finally happening. Tens of thousands of sea turtles are making their way out of the world that they know and coming on to a foreign landscape to lay eggs. This female olive ridley sea turtle is one of life's winners. Starting out, she had about a 1% chance of making it into adulthood. She's possibly back at the same exact beach where she was born to lay her own eggs. Her species has been on the planet for over 65 million years, and one of the reasons they've survived is this mass synchronized nesting event. At one point there were so many predators, either in the water or on land that the turtles had to use overwhelming numbers to give themselves and their hatchlings a fighting chance. The arribada will last for the next three days with the majority of the turtles coming up at night. But the first night we didn't see any jaguars. Nothing... with last night being the first night of the Arribada it would have been so easy for a cat to take one. But the next morning Wilberth has some news. Gato? He's found the marks of a jaguar dragging a turtle. We're right by where the turtle graveyard is where we came up on about six corpses a few days ago. This is where Wilberth said that he saw the drag marks leading this way, so the turtle can't be too far away from this area right here. So, I'm going to go find the kill. I guarantee that the kill is about 20 feet that way because that's where all the vultures are accumulated right now. (flies buzzing). Even though the vultures stripped a lot of this meat the past 24 hours, there's still a lot left. So, I think he's going to come back. We're going to set up somewhere in the clearing over here, pop the hide up, set all the camera gear up, set up the infrared lights, and just wait for him to come back. We've got to work fast, because the jaguar could be back before sundown. He could even be in the forest watching me right now. The trees overhead will block the moon, so I have to set up an infra-red light. If Wilberth's right, the cat is going to enter from the south side of the beach and it will be perfectly framed. I'm really taking a chance because the kill is only about 20 feet away. That could get me a great shot, but it could also mean that the cat finds me. ♪ ♪ FILIPE: There's something moving in the brush, but I can't get a clear shot. After 14 nights, about 130 hours waiting in the hide, I finally get my first glimpse of a wild jaguar. There's something familiar about this cat. The longer it's in my frame, the more confident I am that I know it. It's Amanda, the 3-year-old female that my camera traps picked up months ago. She senses my presence and stares right down the barrel of my lens. This profile shot tells me something about her. She has a distinct bump on her lower stomach. Amanda is pregnant. She's surviving because the turtles are here. And when she has cubs of her own, she'll teach them to make the most of this gift from nature. I think here in Nancite you see nature balanced. Together with Luis and his team we have profiled 20 jaguars on this one beach. In this safe-haven that is Nancite these jaguars are thriving where in most parts in the Americas their numbers are dwindling. You see every single animal having an important effect on the ecosystem around them, and everything is just right because nature is left to be nature here. To me, the linchpin that holds this ecosystem together is the sea turtle. They're not only an indicator species showing how healthy our oceans are, but they have proven to benefit the land as well. I also came away with an appreciation of the other crucial element: The biologists and locals who dedicate themselves to Nancite and its wildlife. Uncompromised effort from a few passionate individuals can truly protect a natural treasure. This area is about more than the relationship between two animals. It's a reminder of how amazing the natural world is and a blueprint for keeping it that way.