Here we puma alife analyze interactions within and between populations of jaguars and pumas in the broadleaf forest of the Cockscomb Basin in Belize. To date, only Scognamillo et al. (2003) have reported jaguar puma interactions, from telemetry data on 4 jaguars and 5 pumas in the Venezuelan Llanos area. They found evidence of jaguars and pumas using the same habitat but avoiding each other temporally. Their sample sizes were too small to calibrate interspecific avoidance against intraspecific interactions, which is a prerequisite to inferences about niche separation between species.

Here we analyze temporal and spatial interactions between a uniquely large sample of individuals to tackle 2 fundamental questions about the function of jaguar movements in resource exploitation: Does spatial overlap of ranges of males depend on hierarchies of residence? Are temporal interactions of jaguars with pumas distinguishable from conspecific interactions? These components of behavior were sampled more representatively puma athletic shoes than is possible with telemetry by using an array of more than 100 camera stations. Camera traps were placed on established and newly opened trails traversing the dense forest matrix.

These trails are the major corridors of travel for both jaguars and pumas, and individuals present within the immediate puma basket black area of a camera are reliably caught on camera ( Harmsen 2006 ; Maffei et al. 2004 ; Rabinowitz and Nottingham 1986 ). Additional high-density camera arrays sampling small areas (10 km 2 ) on and off trails showed that off-trail photographs of jaguars were accompanied in 95% of the instances by on-trail photographs of the same individuals on the same day ( Harmsen 2006 ). We were therefore able to use the time interval between individual captures at a camera location as an index of presence in an area, with longer intervals between recaptures of the puma basket bow same individual indicating that it had traveled farther away.

This format permitted testing interspecific interactions of jaguars with pumas in relation to intraspecific interactions among individual jaguars. Interaction can be interpreted from a frequency distribution through time that is more regular than random, indicating mutual avoidance, or more aggregated than random, indicating mutual attraction. This study represents the largest camera-trap data set for neotropical cats collected to date from 1 site. The study site overlaps almost entirely with that of Rabinowitz and Nottingham (1986) , allowing comparison between their telemetry data and our photographic data.

Jaguars were individually identified from photographic captures. Cameras had an enforced 3-min delay between exposures to prevent wasting film on herd-forming species such as peccaries. Each photograph was stamped with the time and date, allowing calculation of time intervals between consecutive captures at the same camera location. To ensure spatiotemporal independence, simultaneously running camera stations were separated by >2 km. Any jaguar or puma captured at 2 stations on a single day was recorded for analysis at only 1 of the stations, chosen at random. Minitab version 14 (Minitab Ltd., Coventry, United Kingdom) was used for all statistical puma basket heart black analyses.

This suggests the possibility of an inverse relationship of the sort jaguar × puma = constant. However, log 10 (month/jaguar) was not correlated with log 10 (puma/month) ( r = 0.08, P = 0.35). The capture rates per location-month thus were uncorrelated but not simultaneously high in general. No single location biased the pattern in Fig. 4b , with correlations for individual camera locations of "0.8 r <� 0.5, indicating no fixed relation between capture rates at any given location.The interval between consecutive jaguar captures did not differ significantly from that between consecutive puma captures ( Table 1 ).