Panthera onca
Drawn from open occurrence records in and around Tortuguero, aggregated onto a 25 km grid. A cell is matched by its centre, which can sit up to 16 km outside the boundary, so this covers the surrounding country too.
Occurrence records measure where people looked and found something, which is not the same as where the animal is. This is a relative likelihood, not a probability.
A grid cell is a square of the map, not a sighting: 3 squares of 25 km carry records for Jaguar in and around Tortuguero, and the 1 records behind them were collected by other people and published openly. Nothing here counts animals, and a place with more records is not always a place with more animals.
The Americas' great cat carries the strongest bite of any big cat, strong enough to open turtle shells and caiman skulls, which is exactly how it uses it. Jaguars are stockier than leopards, rosettes dotted with central spots, and they treat rivers as roads: few cats swim as readily or as well. Most of the world's jaguars, likely tens of thousands, live in Amazonia; Costa Rica's population is far smaller, threaded through corridors between parks, with Corcovado and the Talamanca ranges as strongholds. Seeing one here is a lottery win, but finding tracks pressed into a beach where a jaguar patrolled for nesting turtles at dawn is a genuine and regular thrill, and somehow almost as good.
Report any jaguar sighting to park staff rather than social media; location leaks are a poaching and disturbance risk. WorldWildMap keeps jaguar records generalised to 25 km.