WHAT WE HAVE ALREADY LOST
Locally extinct
The forests of the district of Cóbano once supported a complete large mammal community. Four species are no longer here. They were not lost gradually or quietly - they disappeared within living memory, from a landscape that has since regrown around their absence.
Their loss is documented in the historical record of Reserva Natural Absoluta Cabo Blanco and the surrounding peninsula. Each represents not just an absent animal but a missing ecological function - and a measure of what a restored corridor could, over time, support again.
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The corridor that could, in principle, allow their return - and the continued survival of species like them - is the corridor we are working to restore.
LOCALLY EXTINCT
Cóbano district
VU - Vulnerable (Global)
Jaguar
Panthera onca (Linnaeus, 1758)
The jaguar was the apex predator of Cóbano's forest community. As the largest felid in the Americas and the top of the trophic pyramid, its presence regulated prey populations, suppressed mesopredator behaviour, and maintained the ecological balance that allowed the forest's mammal community to function as a whole. Its loss from Cóbano is not simply the absence of one charismatic species - it is the removal of the force that structured every predator-prey relationship beneath it. The cascading effects of jaguar extirpation ripple through the entire ecosystem and continue to do so today.
LOCALLY EXTINCT
Cóbano district
EN — Endangered (Global)
Baird's Tapir
Tapirus bairdii (Gill, 1865)
Baird's tapir is the largest terrestrial mammal native to Central America and one of the most important seed dispersers in Neotropical forest. Moving through the landscape in search of fruit, tapirs carry seeds in their gut across distances that few other species can match - depositing them far from the parent tree, in locations where germination is possible. Their loss from Cóbano means that certain tree species can no longer disperse effectively across the forest, quietly reshaping the vegetation community in ways that will take generations to become visible.
LOCALLY EXTINCT
Cóbano district
VU — Vulnerable (Global)
White-lipped Peccary
Tayassu pecari (Link, 1795)
White-lipped peccaries move through forest in herds of dozens to hundreds of individuals, rooting through the soil, turning leaf litter, creating wallows, and breaking open fallen logs. This physical disturbance - what ecologists call ecosystem engineering - shapes the forest floor in ways that create habitat for other species, accelerate nutrient cycling, and maintain the structural complexity of the understorey. No other species in Cóbano's remaining mammal community performs this function at the scale that the white-lipped peccary herds once did.
LOCALLY EXTINCT
Cóbano district
EN — Endangered (Global)
Geoffroy's Spider Monkey
Ateles geoffroyi Kuhl, 1820
Spider monkeys are among the most important seed dispersers in the Neotropical canopy. Wide-ranging and highly frugivorous, they carry seeds of large-fruited tree species that few other animals can disperse. Their disappearance from Cóbano is both a consequence of fragmentation and a signal of its severity: they are among the first species to be lost when a forest landscape begins to break apart, because they require large areas of undisturbed, connected forest to maintain viable social groups.
These four species are locally extinct, not globally; populations persist elsewhere in their ranges, in varying states of decline. Their absence from Cóbano is a local loss - one that reflects the pressures this landscape faced during a period of rapid change that affected forest communities across much of Central America.​
For the species that remain, the window of opportunity to ensure their long-term survival is still open, yet every day that passes that window closes a little more.
Source: Timm, R.M., Lieberman, D., Lieberman, M., and McClearn, D. 2009. Mammals of Cabo Blanco: History, diversity, and conservation after 45 years of regrowth of a Costa Rican dry forest. Forest Ecology and Management, 258: 997–1013.
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