Scientists Declared the Pantanal Dead After 2020 Fires — Then Caimans Did Something Nobody Predicted

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]In September of 2020, a wildlife veterinarian named Christine Strusman waded through what had once been a lagoon in the northern Pantanel. The water was gone. The sediment had baked into a gray crust that cracked under her boots like broken pottery. She was there to count the dead. Charred carcasses of snakes, birds, and rodents lay in every direction, blackened and curled beyond recognition. The smoke had cleared only 2 days before, and the air still tasted of carbon and something else, something biological.

[00:00:30]Strusman had studied reptiles in this wetland for over two decades. She had mapped nesting sites, tracked population densities, published papers on reproductive cycles and habitat use. She had never seen anything like this.

[00:00:42]Across an area roughly the size of Switzerland, the world's largest tropical wetland had burned. Satellite imagery from the European Space Ay's Sentinel satellites showed 30% of the Brazilian Pantanel reduced to ash. The official death toll published later in the journal Scientific Reports would land at nearly 17 million vertebrates killed in a single fire season.

[00:01:05]International headlines called it an ecological catastrophe without precedent. Some researchers quietly wondered whether certain areas would ever recover at all. Others wondered whether the Pantanel as a functioning ecosystem might be entering a terminal decline. This is the story of how a creature most people overlook, a stocky armored reptile with a brain the size of a walnut and a lineage stretching back 80 million years did something after those fires that forced scientists to rethink everything they knew about how wetlands come back from the dead. To understand why this matters, you need to know what the Panel was before the fire.

[00:01:41]And you need to understand what makes this place unlike any other wetland on Earth. The Pantanal sits in the heart of South America, a shallow basin that stretches across roughly 170,000 km of Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. It is about the size of England. Imagine a landscape so flat that a raindrop falling on its western edge might take 4 months to reach the Paraguay River to the east. Every year from October to March, tropical rains flood the basin.

[00:02:09]The Paraguay River and its tributaries swell and spill across vast grasslands, turning the landscape into an interconnected web of marshes, channels, lagoons, and flooded forests. The water is not deep. In most places, it is knee high, but it stretches to the horizon in every direction. A shallow inland sea that transforms the topography completely. Then from April to September, the water slowly drains, rivers shrink to their banks, lagoons contract, and life concentrates around the remaining pools of water in one of the most spectacular dry season gatherings anywhere in the natural world. This annual rhythm is called the flood pulse. It is the engine of everything. It cycles nutrients through the soil. It creates seasonal nurseries for over 260 species of fish. It drives the breeding cycles of birds, mammals, and reptiles. It recharges groundwater, regulates downstream flooding for millions of people, and sustains a web of ecological interactions so complex that scientists are still mapping its connections. More than 4,700 species of plants and animals depend on it. The Pantanal contains over 650 species of birds, including the planet's biggest parrot, the higher macccor. It shelters giant utters, marsh deer, maed wolves, tippers, giant anteaters, and the highest density of jaguars anywhere on the planet. The jabiru stalk, standing nearly 1 and a half m tall, breeds here in colonies so large they turn entire trees white with guano. Capiaras, the world's largest rodent, graze along the margins of every waterway in herds that can number in the hundreds. At dusk, the air fills with the calls of hundreds of bird species settling into roosts as along the water's edge. It is by any measure one of the most biologically dense landscapes left on Earth. But perhaps the most defining creature of the Panel, the animal that exists here in greater numbers than anywhere else on Earth, is the Yakair Kiman. Estimates vary depending on the source and the season, but the population is thought to be somewhere around 10 million individuals. Some estimates run as high as 20 million. Either way, it is the single largest concentration of crocodilians on the planet. During the wet season, caymans disperse across the flooded landscape, hunting fish and aquatic snails in the shallow water.

[00:04:22]They forage through mats of floating vegetation, cracking open snail shells with jaws powerful enough to shatter bone. During the dry season, they congregate around shrinking lagoons in densities that have to be seen to be believed. Hundreds of caymans packed into a single pool, stacked on top of one another, their bodies forming a living mosaic of scales and mud. From a distance, the pools look like the ground itself is moving. Tourists come from around the world to photograph them.

[00:04:49]Jaguars come to eat them. The relationship between jaguar and cayman is one of the defining ecological interactions of the Pantanel. The largest cat in the Americas, hunting the most abundant crocodilian on the planet.

[00:05:02]Jaguars in the Pantanel grow larger than their counterparts in the Amazon, bulking up to 150 kg. Specifically because their prey is so large and plentiful. But for most of the 20th century, nobody thought much about what the Caymans were actually doing to the landscape itself. They were seen as predators, as leather, as obstacles. In the 1970s and 80s, poachers killed them by the millions. An estimated 1 million Cayman skins were taken from the Pantanel per year at the peak of the illegal trade. The population crashed toward numbers that alarmed conservationists.

[00:05:36]It was only after strict trade restrictions were put in place in the late 1980s that their numbers began to climb back toward the staggering densities seen today. But even as the Cayman's recovered, scientists still treated them primarily as consumers. Top predators, fish eaters, prey for jaguars. Almost nobody connected the Caymans to the water. Then came 2020.

[00:05:58]The drought that year was not just severe. It was unprecedented in the modern record. Rainfall across the Pantanel dropped 26% below the average measured from 1982 to 2020. The water surface area shrank by 34% compared with the long-term mean. Rivers that normally acted as natural fire brakes ran dry.

[00:06:17]The Paraguay River fell to its lowest levels in decades. So low that shipping of soybeans and minerals had to be restricted along the Piranha Paraguay waterway. Entire stretches of river became impassible. Lagoons that had held water for as long as local ranchers could remember, turned to dust. And when fires ignited, many of them set deliberately by farmers clearing land for cattle pasture during what they expected to be a routine dry season burn, there was nothing to stop them.

[00:06:44]Between January and November of that year, more than 22,000 individual fires were detected across the region. Active fires were 123% higher than the two- decade average. 95% of those active fires occurred in natural land covers with 28% burning in areas classified as wetlands that had simply dried out. The blazes burned through grasslands, savas, and most unusually through forests that had never burned before in recorded history. 40% of the total burned area in 2020 was forested land, a complete reversal of the historical pattern where wetlands and grasslands accounted for most burning. 43% of the area affected had not burned once in the previous two decades. The Pantanel's fire history had been rewritten in a single season. The damage was not abstract. A team led by Wal Fredo Mariah's Thomas of Embraa Pantanel, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation's Pantanel branch and Ronaldo Marato of the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation walked through 126 burned areas within 72 hours of the fire passing through.

[00:07:51]They surveyed nearly 115 km of transact, moving through landscapes still hot underfoot, dodging smoldering tree stumps and stepping over the blackened remains of animals that had not been fast enough to escape. They found 302 carcasses of amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Despite the poor condition of most of the remains, the team managed to identify more than 300 animals at the species or genus level.

[00:08:17]Most were snakes, birds, and rodents.

[00:08:19]But they also found primates, caymans, and anteaters. When they scaled those numbers to the full 39,000 km of burned area, the estimate landed between 13 million and nearly 19 million dead vertebrates with a central estimate of roughly 17 million. Tomas later told journalists that the the numbers themselves did not surprise him given the scale and intensity of the fires and the abundance of wildlife in the Pantanel. What surprised him was how unevenly different groups of species were affected. The extremely high number of snakes killed made him wonder about cascade effects through the food web.

[00:08:56]And he was honest about the limits of the count. He said that many animals surely died afterward from burns, starvation, and predation, and that those deaths would never be quantified.

[00:09:06]The invertebrate losses, which were never formally counted, were certainly catastrophic. Fernando Tortato, a conservation scientist with the nonprofit Panthetherra, who worked alongside the counting teams, described the scale as something that took the global community's breath away. Mariana Napalanto Ferrer, head of science at the World Wildlife Fund in Brazil, noted that over 22,000 separate fires were recorded during that single year. The Pantanel, the most biologically rich wetland on the planet, had been brought to its knees. The turning point came not from a single dramatic decision, but from a slow realization among field researchers who returned to the Pantanel in the wet season of 2021. The rains came not abundantly but enough. Forest fires decreased, aided in part by community fire brigades and improved monitoring, surveillance, and enforcement by a coalition of government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and local communities who had been shaken by the scale of the previous year's destruction. And when scientists went back to survey the scorched areas, expecting to find biological wastelands requiring decades of active restoration, they found something else entirely. They found caymans, not dead ones, living ones, concentrated in astonishing numbers around the few remaining permanent water features in the landscape. These pools, many of them maintained and deepened over years and decades by the Caymans themselves, had survived the fires. They had survived the drought and they had become the nuclei around which the entire ecosystem was reorganizing.

[00:10:37]Raphael Mores Charavaloti a researcher affiliated with the institute for ecological research known as IP who had spent years studying the relationship between traditional Pantanero ranching culture and wetland ecology was among those who articulated the pattern most clearly. The areas recovering fastest were not random. They were not the areas closest to rivers. They were not the areas with the most rainfall. They were clustered around the water features where caymans had congregated during the drought and the fire. And the reason had everything to do with what those caymans had been doing in and around the water for decades. Here is the key insight that changed everything. Crocodilians are not just predators. They are ecosystem engineers. This concept had been documented extensively for the American alligator in the Florida Everglades. Alligators dig and maintain deep pools called gator holes, depressions in the wetland substrate that hold water even during severe droughts. These holes can be 6 m wide and more than a meter deep, and they persist for decades as permanent landscape features. Research has shown that they become critical refugeia for fish, turtles, amphibians, and aquatic invertebrates when surrounding water dries up. The concentration of prey species in these holes provides a reliable food source source not just for the alligator but for dozens of other species from wading birds to raccoons to utters. The elevated banks around these pools provide nesting sites for other reptiles and support woody vegetation that would not otherwise grow in the flat marsh. And critically, the alligators concentrate organic matter and nutrients in and around these pools through their waste and through the physical transport of prey from the surrounding landscape. A landmark study published in 2023 in the Journal of Animal Ecology, led by Bradley Strickland, then a post-doal researcher at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, was the first to formally demonstrate that alligators function as ecosystem engineers by radically altering nutrient cycling and habitat structure. The study conducted in collaboration with researchers at Florida International University, led by marine ecologist Michael Heithouse, showed that alligator ponds had fundamentally different nutrient dynamics, plant communities, and animal assemblages compared to areas without them. The alligators were not just living in the wetland. They were building it. They were editing their environment in ways that created conditions for hundreds of other species to survive. Strickland himself put it clearly when he said that understanding the diverse ecological roles of predators like crocodilians will ensure that we have the knowledge to protect our ecosystems in the future. What researchers began to document in the postfire pantanel suggested that yaka caymans were doing something remarkably similar at a scale that dwarfed anything documented in the Everglades. The Cayman pools that survived the 2020 fires functioned as biological life rafts.

[00:13:31]During the drought, Caymans had congregated around the deepest, most permanent water features in the landscape. Their bodies, their movements, their constant activity of entering and exiting the water had helped maintain these pools in ways that went far beyond simple occupation. They cleared encroaching vegetation with their tails and bellies. They churned sediment, preventing the kind of compaction that would allow the pools to fill in with organic matter and disappear. They deepened depressions through decades of physical activity, creating pools that retained water when shallower features dried out entirely.

[00:14:06]Female caymans built nesting mounds of rotting vegetation and mud near these pools. Structures that decomposed into nutrient-rich soil supporting the growth of plant species that would not otherwise establish in burned ground.

[00:14:18]and critically the Cayman's concentrated organic matter. Kimman waste rich in nitrogen and phosphorus from their diet of fish, snails, and aquatic invertebrates accumulated in and around these pools in concentrations far higher than the surrounding landscape. The result was a set of nutrient rich water retaining oases scattered across the burned landscape like seeds of recovery buried in the ash. When the rains returned, these pools became the source points for everything that followed. The cascade was striking and it played out in a sequence that became visible over weeks and months. Fish that had survived the drought and Cayman maintained refugeia began to recolonize the surrounding waterways as water levels rose. Small fish species reproduced rapidly in the nutrientrich shallows of the pools and their offspring dispersed outward into newly reflooded channels and lagoons. Aquatic invertebrates repopulated from eggs and larae that had persisted in the wet sediment at the bottom of the pools. Wading birds, jabaroo, stalks, egrets, herand and spills returned to the pools to feed on the concentrated fish populations. The guano further fertilized the surrounding soil, adding another layer of nutrient input to the recovery. Amphibians, devastated by the fires, began breeding in the pools first, using them as stepping stones to recolonize the broader landscape. Frogs and toads that had survived in the mud at the bottom of Cayman pools laid eggs in the shallows, and their tadpoles grew in water enriched by the same nutrient cycling that the Caymans had set in motion. And the nutrient-enriched soil around the pools supported faster vegetation regrowth than the surrounding burned areas, creating patches of green in the blackened landscape that were visible in satellite imagery before recovery was apparent elsewhere. New grasses pushed through the ash. Seedlings took root in soil that still smelled of fire but was already richer than the depleted ground around it. The system was rebuilding itself, not the way engineers rebuild things, the way nature rebuilds things.

[00:16:18]Then suddenly, scientists expected the Pantanel to recover eventually. What they did not expect was the geography of that recovery. Let me put that in context. The Pantanel had just lost 30% of its vegetation to the worst fire season in recorded history. 17 million animals were dead. And the first visible signs of recovery were organized not around rivers, not around human intervention, not around restoration projects with budgets and timelines, but around pools maintained by 10 million reptiles that most conservation plans had never once considered as drivers of wetland resilience. The data refused to fit the models that treated the landscape as homogeneous. Recovery was patchy, clustered, and concentrated around specific hydraological features.

[00:17:01]And when researchers looked at what distinguished those features from the surrounding landscape, they kept finding the same thing. Kimmans. Favia Arajo, a conservation analyst at the World Wildlife Fund in Brazil, reported that studies showed approximately 93% of the fire affected areas had high or medium potential for natural regeneration. But the speed and the spatial pattern of that regeneration told a story that the percentages alone could not capture. The areas with permanent water, shaped and maintained by decades of Cayman activity, were recovering faster and more completely than anything the models had predicted. The models had been wrong, not about whether recovery would happen, about where it would start and how fast it would move. Here is a detail that rarely makes it into the conversation about wetland conservation economics. The cost of maintaining the Pantanile's natural water infrastructure is essentially zero. 10 million Cayman's work around the clock, 365 days a year, maintaining pools, cycling nutrients, and creating refugeia for hundreds of other species. They require no electricity, no diesel, no concrete, no engineering blueprints, no environmental impact assessments, no maintenance contracts. A single Cayman relocated from a conflict area on a ranch to a conservation zone costs a few hundred. A constructed wetland treatment system for a comparable area would cost tens of millions of dollars and require ongoing maintenance for its entire operational lifetime. An artificial water retention structure designed to replicate what a Cayman pool does naturally would require heavy machinery, concrete, and engineering oversight. And it would still fail to produce the nutrient cycling, the biological complexity, and the dynamic responsiveness that Cayman's generate as a byproduct of simply existing. This is not romantic nature worship. This is hard-nosed ecology with economic implications that most policymakers have not begun to grapple with. The Panel's most effective water management infrastructure has scales and a tale. But the Cayman story also crashes into one of the most uncomfortable truths about the Pantanel and about ecological restoration everywhere. The fires of 2020 were not purely natural. The drought created the conditions, but human decisions lit the match. Evidence gathered by researchers at Brazil's National Space Re Research Institute, known by its Portuguese acronym, IMPI, showed that the spatial patterns of burning could not be explained by dry conditions alone.

[00:19:27]Human-caused fires, many of them set to clear natural vegetation for cattle pasture, exacerbated the drought's effects dramatically. Large burned fractions occurred primarily over natural land cover with 52% of the burning affecting natural areas and 44% affecting areas with low cattle density.

[00:19:45]The fires were not accidents. They were in many cases land management decisions that went catastrophically wrong in a drought year that no one had adequately prepared for. And this is where the story gets complicated in a way that cannot be resolved by a narrator on a screen. The Pantanel is not a national park. Roughly 95% of the Brazilian Pantanel is privately owned, mostly by cattle ranchers whose families have worked the land for generations. These are the Panteneeros, traditional ranchers whose lowintensity flood adapted cattle hering practices, have coexisted with the wetlands ecology for more than 250 years. Their cattle handling techniques were born from living inside the flood pulse itself, moving herds to higher ground when the waters rise and spreading them across the grasslands when the waters recede.

[00:20:32]The Pantanile retains more than 80% of its native vegetation. That is a remarkable conservation number for any biome anywhere in the world. And much of that conservation is attributable not to government protection, but to the Panteneeros themselves, whose way of life depends on the flood pulse and the grasslands it sustains. Only about 7% of the Pantanel biome is under formal protection. The rest is managed by private land owners who are in practical terms the stewards of one of the most important ecosystems on the planet.

[00:21:02]Camila Schwitzer who runs Fazinder Baranco Alto a working cattle ranch and ecoourism lodge in the Aquidana region represents the duality that defines the modern Pantanal. Her property is both a commercial cattle operation and a conservation showcase. She has spoken publicly about the need to educate visitors on the economic and ecological value of healthy landscapes and habitat.

[00:21:23]But she is part of a small growing vanguard. Many ranchers face genuine economic pressure to intensify production as commodity prices fluctuate and younger generations weigh whether the ranching life can sustain a family.

[00:21:36]Exotic pasture grasses are replacing native vegetation in the highlands.

[00:21:40]>> Dams and water diversions upstream are altering the hydrarology that the entire system depends on. And when drought comes, as climate models suggest it increasingly will, the temptation to use fire as a cheap land clearing tool puts the entire ecosystem at risk. The ranchers who set fires are not villains.

[00:21:58]They are people making economic decisions in a system that has historically rewarded short-term production over long-term ecological stewardship. The people most affected by fire restrictions and land use regulations are often the ones least able to absorb the economic cost of transition. Jaguar ecoourism generates roughly $6.8 million in annual revenue across a representative portion of the Brazilian Pantanel compared to an estimated $121,000 in annual cattle losses from jaguar predation. The economics favor coexistence, but economics alone do not change culture overnight. And the tension between the families who have lived on this land for generations, the conservation priorities of the international community is not something that a documentary can resolve. It requires listening and compromise and time that the Pantanel may or may not have. There is also the question of whether even the Cayman's can keep up with what is coming. The Pantanel faces a projected 30% decrease in rainfall between 2070 and 2,100.

[00:23:01]Temperatures are rising. Extreme drought events like 2020 are expected to become more frequent and more severe. The northern Pantanal already has 13% more days without rain than it did in the 1960s. Water mass in the landscape has declined by 16% during the drought season over the last decade alone. The Pantanal has lost nearly 80% of its surface water between 1985 and 2022.

[00:23:27]According to data from Matt Biomas, 1/3 of the ecological corridors that once connected habitats across the Pantanile have already disappeared. If the droughts become severe enough and frequent enough, even Cayman maintained pools will fail. The refugeia only work if there is enough baseline water in the system to sustain them. If the flood pulse weakens beyond a critical threshold, no amount of reptilian engineering can compensate. Tomas put it bluntly. He said the Pantanel cannot keep burning to this huge extent year after year because biodiversity cannot recover from that. The Cayman showed that the system has remarkable built-in resilience. But resilience is not infinite. It is a buffer, not a guarantee. And every fire, every dam, every degree of warming narrows that buffer a little more. And yet, return to the image of Christine Strusman wading through that dead lagoon in September of 2020. the cracked gray sediment, the charred carcasses, the silence where there should have been the calls of jabiru stalks, and the splash of cayman tails hitting water. Now move forward to the wet season of 2022. The rains came heavier that year. Forest fires decreased dramatically. Community fire brigades trained by conservation organizations worked alongside government agencies across the region, spreading awareness and conducting training that reached ranchers and local communities who had seen firsthand what uncontrolled fire could do. And in that same in the pools that the Caymans had maintained through the worst drought and the worst fire in the Pantanel's recorded history, life was coming back.

[00:24:58]Fish flashing silver in the shallows.

[00:25:01]Frogs calling at dusk from the edges of pools that had been craters of ash.

[00:25:05]Wading birds standing motionless in water that two years earlier had been a crerematorium. Capiaras grazing on fresh green shoots growing from soil that had been sterile. And in the center of each pool, the Caymans, patient, ancient, unaware that they had done anything remarkable. They had simply done what they have always done. Dug their pools, fertilized their water, waited for the rain. Nobody is talking about this, not the way it deserves to be talked about.

[00:25:31]The world watched the Amazon burn and largely overlooked the Pantanel. Within the Pantanel itself, most conservation funding flows toward the jaguar, the higher synin Macor, the giant otter.

[00:25:42]These are magnificent animals that deserve every dollar they receive. But the creature that may matter most to the structural integrity of the entire wetland system is the one with 10 million representatives and almost no public relations budget. The yakair cayman is not majestic. It is not photogenic in the way that jaguars are.

[00:26:00]It does not inspire the kind of emotional response that drives donation campaigns. But it filters the ecosystem by controlling snail and fish populations. It creates and maintains pools that sustain hundreds of other species during drought. It concentrates nutrients that accelerate vegetation recovery after fire. and its nesting mounds create microhabitats where other reptiles lay their eggs and where plants establish footholds in otherwise barren ground. It is quietly and without any recognition the Pantanel's most important infrastructure project. What the beavers are to the rivers of the American West, what the oysters are to the estuaries of the Chesapeake Bay, the Cayman is to the Pantanel, a living system that outperforms human engineering at a fraction of the cost.

[00:26:44]And it has been doing this work for millions of years before anyone thought to notice. The Pantanel's flood pulse is weakening. The fires will come again.

[00:26:53]The question is not whether the wetland has the capacity to recover. 2020 proved that it does, at least for now. The question is whether we will recognize what is doing the recovering and whether we will protect the conditions that allow it to keep working. 10 million Caymans cannot save the Pantanel alone.

[00:27:10]But the Pantanel, it turns out, cannot save itself without them. That is not a coincidence. That is balance. So here is my question for you. Before today, had you ever thought of a cayman as a water engineer? Had you ever considered that the creature most people see as a predator or worse, as a handbag is actually maintaining the hydrarology of the largest tropical wetland on the planet? I would love to hear what surprised you most about this story.

[00:27:35]Drop it in the comments. And if you are not subscribed yet, now is the time. We cover stories about restoration and the people and sometimes the reptiles who are fixing what is broken. Hit subscribe.