Texas’s wild ocelots are down to an estimated 50 to 80 animals split between two small, isolated populations in the state’s southernmost brush country, and NatureServe’s S1, critically imperiled, rank reflects that precarious reality even though the species carries a much healthier G4 rank across its full range through Mexico and South America. Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge anchors one of those last strongholds, with Aransas and Padre Island extending the record along protected coastal habitat.
The nearly 17,800 records logged here are almost entirely GBIF data rather than casual photographs, just 10 from iNaturalist, a telling split for a population under this much scientific scrutiny: radio collars, camera traps, and roadkill monitoring generate far more of this record than anyone spotting a live cat. Reports peak in winter and again in May, then nearly vanish from July through October, a pattern shaped as much by when researchers are actively tracking collared animals as by the ocelots’ own movements.
Full species profile
