Gentle mammals seen fighting on trail camera in Mexico. See the ‘unusual’ behavior
With their drooping noses, rotund bodies and vegetarian diets, tapirs are quite a sight. These elusive hoofed mammals are widely considered to be calm and gentle, naturally inclined to run and hide when face-to-face with danger.
But trail cameras in Mexico recently revealed some “unusual” — and aggressive — tapir behavior.
For the past 10 years, researchers have been using trail cameras to monitor some Baird’s tapirs at Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in southern Mexico, according to a study published March 13 in the peer-reviewed journal Neotropical Biology and Conservation.
“For 10 years we have recorded many tapirs visiting ponds at night, walking and sniffing in silence, at a slow pace, and usually in the late hours of the night (before midnight), or the early hours of the day,” study co-author Rafael Reyna-Hurtado wrote in a March 14 blog post from Pensoft Publishers. “Our camera traps always showed tapirs walking silently, slowly and stopping many times to listen and smell for danger.”
That all changed in May 2024 when researchers checked a trail camera and found 97 videos of several tapirs “involved in serious fighting, running, chasing, biting each other and whistling,” Reyna-Hurtado said.
Videos show a few of these “unusual” behaviors. One video from May 13 shows a male tapir “closely following” a female and making a sharp whistle sound, likely “related to courtship,” the study said.
Another video from May 6 showed a female tapir making a slightly different whistling sound, which researchers described as her “searching mode.” The night before, trail cameras had recorded the same female with a male tapir.
Other videos from May 9 showed a pair of tapirs, likely two males, “fighting and chasing each other violently” for at least 4 hours, the study said. While fighting, the tapirs tried to bite each other’s hind legs, knocked each other down and seemed surprisingly agile “given their heavy weight.”
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“These fights can explain the wounds that several tapirs have on the back of the rump and the lower hind legs,” researchers said. Previously, experts assumed these wounds came “from jaguar or puma predation attempts.”
Trail camera videos from May 10 showed another aggressive behavior. One tapir repeatedly chased another male away from a watering hole, the study said. During one of the five recorded chases, the tapirs “emitted another set of short high-pitch whistles.”
Researchers aren’t sure if the tapir’s aggressive behavior continued, because their trail camera ran out of space on May 13 and stopped recording.
Even still, the footage “suggests that tapirs are more vocal than we thought” and, although typically gentle, “can be very aggressive” with other tapirs, researchers said.
“It changed our perception of tapirs’ behaviour,” Reyna-Hurtado said. “The information is also very valuable for conservation purposes.”
Researchers noted the “unusual,” aggressive behavior happened during “the core of the dry season” and on “days when the hot temperatures rose to their maximum” but did not say if or how this may have affected the tapirs’ behavior.
Monitoring efforts are ongoing at Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, which sits near the Mexico-Gautemala-Belize border.
The research team included Reyna-Hurtado, Jonathan Huerta-Rodríguez and Edith Rojas-Flores.
This story was originally published March 17, 2025 at 7:07 AM with the headline "Gentle mammals seen fighting on trail camera in Mexico. See the ‘unusual’ behavior."
