The question in the title is badly formulated in my opinion. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the question implies that jaguars only live in the rainforest. This is incorrect. Secondly, the word “adapt” is incorrectly used. Jaguars are not adapting to the rainforest. They have always lived in the rainforest and other areas.
When you use the word “adapt” you are implying that an animal is getting used to a certain area because it is an untypical area to live in. That is incorrect in this instance. Jaguars are typically found in a variety of tropical and subtropical habitats. Sometimes they are found at 3800 m above sea level in Costa Rica for example.
People assume that the Jaguar only lives in dense tropical forest. This is incorrect. It also lives in a wide range of other habitat types (see a page on this). These include arid shrub and swampy grassland. They also live and mangrove swamps and dry deciduous forest. They like streams and watercourses. The Jaguar is a good swimmer. They often follow large rivers in their travels.
The reason why Jaguars live in forests this because there is a lot of prey in that habitat. A jaguar’s prey lives in the forest and associated streams and rivers because there is food there for these animals. The Jaguar will live in a place where it can survive and that normally happens to be tropical and subtropical habitats.
The Jaguar eats just about anything. They are opportunistic predators capable of killing and consuming almost any type of prey that they encounter. As the largest cat in the Americas, the Jaguar is the dominant predator. They have quite variable activity patterns when hunting. They are both active in day and night but in some countries such as Mexico and Venezuelan they are primarily active during the night. Whether they are active in the day or night depends upon the activity patterns of their prey and on human disturbance (to avoid it).
I hope that this answers the question in the title. The images are thumbnails. You can see larger versions by clicking on them + some words.
