The jaguar is one piece in the complex puzzle of biodiversity. Biodiversity is essential for sustaining our economy and general livelihood. However, many of our activities degrade biodiverse ecosystems and thus the species of this planet. Society will not crumble if we lose one species out of a million a year, in fact, this is natural. Before humans emerged this was the background extinction rate but there were also times in history where 50-95% of all species on the earth died. There are five of these mass extinctions and some scientist fear we are heading towards a sixth. When we lose multitudes of species in just one year, like we’re seeing now, we are also losing the valuable services they provided. Ecologically speaking, many serve to clean our air and water, pollinate our food crops like honeybees, and others, like species of birds, act as natural pest controls. For our economy, many plant species are used for food and trees provide fuel wood, lumber, and paper. Many plants have medicinal properties with 62% of all cancer drugs derived from discoveries by bioprospectors, yet less than .5% of plants have been examined for these qualities. We need to explore and utilize species biodiversity sustainably because prior analysis of past mass extinctions shows it will take five to ten million years for speciation to rebuild the biodiversity that will likely be lost during this century.