Banner image: The short-eared dog inhabits the Amazon and prefers untouched forests. Image courtesy of Guido Ayala & María Viscarra/WCS Bolivia.

Study gathers over 4,000 photos to find Bolivia’s rarest Amazonian dog

• A study conducted for more than 20 years with camera-trap surveys in different parts of the Bolivian Amazon has recorded 594 independent events for the short-eared dog in more than 4,600 images.
• This species, popularly known in Bolivia as the ghost dog, is one of the least-known canids in the world. Its survival depends highly on the quality of its natural habitat, according to experts.
• In the Bolivian forests, it can generally be found in protected areas or Indigenous territories, which scientists say underscores the importance of these kinds of areas for biodiversity conservation.

It has a fox-like snout, webbed toes and a thick tail. It’s called the short-eared dog (Atelocynus microtis), but also the ghost dog (perro fantasma in Spanish) in Bolivia, and the Amazonian dog. It’s one of the world’s least-known canids and one of the least frequently sighted carnivores in Latin America.

Now, though, a study conducted over the course of more than two decades — from 2001 to 2024 — in Bolivia has revealed more than 4,600 camera-trap images that show how it lives, the places it inhabits, and why this species is so dependent on South America’s forests remaining intact to survive.

The research underscores that the ghost dog is very much an Amazonian species, and in particular a forest one. In Bolivia, it can be spotted in the country’s continuous Amazonian forests, in the northern portion of the department of La Paz, but also in the department of Pando, in northern and northeastern Beni, and in the far north and northeast of Santa Cruz.

It’s also found in the pre-Amazonian forests of the Andes mountain range, also called piedmont forests, at elevations up to 750 meters (2,460 feet).

Robert Wallace, a British biologist from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in Bolivia and a co-author of the new study, said the team conducted a systematic review of published and unpublished distribution records of the species in Bolivia. Throughout the 23 years, they also carried out 34 intensive camera-trap surveys in the lowland areas of the Greater Madidi-Tambopata Landscape (in northwest Bolivia) and the Llanos de Moxos Biocultural Landscape (northern Bolivia).

Popularly called the “ghost dog” (perro fantasma) in Bolivia, Atelocynus microtis is one of the world’s least-known canid species. Image courtesy of Guido Ayala & María Viscarra/WCS Bolivia.

Wallace said the short-eared dog is native to the Amazonian forests, not the Amazonian grasslands. “Our [collected] data shows that what it seeks the most is the forest itself, as it avoids transitional habitats leading to more open areas. It is a forest species,” he said.

He added that the use of hidden technology, such as camera traps, makes the mysterious dog not as hard to find as people think. Even so, Wallace said, it’s still challenging to witness the species directly: this canid is quite skittish and has a highly developed sense of smell, which allows it to avoid encounters with humans and natural predators.

video from a camera trap

“The short-eared dog is primarily diurnal, but also crepuscular, meaning it’s quite active around dawn and dusk. It can be active at night, but the vast majority of camera-trap sightings occurred during the day,” Wallace said.

He added the species’ preferred biome type is the lowland forest, “not right next to the river, but in the mature forest, further inland.”

A two-decade-long initiative

The study was backed by WCS Bolivia and included a lot of camera trapping, done every year during the dry season.

This method revealed an animal with a relatively low-slung body, short legs, small and rounded ears, a large head, and dense, dark fur ranging from blackish-gray to reddish-brown, with a dark dorsal stripe and a long bushy tail that usually drags on the ground. Its feet are partially webbed, meaning the toes are connected by a membrane — a unique trait among Amazonian canids.

The camera-trap surveys yielded a combined 4,635 photos covering 594 separate events featuring the short-eared dog.

“Camera-trap surveys provided significant information on the behavior and relative abundance of the short-eared dog, suggesting that it is more abundant than previously believed, although it remains a relatively rare medium-sized carnivore,” Wallace said.

He said it’s encouraging that the short-eared dog’s relative abundance was higher in protected areas and Indigenous territories that overlap with protected areas, emphasizing that this reinforces the importance of these kinds of areas for biodiversity conservation.

A short-eared dog approaches a veterinarian in the Bolivian Amazon. Image courtesy of Renata Leite Pitman.

“These results have important implications for conservation, as they suggest that large tracts of continuous forest, comparable in size to larger protected areas, will be necessary to uphold viable long-term populations of short-eared dogs,” Wallace said.

According to the Bolivian environmental NGO ORÉ, six species of canids are known in Bolivia, including the short-eared dog, also known in the Amazon lowlands as the bush dog (perro de monte in Spanish). ORÉ noted that the species shouldn’t be confused with the more common bush dog ( Speothos venaticus ) or the black-footed fox (Cerdocyon thous).

ORÉ collaborated on a 2024 related study with the Noel Kempff Mercado Natural History Museum, located in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the largest city in Bolivia. The organization told Mongabay that the short-eared dog is the only species in its genus and is a solitary carnivore. It measures 70-100 centimeters (28-39 inches) in length, stands 35 cm (14 in) tall, and has a bushy black tail — except at the base — that’s long enough to touch the ground.

The short-eared dog’s survival depends on forest quality. Image courtesy of Renata Leite Pitman.

The short-eared dog’s characteristics

The dog’s head is large and more brownish than its grayish back. Its snout has a distinct black line running from the nose to the area below the eyes. The ears are small, hence the name, but emerge above the crown of the head. They’re rounded and light brown, contrasting with the head’s tone. The dog can weigh between 9 and 10 kilograms (20-22 pounds), with the females up to 30% larger than the males. The species’ diet is believed to consist of amphibians, fish and reptiles, although it also eats fruit.

Marco Greminger, a veterinary zootechnician and professor at the Autonomous University of Beni in Bolivia, told Mongabay that a ghost dog was once captured alive near the university. He said the animal was found hidden in a disused ground-level air duct.

“It was incredible how we managed to capture that ghost dog alive. They called me to help, and I did it. The [short-eared] dog came into the kennel; it was really weak. I remember giving him 350 grams [12 ounces] of chicken liver — which is rich in folic acid — chicken feet, and an oral rehydration solution. He ate all 10 pieces I gave him,” Greminger said.

He added the animal has a strong odor. “It’s stronger than that of a porcupine or a fox; it’s more sour,” he said.

The short-eared dog prefers upland forests, living far from the riverside. Image courtesy of Renata Leite Pitman.

Veterinarian and ecologist Renata Leite Pitman, a researcher at Duke University in the U.S., has studied short-eared dogs for 14 years, calling them “very elusive and hard to spot.” In that time, she’s located just five of them in the wild, in the Amazon Basin, her place of fieldwork, and fitted them with tracking collars to study their habits. “They are very shy, totally different from pets,” she said.

In 2023, Pitman was contacted by Greminger, who was seeking advice after finding the dog in the air duct. “I shared what I had been feeding it. We agreed and coordinated a few steps. She recommended papaya; I had been giving guava,” Greminger said.

This story was first published here in Spanish on May 6, 2026.

370 billion crickets are farmed for food every year. Scientists have discovered they may feel pain

House Cricket (Acheta domesticus). Credit: mani_raab/iNaturalist, CC BY-NC

You're cooking dinner, distracted, and your hand brushes a hot pan. Nerve signals race to your spinal cord and back to yank your arm away in a fraction of a second, with no thought required.

Then comes the pain. A sharp, spreading sting gives way to a pulsing ache, and you cradle your hand and run it under cold water until it subsides. That felt experience is distinct from the reflex that preceded it. While the reflex moved your body out of danger, pain drives you to protect the wound, recover, and learn to avoid similar mistakes in the future.

We readily accept that other people feel pain by reading cues in their behavior, like the inspection and nursing of an injury. We extend this to some animals too—a dog licking its paw or a cat favoring a limb rightly stir our sympathies. But what happens when we turn that lens on animals far less like us?

In our new study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, we searched for behavioral signs of pain in house crickets, one of the most widely farmed insects. After applying heat to an antenna, we found that crickets didn't just reflexively flinch and recover. They nursed the harm, returning again and again to groom the affected site, much as we rub a burned hand.

The frontiers of feeling

French philosopher René Descartes considered animals unfeeling biological machines, and for centuries the circle of moral concern barely extended beyond our own species.

But the boundaries have steadily crept outward. Recognition that mammals experience pain came first, followed by birds. Fish too, once assumed to lack the necessary brain structures, are now widely accepted as capable of pain-like states.

The leap into invertebrates has been greater and more contentious. Their nervous systems bear little resemblance to our own, so arguments from brain anatomy alone don't carry us far. Instead, we look to behavior. Does the animal respond to harm in ways that go beyond reflex, ways that are flexible, persistent, and sensitive to context?

Over the past decade, testable indicators for pain in non-humans have been developed and are increasingly accepted. These include learning from unpleasant events, trading off harms against rewards, and actively protecting the site of injury. Evidence meeting these criteria helped crabs and lobsters gain legal recognition as sentient under United Kingdom law in 2022.

Among insects, the evidence has been accumulating fast. Yet most of this evidence comes from bees. Bumblebees weigh the risk of harm against the richness of a food reward, and groom the site of an injury. Honeybees learn to associate particular smells with harmful stimuli and avoid them.

Far less attention has been paid to Orthoptera, the group that includes grasshoppers, locusts and crickets. That gap matters, because the house cricket (Acheta domesticus) is the world's most widely farmed insect, with more than 370 billion reared annually.

Do crickets feel pain?

We tested 40 male and 40 female crickets, each experiencing three conditions in random order: a hot probe to a single antenna (65°C, to activate damage receptors but not cause lasting injury), the same probe unheated, or no contact at all.

We filmed their behavior for ten minutes. Observers scoring the footage did not know which treatment any animal had received.

The results were clear. After the hot probe, crickets were more than twice as likely to groom the affected antenna compared to controls, and spent roughly four times longer doing so.

Could this simply reflect general disturbance rather than targeted care? Unlikely: grooming was directed specifically at the heated side, not spread evenly across both antennae as it was after gentle touch or no contact.

And the behavior wasn't a brief, reflexive reaction. It was elevated from the outset and tapered gradually over minutes, much like rubbing a burned hand as the felt sting slowly fades.

Small minds, big feelings

Subjective experience cannot be directly observed in any animal, not even humans.

But we have shown crickets respond to harm in a way that satisfies a key criterion many scientists and philosophers use to infer pain: flexible, directed self-protection. Combined with the knowledge that crickets possess damage receptors, can learn to avoid harms, and respond less to injury under morphine, the weight of evidence for an inner life is growing.

The practical stakes are real. Hundreds of billions of farmed insects are slaughtered each year by freezing, boiling and baking. Pesticides kill trillions more, optimized for lethality with no consideration of potential suffering.

If we take a precautionary approach, credible evidence of suffering should motivate proportionate protections well before we are certain.

Insects have been around for more than 400 million years and are far more behaviorally and cognitively sophisticated than once assumed. The question, then, may not be whether some insects feel, but why we ever assumed they couldn't.

Banner image: A black crowned crane (Balearica pavonina), which is found within the African-Eurasian flyway. Image by H. Zell via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Up to half the bird species using the African-Eurasian flyway are declining

• Every year, billions of birds migrate long distances with the changing of seasons — according to BirdLife Africa, 40 to 50 percent of avian species migrating to and from Africa are in decline.
• BirdLife Africa’s Kariuki Ndang’ang’a says climate change and infrastructure collision stand as three of the main reasons for the decline in migratory bird species.
• Because many birds rely on the same sites each year to make their transit, loss or degradation of even small areas can push an entire population towards collapse.

Each year in May, World Migratory Bird Day draws attention to the billions of birds that migrate long distances with the changing of the seasons, a living braid of ecosystems separated by thousands — even tens of thousands — of kilometers. According to Kariuki Ndang’ang’a, BirdLife International Africa’s regional director, about 2 billion birds fly along the African-Eurasian flyway every year: the populations of between 40 and 50 percent of these migratory bird species are in decline.

Ndang’ang’a told Mongabay added that the birds that travel furthest are at greatest risk. Some species, like Abdim’s stork (Ciconia abdimii), migrate relatively short distances within the continent, but palearctic migrants — those coming from distant landscapes in Europe or Asia — are particularly vulnerable, experiencing over a 30% decline in the past 30 years.

“Because these birds depend on specific stopover sites (like Lake Chad or the Nile Delta), the loss of even one small wetland can cause an entire population to collapse,” Ndang’ang’a wrote in an email.

Abdim’s stork at Masai Mara NP, Kenya. Image by tsowerby via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0)

According to Ndang’ang’a, habitat loss, climate change and infrastructure collision stand as three of the main reasons for the decline in migratory bird species.

“For instance, the drainage of wetlands for agriculture or urban expansion has greatly affected migratory birds as they search for resting and feeding ground,” he said. Lake Chad, on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, has lost 90% of its surface area since the 1960s, depriving millions of birds such as the European roller (Coracias garrulus) a refuge.

Climate change presents another challenge for migrating birds, he said.

“Rising temperatures cause ecological mismatches where birds arrive at breeding grounds after their primary food sources (like caterpillars) have already peaked. The European warblers have ended up reaching their breeding grounds in poor condition because the Sahel wetlands in Africa are drying up earlier than usual due to changing rainfall patterns.”

“Thirdly, poorly manned infrastructure such as power lines and wind turbines cause thousands of deaths annually for large soaring birds like storks and raptors, which often follow [fly along] specific mountain ridges or valleys where wind farms are built,’’ he added.

Egyptian vulture at Mishraq Shewa, Ethiopia. Image by Paul G. Schrijvershof via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Paul Matiku, the executive director of conservation NGO Nature Kenya, says there are several successful projects aimed at preventing the death of migratory birds from collisions with energy infrastructure.

“For instance, in the intervention at the Gabal-el Zayt wind farm in Egypt, conservationists and engineers use a protocol to temporarily stop wind turbines when large flocks of migratory birds are detected approaching the site. This has significantly reduced the mortalities of birds such as the white stork from collisions without causing substantial power losses to the grid.”

In Sudan and Ethiopia, power lines have been retrofitted with visibility markers and insulation to prevent the electrocution of species like Egyptian vultures (Neophron percnopterus).

“In Kenya, Nature Kenya worked with Birdlife International and government partners and produced wind power strategic environment assessment report which helps to map places that are most important for migrating birds and which should be avoided during wind power placement,” Matiku said.

Nature Kenya has also enlisted residents of local communities with first hand knowledge of the most common places where birds fall victims of power lines. The NGO provides training for site support groups to gather better information to guide the relevant authorities to rethink powerline design.

From Africa to Central Asia, the European roller’s migration builds relationships

BirdLife SA's tiny staff dedicated to the European Roller Monitoring Project is supported by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The tracking devices are paid for by individual donors. Image courtesy of Lourenço Afonso.

World Migratory Bird Day’s May date has been chosen to coincide with the peak migration period for birds using not only the African-Eurasian flyway, but others linking East Asia to Australia or North to Central and South America.

“Migratory birds connect continents,” said Blessings Chingagwe, who works for one of BirdLife’s partners, Wildlife and Environmental Society of Malawi in March.

“A bird feeding at Chia Lagoon may have travelled thousands of kilometres from Europe or Asia. If just one important wetland along the flyway is lost or degraded, it can affect populations across multiple countries. Protecting wetlands in Malawi is part of protecting a global ecological system.”

Banner image: Lilac-breasted roller in Etosha National Park, Namibia. Image courtesy of Giles Laurent via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

How Namibia's bird conservation projects build community resilience (commentary)

• Droughts and land degradation often erode communities’ social bonds, but in the Karas region of Namibia, bird conservation initiatives have become a rallying point.
• Women and youth are at the forefront of these initiatives, which has inspired confidence among peers and shown that conservation is not the domain of scientists alone, but also a practice of everyday community resilience.
• “It is time for policymakers, NGOs, and donors to support these initiatives not just as biodiversity projects, but as investments in community well-being,” a new op-ed argues.
• This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

In Namibia’s Karas Region, birds are more than symbols of freedom or beauty — they are teachers of resilience. Their survival in arid landscapes mirrors the endurance of the communities who live alongside them. Grassroots bird conservation projects here have revealed something profound: protecting birds can also strengthen families, nurture hope, and build social cohesion.

Across villages in Karas, parents and children tend habitats together, restoring nesting sites and planting native vegetation. These acts of care are not only ecological interventions; they are lessons in patience and problem solving. When a child sees a weaverbird return to a reed bed that the community has protected, it is a moment of triumph that teaches perseverance in the face of environmental challenges.

Women and youth are at the forefront of these initiatives. In one community, a group of young women organized bird walks for schoolchildren, teaching them to identify species like the sociable weaver and the pale chanting goshawk. Their leadership has inspired confidence among peers and shown that conservation is not the domain of scientists alone — it is a practice of everyday resilience.

Sociable weavers nesting in acacia trees, Karas Region, Namibia. Image courtesy of Martha Karas.

These projects also counter the isolation that environmental stress can bring. Droughts and land degradation often erode social bonds, but bird conservation has become a rallying point. Families gather to monitor nesting sites, share stories, and celebrate small victories. In doing so, they weave resilience into the social fabric. Conservation here is not only about biodiversity; it is about belonging.

The ecological benefits are clear. Protecting bird habitats safeguards pollination, seed dispersal, and pest control — services that sustain agriculture and livelihoods. But equally important is the emotional strength these projects cultivate. In Karas, conservation has become a human resilience strategy: a way to confront uncertainty with collective action and hope.

This perspective challenges the conventional view of conservation as a technical exercise. Too often, policies focus narrowly on species counts or protected areas. While these metrics matter, they overlook the lived experience of communities who find strength in caring for nature. By recognizing conservation as both ecological and social, we broaden its value and deepen its impact.

Lappet-faced vultures like this are native to the arid plains of the Karas Region, and organizations like Vultures Namibia ensure there’s awareness of them. Image courtesy of Martha Karas.

The lesson from Karas is urgent. As climate change intensifies, resilience will be as critical as resources. Grassroots bird projects show that resilience can be cultivated through simple, shared acts of care. They remind us that conservation is not only about saving species, but about sustaining the human spirit.

It is time for policymakers, NGOs, and donors to support these initiatives not just as biodiversity projects, but as investments in community well-being. Funding should prioritize programs that empower women and youth, foster intergenerational learning, and strengthen social bonds through conservation.

Birds in Namibia’s Karas Region are survivors of harsh landscapes. But they are also mentors of resilience, teaching us how to endure, adapt, and thrive together. By listening to the voices of those who lead grassroots efforts, we can reimagine conservation as a strategy for human strength as much as ecological survival.

Supporting these projects is not charity — it is foresight. In every nest protected, in every child inspired, we see the seeds of resilience that will carry communities through the challenges ahead.

Conservation, at its best, is a story of hope. And in Karas, that story is being written by birds and the people who care for them.

Martha Karas is a Namibian writer based in the Karas region.

If you are ever confronted by a toad, you soon see why there is little chance of confusing it with its froggy cousin.

I realised this after discovering a glorious, warty specimen settled on damp concrete in the garage one autumn. It was not only its copper-coloured eyes, squat boxer face and bumpy, waterproof skin — allowing it to survive away from water for longer — but its size that impressed. Wild toads can live for more than a decade; this creature may have been as old as my son.

After some deliberation (and Googling) I moved my toad to a pile of logs and fallen leaves near the pond. It was silent as I transported it, in gloved hands to protect its skin from mine, which meant it must have been a female: only male toads squeak when picked up.

Sadly, a report recently found that the chance to perform a toad relocation may become rarer than ever. Led by Dr Silviu Petrovan of the University of Cambridge in collaboration with the charity Froglife last October, it used one of the biggest data-sets ever gathered for amphibian population trends; between 1986 and 2021, a dedicated team of volunteers counted migrating toads during the spring breeding season. The findings were sobering: over the past 40 years, the UK population has declined by nearly half. The common toad (Bufu bufo), now reassessed as ‘near threatened’ in England and Scotland, may soon need a new name.

'In 2025, 275 active patrols helped almost 135,000 toads complete their lust-driven journey to reproduce'

(Image credit: Getty Images/Westend61)

One of two species native to Britain, the common toad has a place in our culture not enjoyed by the natterjack, whose home on sandy coasts and modest population has meant few of us will ever encounter one. The common toad, however, has had a near-ubiquitous presence in Britain since the last Ice Age: a study of frog and toad bones at Repton in Derbyshire found evidence of local populations as far back as the 8th century. The excavation concluded there was a toad boom in the 14th century, which might explain why the creature begins then to creep from folklore into literature.

From magic and medicine to myth, toads have been linked always to the suspicious and powerful: a toad is the first ingredient Shakespeare’s witches drop into their cauldron in Macbeth, the 15th-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson makes his toad treacherous and Milton’s Paradise Lost has Satan himself choosing to inhabit one for his disguise.

As with all folklore, there is confusion: what is bad is also powerful and power is something people try to harness. Across medieval Europe, women were advised that a toad effigy clamped between the knees during childbirth could ease labour pains. Meanwhile, toads were thought to carry a jewel in their heads that changed colour to warn of poison and protect against evil — or, as Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It, the toad was ‘ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head’.

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These ‘toad-stones’, mentioned since the Middle Ages, became especially popular between the 14th and 17th centuries. They were, in fact, often fossilised fish teeth, but that did not stop people believing the proper way to extract one was to sit a toad on a red cloth until it belched the stone up, to be caught and set into a ring or amulet for luck.

'Frequently one comes upon shapeless masses of 10 or 20 toads rolling over and over, one clinging to another without distinction of sex'

Two toads, inspiring enough for George Orwell.

(Image credit: Getty Images/Stephan Gehrlein/500px)

Modern literature has given the poor old toad a gentler reputation. In his superb 1946 essay Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, George Orwell describes the creature after hibernation as having ‘a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent’. The essay credits the toad — not the cuckoo — as the herald of spring. His description of toad copulation brings to mind a particularly lively urban Saturday night, with the creature entering ‘a phase of intense sexiness. All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he wants to get his arms round something and if you offer him a stick, or even your finger, he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a long time to discover that it is not a female toad. Frequently one comes upon shapeless masses of 10 or 20 toads rolling over and over, one clinging to another without distinction of sex’.

My own re-homed toad did not hop into her new refuge, but crawled, stretching her limbs across the leaves like an aged yogi. The glands in her bumpy skin contain toxins that deter predators, meaning that, unlike the frog, she can stroll away from trouble rather than leap. I never saw her again, nor any sign of the alien-like double-rowed strings of eggs she might have left clinging in the pond. Around St Valentine’s Day, amorous toads leave hibernation and begin their migration to ancestral breeding ponds, sometimes many hundreds of feet away. Most return to the very pond of their birth, using chemical signals and magnetic orientation to find their way — regardless of whether a new A-road now crosses their route. The long, jelly-like strings of eggs hatch within days. It takes two or three months for a tadpole to become an inch-long toadlet, which must then brave cars and predators as it leaves the water to find new ground for feeding and hibernation.

Toads return to the same ponds, which means when those ponds are drained or built over it breaks a link that is both ancient and ecological. Although a toad’s skin may look tough enough for a witch’s cauldron, it is porous. Agricultural pesticides seep through it, poisoning the animal, at the same time as killing off its food sources, such as spiders, beetles, worms and slugs. The creatures that prey on pesticide-poisoned toads are also affected, hedgehogs and otters among them, which often skin the toad inside out to avoid its toxic glands. Climate change, too, plays its part. Last year saw the driest spring in more than a century, disrupting hibernation and the availability of a toad’s choice of food, and milder winters cause toads to wake too soon, losing body condition and producing fewer eggs.

Why should we care about the much-maligned toad, apart from the fact that a world with one hiding in your garage is richer than a world without? The answer lies in the natural cycle. As with birds and insects, the decline of once-common species sends ripples along the food chain. As Froglife’s report notes: ‘It is not extinction, but the population decline of abundant species that will have the most serious ecological consequences. Abundant species tether food webs, account for much of the interaction diversity in a given community, and carry out ecosystem services’.

There is some good news. Froglife reports that, although toad populations crashed by 68% per cent between 1985 and 2013, efforts in the past eight years have brought ‘regional recoveries’, reducing the total decline to under half. Much of this is thanks to the Toad Patrols — volunteers who literally carry toads across roads by the bucketful. In 2025, 275 active patrols helped almost 135,000 toads complete their lust-driven journey to reproduce.

'It would be a shameful thing to have created a landscape that in only 40 years manages to kill off a creature that has survived 400 million, through the extinction of the dinosaurs to the Industrial Revolution'

It takes two or three months for a tadpole to become an inch-long toadlet, which must then brave cars and predators as it leaves the water to find new ground for feeding and hibernation.

(Image credit: Getty Images/Naturfoto Honal)

Community-led action can sound worthy, but futile. In fact, there is precedent in the revival of another creature once commonly squashed on tarmac: the hedgehog. As rural populations continue to fall, urban hedgehogs are making a comeback. The excellently named HogWatch project has seen dramatic rises in hedgehog populations in Highgate Wood, north London, in only eight years, thanks solely to citizen action. In October 2024, the National Hedgehog Conservation Strategy—launched by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species and the British Hedgehog Preservation Society — became the world’s first of its kind, providing a frame-work for NGOs, government, landowners and communities. The Hedgehog Street campaign has already recruited more than 100,000 ‘hedgehog champions’.

Are toads the new hedgehogs? Let’s hope so. It would be a shameful thing to have created a landscape that in only 40 years manages to kill off a creature that has survived 400 million, through the extinction of the dinosaurs to the Industrial Revolution.

In the meantime, anyone with a garden can help. Despite not being able to build amphibian tunnels for commuting juveniles, Jenny Tse-Leon, head of conservation and Impact at Froglife, says that ‘the restoration and creation of more and better-connected ponds and habitats such as woodlands and grasslands are essential to their survival’. No matter the size of your garden, a small pond, log pile, stones or even an upturned flowerpot can become a summer refuge and a winter hibernaculum.

One day, perhaps, the sight of a toad making its slow, dignified way through the garden may become as common as it once was — and our children, too, might move one from a garage to a bed of leaves and see for themselves why these characterful creatures have long been woven into the fabric of British culture.

The River Otter's Remarkable Comeback

The first sign isn’t the otter itself. It’s the ripple – small, nearly invisible – spreading across the marsh. Then a blur of brown breaks the morning water’s silver surface. A head lifts, whiskers dripping, eyes alert. For a second, it lingers. Then it’s gone again, leaving only widening rings.

Not long ago, this scene, in this place, would have been impossible. In the 1980s, the chances of spotting a river otter anywhere along much of the Great Lakes shoreline were close to zero. Pollution, trapping, habitat loss – together they’d driven otters out. What remained were faded accounts, the odd specimen in a museum, a memory. Their return isn’t just welcome. It’s a sign the lakes themselves are healing.

The Great Lakes. Credit: Philroc/Wikimedia Commons.

A freshwater giant

North America's Great Lakes – Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario – form the world’s largest group of freshwater lakes. Together, they hold about one-fifth of all surface fresh water on Earth. Their basin straddles the border of Canada and the United States, sheltering more than 3,500 species of plants and animals, and tens of millions of people.

These waters aren’t simply vast storage tanks. They are living systems. Marshes filter runoff. Rivers swell with migrating fish. Wetlands cradle frog eggs and sedge roots. For millennia, Indigenous nations and fishing communities have relied on these shorelines. But stressed systems can break – and for decades, this one did.

The disappearance

River otters (Lontra canadensis) once moved almost everywhere in this basin. They swam with ease, hunted with precision and thrived in backwaters and bays thick with vegetation. But by the mid-20th century, they had vanished from the state of Ohio and become scarce across most of the watershed.

The reasons stacked up quickly. Over-trapping for fur. Pollution that loaded fish with PCBs and other toxins. Wetlands drained for farms and cities. Rivers and streams straightened, dammed, stripped bare. By the 1970s, the silence spoke volumes: the otter was gone, and with it an apex predator vital to the food chain.

A river otter at Muskatatuck National Wildlife Refuge. Photo: Don Sniegowski/Flickr.

The comeback

In 1986, Ohio’s Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) began reintroducing river otters to streams they had not seen in decades. Over the next seven years, 123 otters from Louisiana and Arkansas were released into rivers selected for their clean water, abundant food and protective cover.

They weren’t the only ones bringing otters back. In the late 1990s, New York’s River Otter Project relocated 279 otters – drawn from the Adirondacks, Catskills and Hudson Valley – to 16 sites across western and central New York state. Many of those waterways had been without otter populations longer than most residents could remember.

In Ontario, biologists have documented otters recolonizing areas such as Algonquin Provincial Park and the north shore of Lake Superior, where they had been scarce for much of the 20th century. Across western Canada, populations have rebounded more broadly. Aside from rare remnant areas on Prince Edward Island, river otters are now considered stable or expanding in nearly every province and territory.

Meanwhile, restoration of the habitat itself was gathering pace. Drained croplands were being reflooded as wetlands, riparian buffers were planted to shore up streambanks, and old dams were being removed to reconnect fragmented waterways. All of these efforts were bolstered by the 1972 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, a landmark U.S.–Canada treaty that pushed both countries toward reducing toxic discharges and restoring damaged habitats. By the 1990s, many of these rivers – once pollutants’ dumping grounds – were visibly cleaner and healthy enough once again to sustain apex predators.

The Maumee River at Defiance, Ohio. Photo: Bob Dilworth/Flickr.

Where the otters are now

Today, river otters once more slip through marshes and estuaries across the Great Lakes basin. Breeding populations are thriving along the Sandusky, Maumee and Grand rivers in Ohio. Sightings are increasingly common in Georgian Bay (part of Lake Huron) and along Ontario’s north shore of Lake Erie. Otters have returned to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula too, where quiet backwaters and fish-filled streams are ideal habitat.

As predators at the top of the chain, otters help regulate fish and invertebrate numbers. Their presence signals something deeper, too: the water is clean, the system productive, the ecosystem whole enough to support them again.

Challenges ahead

Recovery, unfortunately, doesn’t mean safety. Roads remain a serious threat. Highways cut through wetland corridors, and otters are killed crossing them. Wildlife officials map these blackspots and add underpasses, fencing and warning systems – but progress is slow.

New contaminants are appearing as well. PFAS, the so-called “forever chemicals,” are showing up in Great Lakes fish, their long-term impacts still unknown. Shoreline development eats away at denning sites. Climate change threatens to shift prey distribution and alter seasonal ice cover. Any of these pressures could slow or even reverse otters’ recovery.

Otters in the harbour in Grand Marais, Minnesota, on Lake Superior. Photo: Sharon Mollerus/Flickr.

More than a species

To many Indigenous communities, the otter represents more than biology. In Anishinaabe culture, for example, it symbolises resilience, adaptability, play. Seeing otters return is a cultural renewal as much as a biological one – a sign that healthy ecosystems sustain people as well as wildlife.

For others, the meaning is simpler. Otters spark joy. A sudden flash through cattails. The clean dive of a plunge. A slide down mud or snow. In this way, they’ve become unofficial guardians of fresh water, their vitality pulling people into conversations about wetlands and rivers.

The folks in charge of the comeback

The otters’ recovery is the work of many. ODNR’s reintroduction laid the foundation, but protection and monitoring continue through agencies, non-profits and volunteers.

The Alliance for the Great Lakes fights pollution and protects shorelines. The River Otter Ecology Project spreads knowledge and research. The Wetlands Initiative rebuilds marshes and floodplains that support countless species, otters among them. Together, they form a safety net for the otters’ future.

Photo: Carlos Porrata

Forward thinking

The next phase is keeping waterways open, clean and full of prey. As otters spread into smaller rivers and lakes, careful planning will matter – especially in regions under pressure from development.

Cross-border cooperation will be critical, since the lakes cross Canada and the U.S. – and otters do not care for borders. Public participation will matter too: reporting sightings, volunteering, supporting wetland projects. Each action helps.

The return of otters – and possibility

On a quiet morning, an otter surfaces with a fish flashing in its jaws. It climbs a half-sunken log, shakes itself in a spray, then slides back into the water with barely a ripple. The rings spread, then fade. The lake seems unchanged – yet it isn’t.

What matters is simple: otters are back. And their presence proves something worth remembering. Healing is possible. Ecosystems can recover. The story of the Great Lakes – its waters, its people, its wildlife – is still unfolding.

Snuffleupagus, a newly described species, is an adorable little predator

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S. snuffleupagus, a newly described species of fish, is named after the beloved Sesame Street character, Mr. Snuffleupagus, to which it bears an "uncanny" resemblance.

Solenostomus snuffleupagus, a newly described species of fish, is named after the beloved Sesame Street character, Mr. Snuffleupagus. (David Harasti)

Scientist David Harasti never had any doubt what he would name the tiny orange creature he first spotted on a diving expedition in Papua New Guinea in 2003.

But it would take another two decades for Harasti and his colleague Graham Short to find the elusive fish again, study it, and officially designate it a new species.

Meet Solenostomus snuffleupagus, named after the beloved Sesame Street character, Mr. Snuffleupagus.

"Snuffy for short," Short, an ichthyologist at the California Academy of Sciences and the Australian Museum, told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal. "The resemblance was quite uncanny."

Short and Harasti have now written a new paper, published in the journal Fish Biology, describing S. snuffleupagus as a new species of ghost pipefish that makes its home along coral reefs, and disguises itself as red algae.

'The awesome power of natural selection'

The fish has quite a few things in common with its namesake — mainly its orange-brown colouring, the long filaments that look like shaggy hair, and its elephant-like snout.

Milton Love, a marine biologist at the University of California’s Marine Science Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif., says the fish's muppet-like appearance demonstrates "the awesome power of natural selection."

"Clearly, all of the morphological features that we find endearing are of some value to the animal," Love, who was not involved in the research, said in email.

"Or, and here is another hypothesis, Gaia created this fish after having one too many of those rum drinks that come with those little umbrellas."

A snuffy fish photographed by a diver in Tonga. (Darren Rice/Matafonua Lodge)

But its similarity to Snuffleupagus goes deeper than meets the eye.

It's also extremely elusive, much like Mr. Snuffleupagus, who, in his early appearances on Sesame Street, was only ever seen by Big Bird, leading the other characters to mistakenly suspect he was imaginary.

Harasti and Short tried for years to spot a snuffy fish again after that first 2003 sighting to no avail.

Their luck changed in 2021 when some scuba diver buddies started seeing the little creatures on the Great Barrier Reef and got in touch. The scientists headed to Australia to see for themselves, and on their second dive, they found the fish.

"It's an understatement to say that we screamed under water," Short said. "We high-fived, gave each other a hug, and we were just so excited."

An itty-bitty carnivore

In order to describe the fish and confirm it as a previously undocumented species, the scientists looked at CT scans of specimens first collected in 1993 during exhibition to far north of Queensland, Australia, in the Torres Strait.

Short says they were collected alongside several hundred other fish specimens and tucked away until he and his colleague came looking. But even back then, he says ichthyologist Helen Larson, who was part of the expedition, suspected it was a new species.

S. snuffleupagus, like other ghost pipefish, is a cousin of the seahorse.

The newly described Snuffleupagus fish is smaller than a matchstick. (Darren Rice/Matafonua Lodge)

Using iNaturalist, the citizen science platform, the scientists confirmed sightings of it in Tonga, Papua New Guinea and New Caledonia, suggesting distribution across the southwestern Pacific.

And while it may look like Big Bird's beloved bestie, there are a few significant differences between S. snuffleupagus the fish and Snuffleupagus the muppet.

While Snuffleupagus is famously big — bigger even than Big Bird — S. snuffleupagus is roughly four to five centimetres long, about the size of an airpod.

The Sesame Street character Snuffleupagus, pictured here rehearsing for the 2019 Macy's Day Thanksgiving Parade in New York City, is much bigger and less predatorial than its fish counterpart. (John Lamparski/Getty Images)

And while Snuffleupagus would never harm a fly, S. snuffleupagus is a natural-born killer.

"They look adorable, very cute. They're very delicate and slow moving in the water. And it's been assumed that they only eat small crustaceans like small shrimp," Short said.

Not so, he says. The CT scans found tiny fish skeletons in the specimens' stomachs.

"Every fish has a role, and they are either eating or being eaten. It turns out, ghost pipe fish and in particular, snuffy … they're just like other fish," Short said. "They're predators."

Short says the widespread interest in S. snuffleupagus has been a delight, and he hopes it won't be the last fish he brings attention to.

He and his colleague already have their eyes on another species of ghost pipe fish that is known to divers around the Pacific, but hasn't been formally described.

If it works out, they plan to name it after another muppet, but Short wouldn't say which one.

"Not yet, because I need approval," he said.

Scientists Capture First-Ever Photos of the Elusive 'Cozumel Dwarf Fox' | PetaPixel

First-ever photograph of a Cozumel dwarf fox taken on September 17, 2023 | Image credit: Rafael Chacón

The Cozumel dwarf fox, a tiny animal so elusive that scientists were unsure whether it even existed, has been photographed for the first time.

Last month, researchers published the first-ever photographs and confirmed sighting of the Cozumel dwarf fox in more than 20 years in the journal Neotropical Biology and Conservation. The images show the adult male dwarf fox on the island of Cozumel, Mexico.

Close up of the Cozumel dwarf fox | Image credit: Rafael Chacón

While the images were only made public recently, the photographs date back to September 2023, when scientists located and safely recovered the Cozumel dwarf fox following online reports of a disoriented animal near the coastal highway on the island’s eastern side. After being held under observation and receiving a full health assessment, it was released into the Laguna Colombia State Reserve in Cozumel, a protected area chosen for its suitability and distance from road hazards.

Although the Cozumel dwarf fox was recovered, released into a protected reserve, and photographed, scientists say little is known about the species.

“The biggest challenge facing the Cozumel dwarf fox is that we still know almost nothing about it, including its remaining population size, distribution, or ecology,” Travis Bayer of Pathos Wildlife says in a statement. “That uncertainty alone is dangerous, because it makes effective conservation extremely difficult”.

A Tiny Animal That is Likely on the Brink of Extinction

The Cozumel dwarf fox is one of the rarest canine animals on the planet and represents a unique population that has inhabited the island of Cozumel for millennia, with subfossil remains suggesting its presence may predate early Mayan settlement.

This extensive period of isolation led to rapid evolutionary divergence and “insular dwarfism.” The Cozumel dwarf fox is estimated to be 60 to 80% the size of its mainland relative, the gray fox. Prior to this rediscovery, physical evidence of the Cozumel dwarf fox was entirely limited to these subfossil remains, and the last second-hand sighting had been reported in 2001.

Despite its long history on the island, the Cozumel dwarf fox has never been formally described or designated as taxonomically unique. Because its habitats in the southern portion of the island are increasingly threatened by land-use change, development, invasive species, and natural disasters, the scientific community considers the dwarf fox to be critically endangered and likely on the brink of extinction.

“One of the most important takeaways from this research is that species can quietly disappear without the world even realizing they are gone,” Bayer explains. “We often think extinction is something dramatic and obvious, but in reality, it can happen gradually and silently, especially for rare species living in remote or understudied habitats.”

Bayer adds: “The rediscovery of the fox is not a conservation success story yet, but it represents a second chance.”

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This spectacular pit viper was among 11 new species that were discovered in Cambodia’s karsts — ancient limestone cliffs with hidden cave systems. While its official name has not been decided, the “pit” refers to the heat-sensitive organ on its head, which it uses to detect and track down warm-blooded prey. Phyroum Chourn/Fauna & Flora

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Conservationists Sothearen Thi and Phyroum Chourn from the charity Fauna & Flora search for reptiles and amphibians deep inside a karst. For two years, the wildlife non-profit surveyed more than 60 caves across western Cambodia in an effort to document life in these unique ecosystems and ensure their protection. Manita Hem/Fauna & Flora

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Named after the Hindu god of destruction, Gekko shiva was another unique reptile found in the surveys. It was discovered in early 2025 in a Thai cave temple dedicated to the deity. Researchers warn that its striking appearance makes it a target for the exotic pet trade, and giving it a formal name is the first step toward legal protection. Manita Hem/Fauna & Flora

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Pablo Sinovas, who led the Fauna & Flora survey team across the karsts, inspects a young reticulated python. This species can grow over 7 metres, making it the world’s longest snake. Manita Hem/Fauna & Flora

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This gecko species, found across different karsts, is new to science. It belongs to the Gehyra genus — geckos with powerful claws and sticky toepads. These help them climb almost any surface. Hun Seiha/Fauna & Flora

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The ornate flying snake glides from tree to tree by flattening its rib cage and twisting through the air like a shimmering ribbon. It is increasingly threatened by illegal trade, as its vivid colors make it popular amongst reptile collectors. Phyroum Chourn/Fauna & Flora

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The Cambodian blue-crested agama was also identified in the surveys. This lizard was only recognized as a new species in 2021, and it can change its vibrant colours when threatened. Phyroum Chourn/Fauna & Flora

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Karsts are not only ecologically rich but also valued by nearby communities as sacred spaces. Many caves have become Buddhist temples, attracting worshippers and tourists alike. Phyroum Chourn/Fauna & Flora

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Despite their extraordinary biodiversity, Cambodia’s karst landscapes are unprotected, often quarried and blasted for their limestone to produce cement. Fauna & Flora warns that because some species exist only in one hill, destroying a single formation can drive species to extinction — including some we know nothing about yet. Phyroum Chourn/Fauna & Flora

Pit viper, flying snake and geckos among new species uncovered in Cambodian caves | CNN

New species uncovered in Cambodian caves

Cambodia’s largely unexplored limestone caves stretch for thousands of miles, are home to countless undiscovered species and host unique ecosystems, with creatures found nowhere else on Earth.

Now, a new survey of caves in the northwestern province of Battambang has uncovered a range of species that are new to science, including a turquoise pit viper, a flying snake, several geckos, two micro-snails and two millipedes.

The viper and three of the newly discovered gecko species are still being formally named and characterized. The other finds have been officially recognized over the course of the biodiversity survey, which explored 64 caves across 10 hills between November 2023 and July 2025, and was published in a report Monday.

Each hill and cave in Cambodia’s rocky karst landscape –– a term for a landscape created when rocks break down, forming large cave springs, sinking streams and sinkholes –– is isolated from the others. Each performs as its own individual “island laboratory” of evolution, holding numerous distinct life forms that have adapted to their niche habitat, according to UK-based conservation charity Fauna & Flora, which led the survey along with Cambodia’s Ministry of Environment and field experts.

A flying snake, documented on the expedition.

“Think of it as their own vignette of biodiversity, where nature is performing the same experiment over and over again independently,” evolutionary biologist Lee Grismer, professor of biology at La Sierra University in California, who supported the survey team, said in a statement.

“We go to these separate places and analyse the DNA of the species, and we see how the experiment has run. Some look alike, some look different, and by analysing this we can get an idea of what the driving forces are behind the way they evolve,” he added.

For instance, while researchers identified one species of the striped Kamping Poi bent-toed gecko, named Cyrtodactylus kampingpoiensis, during fieldwork in 2024, they found four different populations evolving in different ways.

“If we are truly going to conserve the biodiversity on this planet, we need to understand what is there,” Grismer continued. “We can’t protect something if we don’t know it exists.”

Globally threatened species such as the Sunda pangolin, green peafowl, long-tailed macaque and northern pig-tailed macaque were also found in the landscape during the latest survey.

Conservation biologist Pablo Sinovas led the Fauna & Flora team in Cambodia, working with local researchers to get an idea of the terrain during the day and –– the “fun part” –– look for creatures such as snakes and geckos at night, “when they are most active, when they come out of hiding,” he told CNN.

The team would head out after sunset and spend hours traversing “sharp, rocky terrain” with torches, “looking around every crevice, looking around caves in the landscape, rocks, branches, vegetation, really everywhere. It was kind of a nice search party,” said Sinovas, who is now a senior program manager at the charity.

Some caves in the region hold up to one million bats, although the research team did not enter caves with large bat colonies due to health concerns, according to the report.

Karst landscapes make up about 9% of Cambodia’s land area, at 20,000 square kilometers (or 7,722 square miles), said the report, which outlined that “a large portion of this is still unknown to science.”

Fourteen caves that had not previously been surveyed were registered on one karst hill in the Banan district of the Battambang Province.

“There is more exploration to be done,” said Sinovas, adding that they have only “scratched the surface” in terms of the biodiversity that is waiting to be discovered in the ecosystems of the wider landscape in Cambodia.

Laang Spean Cave in Battambang Province, north-western Cambodia.

As well as hosting a range of species, many of the caves are used as shrines, or for meditation and other rituals, and are visited by tourists and pilgrims, according to the report.

Even so, karst habitats are under threat from poorly planned extraction for cement, as well as overtourism, wildlife hunting, logging and wildfires.

“There is growing demand for cement and karst limestone is useful for the making of cement and, so, karst provides a very important raw material,” said Sinovas.

“But, obviously, if you destroy an area where certain species live, and those species don’t live anywhere else, then you would automatically potentially lead to the extinction of species –– in some cases, of species that haven’t even been described yet,” he continued.

“So, we are working with (the) government to ensure that these important areas are better protected,” Sinovas said, adding that there are ongoing discussions regarding “giving this area some sort of protective status, so that they can be preserved into the future.”

Scientists Have Been Studying Fire Salamanders for More Than 250 Years. They Just Discovered That the Creatures Glow Under UV Light

Fire salamanders—one of Europe’s most well-researched amphibians—are biofluorescent, which means they can absorb light from an external source at one wavelength, then re-emit it at another

Fire salamanders are among the most-studied amphibians in Europe, yet until now, no one realized they are biofluorescent. Bernat Burriel-Carranza

First described more than 250 years ago, fire salamanders are among the most-studied amphibians in Europe. Yet researchers are still making new discoveries about these charismatic creatures. Most recently, scientists learned that fire salamanders emit a bluish-green glow after being exposed to ultraviolet light, wavelengths that humans usually can’t see.

It’s the first time the phenomenon, known as biofluorescence, has been documented in the species, researchers report in a study published May 27 in the journal Royal Society Open Science. Though the ecological functions of biofluorescence remain unclear, scientists suspect that the amphibians might use the glow to communicate with one another, select mates or ward off predators.

Biofluorescence occurs when organisms absorb light from an external source at one wavelength, then re-emit it at another. Scientists used to think that only marine creatures and arthropods—a group that includes insects and arachnids—were biofluorescent. But in recent decades, they’ve been finding the trait in more animals, including some reptiles, birds and amphibians.

The bright, sparkly pattern is concentrated in the yellow spots on the creatures’ skin. Bernat Burriel-Carranza

“We are in a thrilling period of discovery in terms of biofluorescence in amphibians and other [four-limbed vertebrates],” Jennifer Lamb, a biologist at St. Cloud State University who was not involved with the research, tells National Geographic’s Jack Tamisiea.

Studies like this one, she adds, “help fill some of the gaps in our understanding, both in terms of what species fluoresce and in terms of the mechanisms likely responsible for that fluorescence.”

Against this backdrop, Bernat Burriel-Carranza, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural Sciences Museum of Barcelona, decided to start taking an ultraviolet (UV) flashlight, also known as a blacklight, with him on evening field expeditions. On a rainy night in Spain, he spotted a fire salamander crossing the road and pointed the beam at it. The flashlight revealed a bright, speckled pattern along the creature’s flanks.

Did you know? Biofluorescence vs. bioluminescence

Biofluorescent animals require an external light source to glow, while bioluminescent creatures produce their own light through chemical reactions in their cells.

Common throughout Europe, fire salamanders are small, black-and-yellow amphibians that range from 6 to 12 inches long. These nocturnal critters tend to live in cool, damp forests near bodies of water, where they feast on worms, slugs and other insects. If they feel threatened, fire salamanders can protect themselves via toxins in their skin or by spraying poisonous liquid from glands behind their eyes. They breathe through their skin, can regrow their limbs and tails and give birth to live young.

After the initial field observation in Spain, Burriel-Carranza and his colleagues decided to investigate biofluorescence in fire salamanders further. Between April 2024 and November 2025, they searched for fire salamanders in Spain and Germany, illuminated them with a UV flashlight and took photographs to capture the bright, speckled glow. The fluorescence seemed to be coming mostly from the yellow spots on the creatures’ skin and concentrated along their sides and stomachs.

Scientists think the yellow splotches might serve as warning signs to potential predators. Andrés Brunetti

Researchers also swabbed the salamanders’ skin to collect samples of their toxic secretions. When they exposed the slime to UV light, it glowed, too, suggesting the biofluorescence may be coming from the glands that produce the poisonous goo.

CW: animal cruelty

To confirm that hypothesis, the team dissected two preserved fire salamanders. When they looked at tissue samples under a microscope, they found fluorescent chemical compounds in the glands and bloodstream, which suggests the substances circulate throughout the creatures’ bodies. That’s something that had previously been observed only in some tree frogs, which use fluorescent compounds known as hyloins to illuminate their translucent skin.

Researchers suspect that the biofluorescence plays a role in communication. Bernat Burriel-Carranza

“We still don’t know what the compound responsible for this fluorescence is, but everything indicates that it is a molecule unknown until now in this species,” says study co-author Salvador Carranza, a biologist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Spain, in a statement. “Identifying it will be key to understanding its origin and function.”

Though humans usually need a UV light to see the salamanders’ blue-green glow, it might be more clearly visible to other animals. Because salamanders are nocturnal and live in dense forests, one possible explanation is that they fluoresce so they can see one another better at night. The researchers say this proposal is supported by the fact that, compared with daylight, full moonlight contains more UV and violet wavelengths, the ones that are absorbed by the animals and re-emitted at different wavelengths. Additionally, the amount of moonlight that reaches the forest floor peaks in the fall, when the salamanders usually breed.

The toxic secretions that fire salamanders produce from their skin also glow under UV light, the researchers discovered. Bernat Burriel-Carranza

Beyond flagging down potential mates, the amphibians might also be using their natural fluorescence as a warning to predators. The scientists think the creatures use their bright yellow splotches as natural “keep away” signs, and because the fluorescence is concentrated in those markings and their toxic secretions, it may help reinforce that warning.

No matter how fire salamanders use their biofluorescence, Burriel-Carranza finds it “fascinating” that such a well-studied species could still hold undiscovered traits, he says in the statement.

“It reminds us that even the most familiar organisms can hide secrets that are only revealed when they are observed with new tools,” he adds.

Banner image: Turquoise dwarf gecko. Image © Ardgard Essau via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

How trade bans and local conservation helped save a dazzling blue gecko

Beauty is a curse — at least for the turquoise dwarf gecko of central Tanzania. Between December 2004 and July 2009, demand for this gecko from collectors in Europe boomed, leading to the capture and export of an estimated 40,000 of these striking reptiles from Tanzania.

“I remember when I saw them for the first time [at] a fair, it was about 600 euros per specimen,” or about $700, Dennis Rödder, a herpetologist at the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change in Germany, told Mongabay in a video call. “I think within three or four years, the species appeared everywhere across Europe. You could buy them in every pet shop.”

Turquoise dwarf geckos (Lygodactylus williamsi) grow to a length of 6-9 centimeters (about 2.5-3.5 inches) and are known from only two small patches of forest in Tanzania: The Kimboza and Ruvu forest reserves. These protected areas cover a combined 34 square kilometers (13 square miles). Adult females have a green-brownish color that mimics the leaves of the trees they live in, but the males’ skins are a vivid contrasting blue, one of the rarest colors in nature, meant to stand out and attract females.

Turquoise dwarf gecko (Lygodactylus williamsi). Image © Simon via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Active during the day, and so fiercely territorial they evict their young hatchlings from their home trees soon after birth, this species lives exclusively on screwpines (Pandanus rabaiensis), a tree found in Kenya and Tanzania. Standing anywhere from 3-20 meters tall (up to 66 feet), these trees feature long, spiked leaves and a fountain-shaped architecture that provide the ideal habitat for the reptiles, giving them shelter to hide and reproduce, a platform to bask, and a feeding place where water for cooling and insects accumulate.

“It’s the perfect environment for them,” Charles Kilawe, a forest ecologist at Tanzania’s Sokoine University of Agriculture, told Mongabay in a video call. “The leaves of the Pandanus have spines, and it protects [the lizards] against predators like snakes or … eagles.”

But the gecko’s reliance on the screwpine as protection against natural predators has left it vulnerable to another predator: using machetes, poachers cut down large screwpines to grab their helpless resident geckos. The logging to capture these animals was so intense that by 2009, screwpines had gone from covering more than half of Kimboza to only 17.6% of the forest reserve’s area.

That year, researchers estimated that only around 150,000 of these beautiful geckos remained in the wild.

“When I started to work there in 2016, it was difficult to spot them,” Kilawe said.

In 2009, herpetologist Morris Flecks and colleagues from the Leibniz Institute interviewed one group of gecko collectors from the communities around Kimboza and estimated that they had captured between 32,000 and 42,000 turquoise dwarf geckos from the forest reserve over the previous five years. The researchers noted that this total — which they believed represented at least 15% of the wild population at the time — could be even higher as it didn’t account for many more geckos collected by other groups known to be operating in the forest.

Collection or export of the geckos — or any other wildlife species from a protected forest reserve — required a license, but officials from the Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute told the researchers no such permits were ever issued.

This frenzied collection for the pet trade and the rapid destruction of their already limited habitat led to a steep decline in the geckos’ population size; Rödder, Flecks and other herpetologists recommended that the species should be listed as critically endangered by the IUCN. This was done in 2012. It took another five years before international trade in turquoise dwarf geckos was banned when the species was added to Appendix I of CITES, the global treaty on the wildlife trade.

By this time, the wholesale capture of the geckos in the shadow of Tanzania’s Uluguru Mountains had tapered off; overseas markets were saturated, and while the reptiles remained popular, captive-bred geckos were widely available across Europe, pushing the price of a turquoise dwarf gecko from a peak of $1,500 per specimen to just $40 each.

“Population sizes are back to pre-collecting events. So that’s the good part,” Rödder told Mongabay.

“The not-so-good part is that after a couple of years after our study, there was a wildfire in one of these reserves.”

The white-chested alethe (Chamaetylas fuelleborni) is one of several species that have returned to Kimboza, thanks to restoration efforts involving members of the local community. Image © Zein et Carlo via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Habitat loss due to illegal logging, collection of firewood, conversion of forest to agricultural land, mining, and the growing presence of the invasive Spanish cedar (Cedrela odorata) inside and outside the two forest reserves where L. williamsi is found continue to put pressure on the geckos.

Spanish cedar was introduced to Kimboza in 1960, ironically as a means to relieve logging pressure on native tree species. The idea was that this fast-growing tree, native to the Americas, could provide a reliable source of quality timber and firewood.

The idea was too successful. The exotic cedar, which can grow to a towering 40 m (130 ft), turned out to be very invasive: because it produces seeds twice a year that are dispersed by wind and germinate easily in open areas, the species has taken advantage of gaps and changes to forest structure caused by illegal logging and fires to replace screwpine in many areas.

“By 2016, Cedrela was the most dominant tree in the forest, covering nearly 32% of the big trees area,” Kilawe told Mongabay.

In 2022, Kilawe published a study of Kimboza aimed at determining if turquoise dwarf geckos were directly affected by the presence of Spanish cedars. He found screwpines still thriving in swampy areas and on limestone outcrops, but where a similar survey 40 years earlier found P. rabaiensis in more than half of plots it surveyed, screwpines occurred in barely half the plots Kilawe examined — a severe reduction in habitat for geckos. The presence of cedars, meanwhile, had moved in the opposite direction, found in 16% of plots in 1982, but 52% in Kilawe’s study.

While he found turquoise dwarf geckos just as frequently in screwpines growing under the taller cedars, results from the surveyed plots showed that the number of lizards in screwpines shadowed by dense exotic canopy was considerably lower than in areas where there were fewer cedars or none at all.

Further research is needed to understand what the direct effect of the cedars’ presence on geckos is, but the invasives’ steady expansion into forest areas opened up by fire or tree falls raises fears that cedars will continue to displace gecko habitat. Similar impacts on native biodiversity have been reported from other places where the tree has been introduced, such as Ghana and the Galápagos Islands.

Screwpine (Pandanus rabaiensis) in Morogoro, Tanzania. Image © Andrey Vlasenko via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Today, people from the villages surrounding Kimboza Forest Reserve assist rangers in managing the forest, Kilawe said. Led by Kilawe, they have cut down nearly 100,000 Spanish cedar trees since 2016, and reduced forest fires by around 80%.

They have also planted about 5,000 native trees per year since 2018, working step by step to rebuild the original structure of Kimboza’s forest. Kilawe told Mongabay 10 “ambassadors” drawn from the different villages are paid for their efforts; guiding tourists is another source of occasional income linked to protecting this ecosystem.

“We are hoping that if the removal process continues, in about five years, maybe the forest might be Cedrela-free,” Kilawe said. “It is very important and effective to work with the community in conservation.”

Once caught between the devil and the blue sea, the turquoise dwarf gecko is recovering thanks to these reforestation efforts and the prohibition on trade worldwide. Kilawe said the restoration of Kimboza’s forests has also allowed other animals, such as blue monkeys (Cercopithecus mitis) and birds like the white-chested alethe (Chamaetylas fuelleborni) and the trumpeter hornbill (Bycanistes bucinator) to return to the forest, showing that collaborative hard work can save species and places from the fragile edge of extinction.

Cover image:

Two individuals of Thecacera sesama sp. nov. feeding on a bryozoan. Image credit: Ho-Yeung Chan et al.

Tiny sesame sea slug species discovered in the waters of northern Taiwan | Blog

This tiny nudibranch, which measures less than three millimetres in length, was first spotted by lead author Ho-Yeung Chan during a recreational dive in 2019.

Translucent, speckled, and barely the size of a grain of rice, a new species of sea slug has been identified in the coastal waters of Keelung, Taiwan. Because of its minute size and distinctive black and yellow markings, researchers from National Taiwan Ocean University, National Museum of Natural Science and National Taipei University of Education have named the creature Thecacera sesama.

“Taiwanese divers call it ‘sesame’ in Chinese and it is also small like a sesame seed, hence the name,” the research team explained regarding their decision to honour the local nickname in the scientific nomenclature. This tiny nudibranch, which measures less than three millimetres in length, was first spotted by lead author Ho-Yeung Chan during a recreational dive in 2019.

Thecacera sesama sp. nov. Details of appearance and morphological features, hand-drawn on a tablet PC by Chen-Lu Lee.

The discovery was a stroke of luck that began during Chan’s undergraduate studies:

“During a recreational dive in the summer during the undergraduate study of HY Chan in 2019, he accidentally discovered Thecacera sesama sp. nov. in northern Taiwan waters.”

The Research Team

Despite its unique appearance, the importance of the find was not immediately obvious. In a modern twist on traditional taxonomy, Chan “never realised Thecacera sesama was a new species until he consulted the sea slug expert ‘Hsini Lin teacher’ on Facebook.”

Living specimens of Thecacera sesama sp. nov. Image credit: Ho-Yeung Chan et al.

Documenting the species proved to be a significant logistical feat due to the volatile environment of the Keelung coast. The research team noted that the most challenging part of the study was the unique weather conditions of the region.

Taiwan experiences frequent typhoons in the summer and large waves during the winter monsoon season, with sea temperatures often dropping below 16 degrees Celsius. These factors mean that diving for nudibranch research is only possible for about four months of the year, making sightings of such tiny creatures entirely a matter of chance.

Living specimens of bryozoan with Thecacera species. Image credit: Ho-Yeung Chan et al.

The life of T. sesama is remarkably focused, as the researchers observed that the species exhibits only four primary behaviours: feeding, searching, mating, and laying eggs on bryozoans, which are tiny aquatic invertebrates often called “moss animals”. Interestingly, the specific bryozoan that T. sesama calls home may itself be a species new to science.

From a broader ecological perspective, these vibrant molluscs play a vital role in the marine environment:

“Nudibranchs are one of the key players in the marine food web. They are extremely colourful and can be spotted on coral reef ecosystems. However, many nudibranchs are very small in size and are extremely difficult to spot underwater with the naked eye.”

The Research Team

The researchers believe that the discovery of T. sesama is just the tip of the iceberg for Taiwanese marine biology. Because many species are so small, many more are likely awaiting discovery and formal study. The full research on Thecacera sesama was published in the open-access journal ZooKeys on 11 May 2026.

Original source:

Chan H-Y, Lee C-L, Chen W-C, Chang C-H, Shao Y-T, Pang K-L (2026) Thecacera sesama sp. nov. (Nudibranchia, Polyceridae) from Taiwan, evident from morphology and phylogenetic analyses of the 16S rDNA and cytochrome c oxidase I gene. ZooKeys 1279: 269-284. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1279.184298

Hidden in plain sight: the race to discover new species before they’re gone

When most people imagine scientists discovering new species, they probably still picture an expedition into the unknown.

A naturalist travels somewhere remote, perhaps on a wooden ship, and traipses through the jungle to encounter an animal or plant never before described by science. The intrepid explorer brings back specimens or observations to a museum, where they can be compared, named and described.

There is some truth to this stereotype. Between 1854 and 1862, scientist Alfred Russel Wallace travelled through the Malay Archipelago, discovering animals and insects unknown to Western science. This led him to the theory of evolution by natural selection, contemporaneously with Charles Darwin.

Antarctica had its own era of discovery. In 1840, scientists on a French expedition encountered what we now know as Adélie penguins. Imagine seeing penguins for the first time: strange black-and-white birds waddling over the ice, sliding on their bellies, leaping from freezing seas.

Of course, “discovery” is a loaded word. Many animals and plants described by Western science were already known to Indigenous peoples and local communities. What changed was their entry into the formal scientific naming system – the global process by which species are compared, classified and recognised.

Today, scientists are still finding new life in remote places and hidden inside the DNA of animals we thought we already knew.

We still explore unknown worlds

Scientists still discover species this way: by probing Earth’s nooks and crannies and travelling to remote places to study what lives there.

Last year, I was onboard the scientific vessel R/V Falkor (too) in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, where one scientific team was searching for seafloor methane seeps.

These are not just geological curiosities. Methane seeps create unusual habitats that harbour strange communities of life fuelled not by sunlight, but by chemicals rising from below. Scientists have already found new microbial diversity at Antarctica’s first known active methane seep.

Not all hard-to-reach worlds are underwater. In Papua New Guinea’s Southern Fold Mountains, camera traps captured a shy, ground-dwelling bird slipping through rugged limestone forest. Scientists described it as a new species in 2025, the hooded jewel-babbler.

But there is another kind of discovery happening too.

White microbial mats underwater are telltale signs of seeping methane. Andrew Thurber, CC BY-ND

Hidden species in familiar animals

Some species are not hidden because they live at the bottom of the sea or deep in a mountain forest. They are hiding in plain sight.

Gentoo penguins are a good example. With their bright orange bills and comic waddle, they are familiar to anyone who has visited Antarctica. To most observers, they are simply “gentoos”.

But our new research shows gentoo penguins are not one widespread species, but four. Our 2020 study first showed major genetic and physical differences between gentoo penguins from different islands.

Now, using whole genomes – the complete set of genetic instructions inside an animal – and ecological modelling, we found these penguins are not just separated by distance, but have adapted to different Southern Ocean worlds.

Gentoo penguins on Cuverville Island, Antarctica. David Stanley/flickr, CC BY-ND

Learning to see in higher resolution

Discoveries like this are often called “hidden” species. They look very similar to their relatives, but if we study their DNA, body measurements, behaviour and ecology, it’s clear they are separate species.

Species discovery has always depended on the tools available. Early naturalists relied on what they could collect: feathers, skins, eggs and bones. These museum collections are like time machines and remain incredibly important.

Today, whole genomes tell us if animals have different coding. Ecological models show whether animals live in different environmental conditions. Mathematical approaches test whether groups are evolving independently.

In other words, we are learning to see biodiversity in higher resolution.

This sharper view is changing how we understand familiar animals. For a long time, giraffes were considered one species, but genetics suggests they are four. My own work on forest birds in Madagascar found a new species of Newtonia bird.

The Tapanuli orangutan is a powerful example. This Indonesian great ape from Sumatra was described as a new species in 2017, based on genomic, anatomical and behavioural evidence. It was extraordinary to recognise a new great ape in the 21st century, and sobering to realise fewer than 800 may remain.

Again and again, the message is the same. The natural world is more complex than we know. And sometimes, by the time we recognise that complexity, a species may already be in deep trouble.

The Tapanuli orangutan is a species of orangutan restricted to South Tapanuli in the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. It is one of three known living species of orangutan. Prayugo Utomo/Creative Commons, CC BY

Why names matter

Taxonomy – the science of naming and classifying life – can sound like an old-fashioned labelling exercise. But it’s how we map life on Earth.

Conservation laws, threatened species lists and monitoring programs usually work at the species level. If several species are mistakenly treated as one, a declining species can be hidden inside a larger group that looks secure.

As we stand at the precipice of Earth’s sixth mass extinction, this has never been more important.

Recognising hidden biodiversity does not solve conservation problems by itself. But it helps us ask better questions. Which species are increasing? Which are declining? Which have not been counted for decades?

These questions are urgent, because we are racing to understand biodiversity while climate change and habitat loss reshape life on Earth.

Even now, in an age of satellites and genome sequencing, Earth still has secrets. Not only in the most remote places, but in the first animals we learn to recognise as children: penguins, giraffes, orangutans.

The closer we look, the more life reveals itself. Our task now is to keep looking and protect the richness that was there all along.

New miniature bright-orange toadlet found in southern Brazil and named after Lula

In a small stretch of the Atlantic Forest in southern Brazil lives a bright-orange species of frog that’s new to science, researchers report in a recent study. The miniature amphibian measures just over a centimeter long, less than half an inch, or the length of an average fingernail.

The team has named the toadlet Brachycephalus lulai, in honor of Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The genus Brachycephalus, also called flea toads or saddleback toads, are all tiny and live among leaf litter in Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest. Of the 42 known species, 35 have been described since 2000.

Individuals of the latest species to be described, B. lulai, were found hidden in the leaf litter of the montane Atlantic Forest at two nearby sites on the southeastern slopes of Serra do Quiriri in the state of Santa Catarina, southern Brazil.

The researchers collected 32 individuals and compared different features of the frogs, including their DNA and vocalizations, with those of other Brachycephalus species. Their analysis showed that it was indeed a new-to-science species.

B. lulai has a bright-orange body dotted with tiny green and brown spots. Males measure just 8.9-11.3 millimeters (0.35-0.44 inches) in length, while females are slightly larger at 11.7-13.4 mm (0.46-0.53 inches). The males produce a very distinct call to attract females that’s unique to the species, the researchers found.

Currently, the sites where B. lulai was found appear to be intact, without any significant threats. As such, the researchers suggest the species be categorized as least concern under the IUCN Red List classification.

“The new species occurs in highly preserved forests that are very difficult to access, which means it is not threatened with extinction,” Marcos R. Bornschein, study co-author from the Institute of Biosciences at São Paulo State University, told Popular Science. “It is one of the few Brachycephalus species that are not threatened, which is very reassuring for us.”

However, “it is essential to continue systematically monitoring this scenario,” the researchers write. This is because the broader Serra do Quiriri range — which includes threatened frog species like B. quiririensis, B. auroguttatus, and Melanophryniscus biancae — faces impacts from regular burning of grasslands, cattle grazing, mining, invasion of pine trees, and development for tourism.

Banner image: The newly described Brachycephalus lulai. Image courtesy of Luiz Fernando Ribeiro.

Banner image: Poison dart frog of the species Ranitomeya aetherea, described from the Juruá River Basin, western Amazon, in 2023. Image courtesy of Alexander Mônico.

Scientists race to study the Amazon’s frogs before they disappear

• The Amazon is home to the world’s greatest amphibian diversity, with an estimated 1,525 species, of which only 810 have been formally described by science.
• This megadiversity is under pressure from climate change and human activity, threatening the risk of species going extinct before scientists even get a chance to describe them.
• Recent research indicates that the combination of increased temperature and exposure to pesticides can alter tadpoles’ growth and development in the Amazon.
• Amphibians play a central role in controlling insects, including disease-transmitting mosquitoes, while also contributing to natural control of agricultural pests — a service valued in Brazil at more than a billion dollars annually.

MANAUS, Brazil — Crouched over the leaf litter, where dry leaves accumulate on the forest floor, a researcher tries to capture a distinct croak using a directional microphone. Identifying the sound of a small frog is often one of the conclusive proofs that a new species has been found. It’s nighttime. He wears long clothing as protection against mosquitoes and ants, and boots to keep his feet dry. Finding amphibians in the Amazon doesn’t require high-tech equipment; it actually dates back to explorations by early-20th-century naturalists.

That’s how biologist Igor Kaefer, a professor at the Federal University of Amazonas in Brazil, describes a typical day of fieldwork in search of amphibians in the Amazon. Kaefer was part of a group responsible for describing Amazophrynella bilinguis in 2019. The very description of the little toad gives an idea of ​​how difficult it is to find: females measure about 2 centimeters (less than an inch), and their brown head and back make them “disappear” among the leaves and branches.

Home to an estimated 1,525 species of amphibians, the Amazon Basin is the most diverse ecosystem in the world when it comes to frogs, an order that includes toads and tree frogs. However, occurrence records have been confirmed for only about 810 of those. So going into the field and finding a new-to-science species is not unlikely.

“In almost every inventory conducted in a remote area, you come back with more than one new species for synthesis,” Kaefer says.

But finding a species in the field, analyzing it, and publishing the description takes “at least five,” he adds.

This constant stream of new-to-science discoveries masks another fact: from 2001 to 2010, only 12% of studies on Brazilian amphibians focused on Amazonian species, compared to 60% in the Atlantic Forest. This shows that studies are concentrated in Brazil’s southeast and points out some of the difficulties of conducting research in the world’s largest tropical rainforest, such as limited infrastructure, hard-to-reach areas, and lack of personnel.

“Biologists who know about amphibians are the real threatened species in the Amazon,” Kaefer says.

More than 2,000 amphibian species are threatened worldwide, making them the most vulnerable group of vertebrates on the planet. Of this total, 48% are directly threatened by habitat loss. This adds another layer of complexity to the knowledge gap regarding Amazonian amphibians: we may be losing entire populations before we even know they exist.

Biologist Guilherme Azambuja searches for tadpoles in a puddle in the Amazon. Image courtesy of Guilherme Azambuja.

Why are there so many species of amphibians in the Amazon?

Viewed from above, the Amazon Rainforest looks like a seamless green block, but it’s composed of a mosaic of distinct habitats: dry land, floodplains, streams, and seasonally flooded areas. This heterogeneity is even more pronounced when it comes to amphibians that are just a few centimeters long. Even in a stretch of forest that seems homogeneous to the human eye, some variations regarding moisture, forest height, soil type, and water type are decisive for amphibians.

“Over millions of years, species have diversified and specialized in these many habitats and in different environmental conditions,” Kaefer says. “This means that they have adapted in very distinct ways to different places. Even within a large group of amphibians, we find species with differences that are very subtle but enough for us to recognize a new one.”

The most significant example of these subtle differences is found in species from the genus Synapturanus, called disc frogs because of their round, flat profiles. These species live underground and have short reproductive periods, which makes them difficult to observe. Lineages that used to be seen as a single species are now only distinguished by approaches that combine genetic examination, vocalization monitoring and bone analysis based on 3D models.

Neblinaphryne imeri, a species described only in 2024, from Pico da Neblina. Image courtesy of Taran Grant.

It was precisely this diversity that attracted Kaefer to the Amazon. Originally from the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, he arrived in Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, in 2008 to pursue his doctoral studies, accompanied by his friend, Daiani Kochhann, now a professor at the State University of Vale do Acaraú, in Ceará state. While Kochhann’s career was focused on the study of Amazonian fish, she was convinced by her colleague to invest in the little frogs as well — a field where scientists still have much to discover.

Kochhann says Amazonian diversity isn’t defined only by the sheer number of species, but also includes the richness of reproductive behaviors. She cites the case of frogs, which most schoolchildren are taught go through two life stages, first as tadpoles, before metamorphosing into adults.

“In the Amazon, however, some species face very complex variations regarding this pattern, such as parental care, or tadpoles that hatch from the egg and live freely right away,” Kochhann says. “Some lay eggs in water; others in damp soil. And there are species that we only know in their adult phase, whose tadpoles we have never seen.”

These differences also pose a challenge for Kochhann’s research area of physiology: scientists need to know these organisms’ functions and processes, from cells to tissues and organs. Above all, they need to understand how they function in the face of increasing environmental strain, including climate change impacts.

“When we talk about climate change and amphibians, the big questions are which species will survive, which will not, and how this process will occur,” Kochhann says. “In the case of amphibians, the urgency is greater because they have characteristics that make them especially vulnerable to rising temperatures and drier climates, such as cutaneous respiration, which depends on skin moisture. Having little data on the Amazon means not understanding enough about these processes and risks.”

Data from Brazil’s National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) indicate that only five groups in the country’s Northern region, which includes much of the Brazilian Amazon, formally study amphibians in their research; three of them are systematically focused on amphibian ecology and physiology.

A search by Mongabay found 9,062 scientific articles on Amazonian amphibians published in the last 10 years, only 3% of which explicitly describe new species. Climate, on the other hand, has been a central topic in the scientific literature: the keyword comes up in 3,411 of the papers, even though a data gap persists regarding amphibians’ tolerance to higher temperatures and their adaptive capacities.

Adult female of the species Ranitomeya aetherea, described from the Juruá River Basin, western Amazon, in 2023. Image courtesy of Alexander Mônico.

Climate change and pesticides: Emerging extinction risks

Climate change scenarios for the Amazon region include not only hotter days but also more severe periods of drought, as already observed in 2023-2024. Studies indicate that the increase in prolonged drought will cause an increase in habitat loss of up to 33% for frogs.

In addition to this risk, climate change interacts with other factors that also affect amphibians, such as water contamination by pesticides and heavy metals. Biologist Guilherme Azambuja investigates precisely these interactions, which are still little explored in the literature on the Amazon.

“One of the biggest challenges I faced was the lack of studies in this field for tropical environments such as the Amazon,” he says. “We end up resorting to results obtained in Europe or North America, which compromises comparisons with our reality.”

The darker colors show the areas of the planet with higher projected risks for frog species due to increased aridity. Image courtesy of Wu et al., 2024.

In a paper published in February this year, Azambuja tested the isolated effects of warming and exposure to the insecticide methomyl — an extremely toxic substance used in crops, with high water solubility — on tadpoles from two species, Osteocephalus taurinus and Scinax ruber. In a second phase, exposure to methomyl was tested at two temperatures: 26.5° and 30° Celsius (79.7° and 86° Fahrenheit).

In both species, the higher temperatures reduced the animals’ final mass. “When the temperature increases, their metabolism accelerates, hindering mass gain,” Azambuja says.

With higher temperatures and faster metabolism, tadpole respiration also increases, which may explain their greater susceptibility to absorbing substances present in water in warmer scenarios. In the case of O. taurinus, the link was clear: heat doubled methomyl’s lethal toxicity.

But the results also showed there are no absolutes in nature, with species responding differently to multiple stress factors. In terms of lethality, the tree frog S. ruber proved to be sensitive to methomyl regardless of temperature.

For Azambuja, this variation between species is the central point. It is precisely because species diversity is so high that responses to the same conditions also vary. Therefore, the lack of knowledge about these animals and their lifestyles means we can’t fully understand the impacts of these challenges or which species may be at greater risk.

In any case, Azambuja says, adaptation to temperature or substances takes a toll on amphibians, even the most resistant ones. “Body size decreases, resulting in thinner and smaller animals. While they are resistant, they may have lower sexual fitness and face reproductive challenges. Sometimes an animal tolerates warmer environments but remains at a level of stress that may not be sustainable in the long run, leading to organism collapse,” he says.

Harlequin toads of the species Atelopus spumarius, endemic to the Amazon. Image courtesy of Jaime Culebras/ASI.

What are we about to lose?

Making the case for amphibian conservation can be difficult: considered “disgusting” by society, these little frogs face invisible threats, and their contribution to ecosystems is rarely appreciated. At the Federal University of Ceará, Karoline Ceron is trying to change this reality with a powerful argument: money.

“By proposing research to assign economic value to amphibians in Brazil, we want to work alongside those who influence decision-making in the country, considering agribusiness’s major role in policymaking,” she says. “We want to establish a dialogue between two worlds: that of conservation and that of production.”

Still in progress, her research estimates that amphibians help prevent $1.18 billion in agricultural losses in Brazil, simply by consuming insects that attack crops. In soy plantations in the Cerrado biome, for example, amphibians likely save around half a million dollars a year in pesticides, by eating approximately 300 million invertebrates in those areas.

They also play a role in public health, especially in the tropics. With amphibians’ decline, part of the natural control of disease vectors like mosquitoes, which can transmit malaria and dengue fever, becomes lost. Research conducted across Central America found an increase in malaria cases related to the loss of amphibian populations.

“There is a synergistic risk, therefore,” Ceron says. “Loss of amphibian populations can lead to increased use of pesticides and insecticides in both rural and urban areas, which in turn would create new contamination and environmental poisoning.”

This story was first published here in Portuguese on April 13, 2026.

Banner: Secretarybird. Photo: Ronelle Visagie, Author provided (no reuse)

Birds of prey in South Africa are in trouble – a study analyses data from 16 years of road counts

Birds of prey and vultures (raptors) play a vital role in ecosystems, both as top predators and key scavengers. However, compared to many other bird species, raptor populations are declining faster. This is because they need large areas to live in, have low population densities, and reproduce slowly. For these reasons they are vulnerable to human impacts like farming with pesticides, electrocution, collision with wind turbines, or poaching.

In many cases, by the time scientists and conservationists fully understand how bad the declines are, it may be too late to act. Thus, having good population monitoring is vital to act as an early warning system of declines. Many countries in the global south host important populations of raptors but lack effective monitoring programmes.

Africa is an important continent for raptor diversity. Several studies across Africa have used road counts (counting birds from repeated transects across routes) to monitor how raptor populations have changed over time. A recent study went one step further, combining trends from these different surveys from across Africa to better understand these changes at a pan-African scale. Unfortunately, no data from South Africa were available to be incorporated into this analysis.

Monitoring on the road.

In our recent study we took advantage of data that was collected by one dedicated fieldworker, Ronelle Visagie, who drove nearly 400,000 km (the distance from Earth to the moon) across the central area of South Africa (see map) between 2009 and 2025, while she worked for the Birds of Prey Programme of the Endangered Wildlife Trust.

Map of the study area showing the distribution of all road counts conducted between 2009 and 2025. The black polygon indicates the core survey area.

During these 16 years, Ronelle counted all the raptors and large birds that she saw on these work trips. Comparing how the rate of these observations (numbers of individuals per 100km driven) changed over time allowed us to explore species population trends. We had enough data to examine trends for 18 raptors and eight other large bird species over this period. Unfortunately, we did not find a good news story.

These road counts revealed that 50% of the species (13 out of 26) declined significantly, while only three species (12%) showed significant increases. The remaining ten species (38%) showed no significant trends (see Figure 2).

The declining trends raise serious concerns about the conservation status of several species in a region known to host important raptor populations. Thus, urgent conservation actions are needed, especially for species declining by more than 50%. Given that several of these species are not currently listed as threatened either globally or regionally, their conservation status may need to be reassessed.

Fig.2: Estimated population change for 26 species from road counts between 2009 and 2025 in South Africa. (a) Negative and (b) positive trends. The dashed vertical black line indicates a −50% population change. Author provided (no reuse)

Trends in raptor populations

According to our results, 42% of the assessed species declined by more than 50% in the last 16 years.

Notable declines included all of the three migratory species assessed (lesser kestrel, amur falcon and steppe buzzard). These trends match other studies from their breeding grounds in the northern hemisphere, which also suggested declines. Protecting migratory species is especially challenging because action may be needed in breeding areas, non-breeding areas, and along migration routes, where the threats they face may differ.

We also found declines of several resident raptors, including jackal buzzard, Verreaux’s eagle and secretarybird. Populations of these species declined by over 50% in our study region.

In contrast, populations of white-necked raven, greater kestrels, and white-backed vulture increased. The latter is a critically endangered species, but seems to be increasing within our study area.

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Read more: Nigeria’s Hadejia wetlands are a vital stopover for migrating birds: new survey records species found in the park

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Amur Falcon. Ronelle Visagie, Author provided (no reuse)

Some of the trends we detected were similar to a recent study that explored raptor population trends from across Africa using similar approaches to our study. For example, our findings of large declines for secretarybird and lesser kestrel were very similar to those reported in Kenya and Botswana. Additionally, similar population changes for secretarybird were detected during winter (but not summer) using road counts in the Nama Karoo (a major part of our study area) during the period just before our study (a 61% decline between the late 1980s and early 2010s). This suggests that the decline detected earlier may have continued into the mid-2020s.

Secretarybird. Megan Murgatroyd, Author provided (no reuse)

We compared the direction of trends (whether species numbers were going up or down) from our road counts and the Southern African Bird Atlas Project (SABAP2). But only about half of the trends agreed between the two methods (road counts and the bird atlas). Species with consistent trends between the methods included amur falcon and lesser kestrel – both showing declines – and greater kestrel and white-backed vulture – both showing increases. Species with inconsistent trends all showed decreases according to our road counts but increases according to the bird atlas project. These included Ludwig’s bustard, blue crane, secretarybird, black-winged kite, and southern pale chanting goshawk.

If we assume that our road counts trends are reliable, these findings suggest that although the bird atlas project data can provide valuable information on the changes in distribution of birds, atlas data may be less well suited to capture changes in abundance at large spatial scales and across multiple species.

Across Africa, declines in birds of prey are often linked to human population growth, agricultural expansion and climate change. In our study area, there have been no major recent changes in land use or population density, but more subtle or long-term human impacts may be driving these changes.

Conflicts between people and raptors, including illegal killings, could play a role. Climate change and infrastructure like power lines and wind farms are adding further pressure by fragmenting aerial habitat and affecting survival and reproduction.

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Read more: Finding space for both wind farms and eagles in South Africa

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Trends in human populations

Ronelle Visagie. Author provided (no reuse)

Human populations in Africa are expected to grow significantly over the next three decades, which will increase pressure on biodiversity.

Given the projected human population growth in Africa (79%), and a corresponding rise in demand for resources and energy, threats to vulnerable bird species are likely to get worse.

Gareth Tate. Author provided (no reuse)

It is therefore essential that we have reliable tools to monitor species trends and better understand the impacts of these pressures.

This is crucial for understanding the current biodiversity crisis and preventing severe wildlife loss.

Ronelle Visagie and Gareth Tate of the Endangered Wildlife Trust contributed to this research.

Banner image: The golden mantella, an endangered frog species found only in Madagascar. Image by Frank Vassen via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Africa’s amphibians are overlooked in conservation planning, experts warn

Herpetologists are calling for greater inclusion of amphibians in African conservation planning, in a recent letter published in the journal Science.

Africa is home to roughly 1,170 known species of amphibians, 99% of which are endemic. Some 37% of the amphibians are recognized as threatened with extinction.

The researchers note that amphibians — frogs, salamanders and caecilians — are especially important as early-warning detectors of ecological disruption, given their sensitivity to pathogens, thermal stress, pollution and hydrological changes in their wetland habitats. Yet amphibians as a group remain poorly represented in protected-area planning and management tools in Africa, the authors write. They note there are only 12 documented amphibian-specific action plans across the continent. These include a conservation plan for frogs in Cape Town, South Africa, and for the golden mantella frog (Mantella aurantiaca) in Madagascar.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example, doesn’t yet have conservation action plans specifically dedicated to amphibians, according to the letter’s lead author, Bienvenu Mwale, an expert on amphibians in the DRC and Cameroon. “To date, the DR Congo existing legal frameworks remain broad and give limited attention to this taxonomic group, with a stronger focus on large mammals,” Mwale told Mongabay by email.

Cameroon, on the other hand, has given full protection to six amphibian species, including the Goliath frog (Conraua goliath), the world’s largest, through a ministerial decree. This could be a good model for African conservation planning, Mwale said.

He added that several African amphibian species are currently classified as data deficient on the IUCN Red List, meaning there’s not enough information to assess their conservation status.

“One of the needs for amphibian conservation plans in Africa (that citizens can help with) is specific information on distribution,” Amaël Borzée, a co-author of the letter and member of the Amphiban Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, told Mongabay by email. “This is something anyone can help with, and for instance, doing it through the iNaturalist platform is a great way for people to get engaged. This is easy: take a picture of any amphibian and upload it on iNaturalist, and the job is done, and it helps.”

Karen Lips, an amphibian expert not affiliated with the letter, told Mongabay in an email: “I agree that much more research and much more conservation is needed in Africa. It is a continent with incredible richness of biodiversity, but still needs research to understand patterns of distribution and threats to that biodiversity.

“Africa is one of the regions with the least amount of information on amphibian population biology, meaning that we are not able to assess how land use change, climate change, disease, or other factors affect those species, because we have no baseline population data for comparisons,” Lips added.

A program is returning burrowing owls back to their natural habitat

The Upper Nicola Band released 11 captive-born owls in spax̌mn — part of a decade-long effort to reinstate the tiny birds of prey whose populations have plummeted

Pluto, an 11-year-old educational burrowing owl with the Burrowing Owl Conservation Society of BC, is pictured at N’kwala School’s gym in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake), B.C., on April 22, 2026. Photo by Aaron Hemens

This story is a collaboration between IndigiNews and The Narwhal.

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Nine-year-old John Smithers cradles a tiny burrowing owl in his hands, preparing to release it into the grasslands of Upper Nicola Band (UNB) territory.

Like other young syilx people, he’s grown up hearing stories about the small birds of prey whose populations have plummeted in the region in the last century or so.

The owls – known in syilx culture as guardians, guides or messengers – were “once a common element” in landscapes stretching from the southern Interior of “B.C.” all the way to Manitoba, according to “Canada’s” Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife.

Now, burrowing owl sightings are rare. In 2003, the Government of Canada listed the burrowing owl as endangered under the federal Species at Risk Act. Experts link the bird’s decline to the gradual loss of its grassland habitats over the last century.

According to the Burrowing Owl Alliance, the bird’s population in the country has declined by over 96 per cent since 1987.

“Lots of animals can come and get them,” Smithers said about the lack of protective habitat for the burrowing owl.

John Smithers, a nine-year-old student from Upper Nicola Band’s N’kwala School, prepares to release a captive-born burrowing owl down an artificial nesting burrow and into the wild, during a release event for 11 captive-born owls into the community’s owl restoration site in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake) on April 22, 2026. Photo by Aaron Hemens

Earlier this year, Smithers became N’kwala School’s annual student ambassador to a regional burrowing owl recovery program that’s being led by the First Nation.

As ambassador, he was invited to be the first person of the year to release a captive-born burrowing owl into the wild on April 22, in his home community of spax̌mn (Douglas Lake) in “B.C.’s” Nicola Valley.

The release, which coincided with Earth Day, marked 10 years since UNB began releasing captive-born burrowing owls onto their homelands.

In return, those captive-raised owls have produced 125 “wild-born” baby owls — or fledglings — since being released from the community’s restoration site.

Despite high winds and the risk of ticks, dozens of excited people from all age groups turned out in high spirits for the release.

Students, nature enthusiasts and Elders alike shared laughs and smiles at the sight of the precious birds, with their round heads, short stature and long legs.

Upper Nicola Band Elder Howard (Howie) Holmes prepares to release a captive-born burrowing owl down an artificial nesting burrow and into the wild, during a release event for 11 captive-born owls into the community’s owl restoration site in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake) on April 22, 2026. Photo by Aaron Hemens

Framed by grassy hills, Smithers released the first owl under the warm sunshine with the help of Dawn Brodie, one of the main field technicians who has been involved in the program since its inception.

The nervous bird nearly escaped from his grasp and into the open air. But thanks to the quick reflexes of Brodie, her helping hands connected the captive-born owl back to the land and down an artificial nesting burrow that had been prepared by the UNB stewardship department.

“Soft” is the word Smithers used to describe the feeling of holding the owl.

Soon after, several guests in attendance – from program partners to Youth and Elders – were invited by the field technicians to release an owl down different burrows that were created by the recovery program and its partners.

Some of the owls wore amusingly bewildered expressions as they waited in the gentle grasp of human hands before being placed into a burrow.

A captive-born burrowing owl prior to being released into an artificial nesting burrow, during the release event for 11 captive-born owls into the Upper Nicola Band’s burrowing owl restoration site in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake) on April 22, 2026. Photo by Aaron Hemens

In total, 11 captive-born owls — six males and five females — were released into five of the site’s 35 artificial burrows that day. They are all just under one year old.

“The program has exceeded all our expectations,” said Loretta Holmes, a UNB member and senior resource technician with the band’s stewardship department.

“The owls, which we call sq̓əq̓axʷ, have responded better than we dared to hope ten years ago. And community interest and involvement has been strong since the start.”

Underground burrows protect, allow for monitoring of owls

The tiny burrows are connected through a network of underground tunnels hidden under the grassland hills above spax̌mn.

Each artificial burrow consists of a small, corrugated tube in the ground that serves as its entrance, which feeds into the larger network of tunnels. The entry points are camouflaged in the field by grass and large rocks.

Artificial nesting burrows are scattered throughout the grassland hills above Upper Nicola Band, at the community’s burrowing owl restoration program site in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake) on April 22, 2026. Photo by Aaron Hemens

Before any captive-raised owls are released, handfuls of frozen mice are inserted into the burrows and tunnels.

“That helps them not have to go as far to hunt as often. It encourages them to lay more eggs, and helps them rear their young ones when they’re hatched,” said Holmes.

Once released, the burrow entrances are closed off for a few days, explained Chris Gill, a project biologist with the band’s Species-at-Risk program.

“It’s to let them acclimatize and calm down, basically. And potentially bond with the mate that’s in there,” said Gill.

Breeding gets underway as soon as two owls choose each other as mates, and Gill said that eggs are laid in June.

The burrow tunnels, which protect the owls from predators, are connected to a nest box. The nest box has an opening at ground level, allowing technicians to observe how many eggs have been laid and monitor activity.

Technicians also attach leg bands to the newly-hatched birds here, to track future migration.

Mice are also delivered to the burrows two to three times a week. Holmes said that this type of care results in nests that carry nine to 10 eggs — more than the average of six to eight laid by burrowing owls in the wild.

The mice are “giving them a big head start and maximizing the chances of producing healthy fledglings, and healthy parents as well,” Gill said.

The owls stay in the site’s burrow network from anywhere from four days to up to a week, depending on weather conditions, and are then free to fly around in the open air.

“They mostly stick at the site, even after you release them out of the burrow, because they’re now used to the site,” said Gill.

“They may have paired up, or they may choose another mate from the site.”

Chris Gill, a project biologist with the Upper Nicola Band’s Species-at-Risk program, speaks at the playground of N’kwala School, prior to the release event for 11 captive-born owls into the community’s burrowing owl restoration site in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake) on April 22, 2026. Photo by Aaron Hemens

By July, fledglings will start to emerge from the burrows, and the owls usually start to migrate south in September and October. They’ll return to the breeding sites next April.

Tracked migration data from burrowing owls who left the site in previous years revealed that the birds travel as far as “San Jose, California.”

“It’s just so amazing that they went all the way somewhere, wintered in those conditions and came back,” said Holmes.

“It’s wonderful.”

UNB program part of larger effort to bring back owls

In the last decade, more than 100 burrowing owls have been raised in captivity at the Kamloops Wildlife Park by the Burrowing Owl Conservation Society, before being released at spax̌mn. There’s a site in “Oliver” that supports the program as well.

The captive-raised owls all come with identification tags on their legs, which are documented by field technicians before they are released into the burrows.

Two captive-born burrowing owls from the Kamloops Wildlife Park — one female and one male — are transported to their artificial burrow nesting sites for release at the burrowing owl restoration site in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake), B.C., on April 22, 2026. Photo by Aaron Hemens

Many of the 125 wild-born owls have left the UNB site and returned, including four who came back this spring; two males and two females, three of which were born at the site last year.

While the conservation efforts are helping to re-populate the burrowing owl species in this part of the country, UNB views this work as only one piece of the larger puzzle of how to protect the community’s rare and sensitive grassland ecosystem habitats.

By stewarding these ecosystems — and restoring and supporting the biodiversity that has been depleted — it’s also an act by the band to protect their cultural identity and fulfill generational responsibilities around caring for the land and for all living things.

“Conserving a species at risk, like a burrowing owl, it’s about far more than a single bird or species. It’s about upholding relationships, responsibilities and balance with the living world,” said Holmes.

Animals like the burrowing owl are part of an interconnected system that has sustained Indigenous Peoples for generations, she said.

Loretta Holmes, an Upper Nicola Band member and senior resource technician with the band’s stewardship department, wears owl-themed earrings made by a Kamloops-based Indigenous artist, during the release event for 11 captive-born owls into the site in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake) on April 22, 2026. Photo by Aaron Hemens

“If one species declines, it signals that the relationship between people and the land is out of balance. Conservation becomes an act of restoring harmony and respect in that system,” she said.

“Protecting species at risk aligns with Indigenous laws that emphasize caretaking. Conservation efforts honour the principle that decisions made today must ensure the healthy lands and wildlife for our relatives yet to come.”

It’s just one of many projects under the community’s stewardship department’s larger Species-At-Risk program, which is designed to protect and restore endangered species populations on their lands.

The program also looks at restoration efforts for species including American badger, Lewis’s woodpecker and Great basin spadefoot — all of which have been federally recognized as threatened or endangered.

Penticton Indian Band — a fellow syilx community that’s under the Okanagan Nation Alliance (ONA) along with UNB — also released burrowing owls through their own similar program that same week.

“In British Columbia, burrowing owls are extirpated. That means that they’re not actually existing on the landscape without reintroduction programs, like the Upper Nicola Band’s,” said Gill.

A captive-born burrowing owl is released into an artificial nesting burrow, during the release event for 11 captive-born owls into the Upper Nicola Band’s burrowing owl restoration site in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake) on April 22, 2026. Photo by Aaron Hemens

But Traditional Ecological Knowledge gathered from Elders and advisors confirmed that burrowing owls historically existed on the spax̌mn landscape.

In 2015, a year before the burrowing owl recovery program launched, the Species-At-Risk team conducted surveys on reserve lands to determine a suitable habitat for the birds.

They settled on the grasslands above the UNB community as the reintroduction program’s site.

The grassland ecosystem landscape above the Upper Nicola Band community is the site of their burrowing owl restoration program, pictured in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake) on April 22, 2026. Photo by Aaron Hemens

“We found suitable habitat for burrowing owls — but no burrowing owls present,” said Gill.

The birds traditionally nested in the underground burrows that were dug and abandoned by different animals, from badgers to marmots and coyotes, he said

Because of a lack of badgers, Gill said there weren’t any natural burrows out on the land.

“That’s why the Upper Nicola Band put in these artificial burrows,” he said.

“There are actually badgers on that reserve, but there are very few — and far in-between — so we can’t rely on a burrowing owl finding a badger burrow.”

According to the province, “several small” burrowing owl nesting sites were identified in the Okanagan and Thompson valleys from 1900 to 1928.

Historical nesting areas include Osoyoos, Oliver, Penticton, White Lake, lower Similkameen Valley, Vernon, Kamloops and Douglas Lake.

Artificial nesting burrows are scattered throughout the grassland hills above Upper Nicola Band, at the community’s burrowing owl restoration program site in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake) on April 22, 2026. Photo by Aaron Hemens

But between 1928 and 1980, only four nesting sites were recorded.

The federal government attributed the “conversion of grassland to cropland” as the “ultimate factor responsible for the decline in burrowing owls.” It estimates that the species experienced a 90 per cent population decline from 1990 to 2000.

Also contributing to the owl’s population decline is the “gauntlet” of issues they face on their migration route, Holmes said.

This includes fatalities occurring from collisions with wind turbine farms and motor vehicles. Pesticides targeting insects and rodents that the birds feed upon indirectly poisons them as well.

In 2004, the estimated population of burrowing owls in “Canada” was recorded at 795 mature individuals. In 2015, it had plunged to approximately 270.

Burrowing owl populations are “in a nose dive,” said Gill.

He called the burrowing owl “a canary in a coal mine” in measuring the state of ecosystem health.

“A badger, a burrowing owl — those species are the indicator species. If they’re not doing well, then that’s a sign of something bigger that’s not doing well,” he said.

Grasslands are also endangered

Along with Holmes and Brodie, Gill helped initiate the burrowing owl reintroduction program 10 years ago. He called the two women “the work horses” of the program.

“We monitor the owls, and write really good data collection on it,” said Brodie, a veterinary technician who supports the program as a burrowing owl consultant.

The program has been a success, Gill said, not just because of the region’s “great grasslands.”

“But it’s also the stewardship that’s going on with these owls,” he said.

“It’s one of the most productive sites in B.C. for releasing our fledging owls.”

In the wild, burrowing owls can live anywhere from four to six years, according to Lauren Meads, the executive director of the Burrowing Owl Conservation Society of BC.

Meads, who was joined at the release event by the society’s 11-year-old educational burrowing owl, Pluto, added that in captivity they can live up to 15 years.

A student from N’kwala School in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake), B.C., pets Pluto, an 11-year-old educational burrowing owl with the Burrowing Owl Conservation Society of BC, at the school gym on April 22, 2026. Photo by Aaron Hemens

According to the Government of B.C., grasslands made up less than one percent of the province’s land area in 2004, adding that “only a small percentage of our grasslands are protected.”

But grasslands surrounding the Upper Nicola landscape are “some of the most intact and incredibly resilient grasslands” Gill has observed, he said.

“Grasslands are one of the most endangered ecosystems in Canada … They’re very, very rare. It looks like we have a lot, but this is one little spot,” he said.

Holmes added that protecting burrowing owls also protects the grasslands.

“That’s their home. It works hand-in-hand,” she said.

Community members walk towards an artificial nesting burrow at the Upper Nicola Band’s burrowing owl restoration site in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake) on April 22, 2026, during the release event for 11 captive-born owls into the wild. Photo by Aaron Hemens

Burrowing owls also hold stories, teachings

Holmes said that the burrowing owl’s population decline and status as an endangered species is not just an ecological matter, but a cultural issue as well.

Burrowing owls are a “symbol of our cultural identity,” she said.

“Owls can be messengers, teachers or indicators in an Indigenous knowledge system. They’re often associated with observation, protections and indicators of change.”

The loss of burrowing owls “erodes the stories, the teachings and our ways of understanding the land that has been passed down through generations,” she added.

Upper Nicola Band Elders Howard (Howie) Holmes and Linda Intalin Holmes are pictured at the community’s burrowing owl restoration site, during the release event for 11 captive-born owls into the site in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake) on April 22, 2026. Photo by Aaron Hemens

Upper Nicola Chief Dan Manuel said in a statement that burrowing owls are deeply woven into syilx culture.

“For our people, the cultural, spiritual and environmental importance of sq̓əq̓axʷ are one,” said Manuel.

“Our culture is rooted in co-existence with the world around us. We have a responsibility to care for the land and the beings on it. We must help rebuild what has been lost, and it will continue to support us.”

Dawn Brodie, one of the main field technicians who has been involved in Upper Nicola Band’s burrowing owl restoration program since its inception, leads the release event of 11 captive-born owls into the community’s owl restoration site in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake) on April 22, 2026. Photo by Aaron Hemens

Holmes said that having a dedicated conservation program fulfills those duties that are owed to the land and to all living beings.

“It treats our relatives with respect,” she said.

“The land, the animals, the plants — everything that’s there — provides us with sustenance. So it’s our responsibility to take care of them as well. We see all those things as our relatives.”

She emphasized that Indigenous Peoples have an inherent responsibilities as stewards of their territories — responsibilities that originate in syilx laws, teachings and oral traditions, also known as captikʷł.

“That predates colonial conservation frameworks,” she said.

UNB Elder Casey Holmes thanked all the staff and volunteers involved in the community’s stewardship program, especially for their work in supporting the restoration of the burrowing owl population.

“People are making a difference. Even if it doesn’t look like a difference, they made a difference today, to make this a success – to make this a part of history that we’re not losing,” said Casey.

Upper Nicola Band Elder Casey Holmes speaks at the playground of N’kwala School, prior to the release event for 11 captive-born owls into the community’s burrowing owl restoration site in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake) on April 22, 2026. Photo by Aaron Hemens

When the community loses a tmixʷ (All living things) relative, Casey said that “we lose a part of history.”

“Bringing back this, is regaining back that history,” he said.

Deadly droughts and floods wipe out young California salmon en route to Pacific

Salmon are becoming river "ghosts" as brutal droughts and violent floods cause unprecedented losses on their treacherous journey to the Pacific Ocean, scientists say. A study led by the University of Essex; NOAA Fisheries; University of California, Davis; and Cramer Fish Sciences has found that young Californian Chinook salmon face a deadly double threat from extreme weather and the destruction of historical wetland habitats they rely on.

The study emphasized how deadly droughts are for young fish and how they thrive in wetter conditions. However, the results also indicated that in modern, simplified rivers, extreme flows during winter storms can be devastating too. The paper is published in the journal Global Change Biology.

Decades of engineering in California's 1,100 square mile Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta have created an "ecological trap" by carving the Delta into a series of fast-flowing canals.

The research paper contrasted juvenile salmon habitat use during the multi-year drought of 2012–2016 with the massive floods of 2016–2017 that were associated with millions of dollars of damage to roads and infrastructure.

It showed that the altered river system simply could not support the smallest fish at extreme high flows, with high numbers being shot out to sea in early 2017 instead of being guided through the freshwater floodplains and wetlands they need to grow and survive.

The team described these lost fish as river "ghosts" because they die unseen, their fate hidden beneath the water.

Lead author Dr. Anna Sturrock, from Essex's School of Life Sciences, said, "The heroes of the tale, the 'early migrants,' were a bit of a mystery before. They're simply too small to track with traditional tags when they leave their rivers. By turning to natural chemical tags that are more often used to identify the origin of bones found in archaeological digs, we could track the lifetime movements of these tiny fish and identify the key mortality hotspots."

By analyzing the chemical composition of otoliths, tiny ear stones that preserve a chemical record of each fish's life, alongside their eye lens isotopes, the team reconstructed where each salmon had traveled and grown. By sampling the same cohort across their entire life cycle, they could also infer where and when they were being lost.

The study showed that early migrants became rarer at every stage of the journey. On average, the early migrants made up about 80% of the juvenile salmon entering the Delta, but only 26% leaving it and just 15% of the adults that returned to spawn.

In the extreme climate years, young fish either face low flows and rising temperatures or are swept downstream by powerful floods into hostile environments with a slim chance of survival.

"In extreme climate years, juvenile salmon run out of options, and climate models predict these harsh conditions will only become more frequent," said Rachel Johnson, senior author of the study and scientist with NOAA Fisheries.

Despite heavy losses, some fish from every migratory group still made it back to reproduce, showing why having different types of salmon is so important.

These different groups take slightly different routes and leave at different times, which helps the species survive when conditions change, but researchers warn that as weather becomes more extreme, losing this diversity makes the whole population more likely to collapse.

The researchers say that restoration actions need to mimic that diversity and to be made climate-ready, with habitats restored across the full migratory route so salmon have safe places to grow, shelter and survive, whatever the weather throws at them.

Dr. Sturrock added, "The impacts of 'whiplash weather' are being felt all around the world, impacting both human and natural systems. Salmon didn't evolve to bet everything on a single strategy. Historically, the Delta offered multiple pathways and places to grow, which allowed different migratory groups to succeed in different years. Restoring that diversity of habitats is essential if we want salmon populations to remain resilient in the face of increasingly extreme and unpredictable climate conditions."

Banner image of a Venezuela snouted treefrog by Taucce et al., 2022, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

Study finds microplastics in tadpoles in the Amazon for the first time

Researchers have recorded microplastics in frog tadpoles and their pond habitats in the wild in the Amazon for the first time, according to a new study. This confirms widespread microplastic contamination in the Amazon Rainforest, the researchers say.

Previous studies from the region have found microplastic contamination in fish, invertebrates, soil and water samples.

In the recent study, ecologist Fabrielle Barbosa de Araújo from the Federal University of Pará and her colleagues collected 20 water samples from five natural water bodies formed by the accumulation of rainwater in soil depressions at Gunma Ecological Park in Pará state in April 2025. These temporary ponds are important breeding sites and larval development areas for various frog species in the Amazon.

From each of the five ponds, the researchers also collected 100 tadpoles of the Venezuela snouted treefrog (Scinax x-signatus), commonly found in both forests and urban areas across South America.

The researchers found microplastics in each sampled pond and tadpole. Most of the microplastics were transparent, blue and black fibers made of plastic like polyester. Other studies have also found similar blue and transparent fibers across the Amazon, possibly originating from sanitary sewage and fishing activities, the researchers write.

Araújo told Mongabay by email that finding microplastics in the tadpoles and their habitats was not surprising as several previous studies have shown microplastic contamination in other organisms in the Amazon. “What really caught our attention was the large quantity found, especially because this is an area with low [human] population density and considered relatively well preserved,” she said.

Araújo said she’s particularly concerned about microplastics in the tadpoles because the “contamination can negatively affect the health of amphibians, causing genetic and morphological damage, such as alterations in blood cells and in the DNA itself.” She added that microplastic particles can also accumulate in tissues and cause physiological changes in frogs.

The authors write that tadpoles of the Venezuela snouted treefrog eat algae, fungi and eggs in water and may have ingested the microplastics that way.

“Research on the presence of microplastics in the Amazon has intensified in recent years, and our goal is to continue monitoring this contamination, especially in anuran tadpoles, in order to better understand how this pollutant is affecting the biodiversity of our region,” Araújo said.

“This study provides the first evidence that microplastics are reaching tadpoles in the Amazon, a region where we have very limited data,” Jess Hua, an ecologist who studies freshwater ecology and amphibians and wasn’t affiliated with the study, told Mongabay by email. “This is important because amphibians represent the most threatened vertebrate taxa and understanding potential threats, including from microplastics, is important to their conservation.”

Hua added that microplastic contamination in freshwater systems is still much less studied compared to marine systems.

Massive marine heat wave caused Caribbean coral reefs to collapse much faster than predicted

For decades, coral reefs throughout the Caribbean have been suffering from disease, pollution, overfishing and rising sea temperatures, yet most have continued to grow—until now.

In 2023 and 2024, surface temperatures climbed to record highs in the world's oceans, and a marine heat wave of unprecedented length and intensity spread across the tropics. Satellites from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration detected heat stress that could cause corals to bleach across more than 80% of the planet's reef areas.

During these periods of extreme stress, corals expel the symbiotic algae that give them their color and most of their food—turning them stark white and leaving them vulnerable to starvation, diseases and eventually death.

Across the North Atlantic, including the Caribbean, the heat stayed for months, with heat stress two-to-three times higher than reefs had ever experienced. Heat stress, the phenomena of high temperatures putting fragile ecosystems under pressure, can permanently alter their ability to function.

This triggered what is now recognized as the fourth global coral bleaching event, the most severe one that has been documented.

Coral reefs are among the most productive ecosystems on Earth, and their importance to people is fundamental. They feed hundreds of millions through small-scale fisheries, underpin tourism across the Caribbean, and serve as natural breakwaters that protect the coast from storms and reduce flooding events.

Caribbean reefs are eroding fast

In a new study, we found that across the Caribbean, the 2023 marine heat wave—combined with a deadly disease known as stony coral tissue loss disease—has pushed reefs over a threshold scientists thought was a decade or more away. They are now eroding faster than corals can rebuild them.

We studied reefs in the Mexican Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, comparing data collected before the heat wave (2018–2022) with surveys after it (2023–24). At each reef, we counted live corals and organisms that break down the reef, like parrotfish and sea urchins. From those counts, we estimated how much reef-building (carbonate production) and reef-breaking (bioerosion) was happening, then calculated the net result—whether the reef was gaining or losing material.

The results were stark: between 70% and 75% of our Caribbean sites had tipped from net growth into net erosion. They are now losing calcium carbonate faster than corals can add it. The threshold that earlier models had suggested might be crossed over during the next decade or so has already arrived.

This shift was driven by the loss of fast‑growing, branching and plate‑forming corals, especially the Acropora species, which have very high growth rates and disproportionately contribute to reef building.

One of our most unsettling findings is that the Caribbean reef sites that still had high coral cover and high carbonate production before the disease and heat wave were the ones that lost the most. Some lost up to 8 kilograms of calcium carbonate per square meter per year.

A tale of two seas

Our survey also revealed a striking contrast. While Caribbean reefs collapsed, reefs in the Gulf of Mexico largely held their ground. The great majority of Gulf sites remained net positive after the heat wave.

The difference comes down to which corals are pre-eminent in each region. In the Gulf of Mexico, reefs are dominated by slow-growing, mound-shaped corals. They grow more slowly, but they are tougher when the heat kicks in. They bleached during the heat wave but mostly survived, keeping the reef's carbonate budget positive.

This is the balance between the constructing and eroding processes. When more is added than removed, the coral reef can grow. When that balance flips, the reef stops growing and may even erode.

Moreover, sites in the Gulf of Mexico have not yet been affected by stony coral tissue loss disease, which preferentially kills the same massive, long-lived species that are keeping Gulf reefs alive. By the time the heat arrived, large parts of the Caribbean had already lost their most resilient corals because of the disease outbreak. When started, the heat wave finished.

Why reef erosion matters

All the benefits reefs provide rely on a delicate balance between reef construction and erosion.

Tropical reefs are essentially vast limestone structures, built slowly over centuries as corals deposit calcium carbonate skeletons. At the same time, waves and various reef organisms like parrotfish, sea urchins and boring sponges chip away at them.

An eroding, flattening reef begins to lose its capacity to provide benefits to other species and people.

We did not expect to be documenting the moment at which a major region of the ocean crossed from growing to eroding. The fact that it happened this quickly, and at some of the most iconic and well-studied reefs in the Caribbean, suggests the timelines scientists have been using may be too optimistic.

Our findings may also force a rethink of how to approach coral restoration. Programs across the Caribbean have invested heavily in replanting fast-growing branching species of coral, such as Acropora, because they rebuild structural complexity quickly. The 2023–24 heat wave wiped out many of these restored populations, along with wild ones.

Restoration will have to diversify. Exploring approaches such as moving heat-tolerant genes between populations (assisted gene flow) and breeding corals that survive heat better (selective breeding) might be a promising path.

But restoration alone will not be enough. Reversing the decline requires rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to slow the frequency and intensity of marine heat waves, alongside serious local action on pollution, nutrient runoff, sedimentation and disease—the stressors that weaken corals before the heat arrives.

Timor green pigeon 'likely to go extinct' without urgent action, according to scientists

The Timor green pigeon, which is under pressure from hunting and habitat loss, is at serious risk of extinction and should be uplisted to Critically Endangered, according to a new study from researchers at Charles Darwin University and BirdLife International.

The study, published in Oryx, provides the clearest evidence of the rapid decline of the species, which is now estimated to number fewer than 500 individuals in Timor-Leste and is thought to be functionally extinct in neighboring Indonesia.

The authors of the study say that the Timor green pigeon should be reclassified as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List and that urgent action is needed in both countries to save the species and others like it.

Dr. Colin Trainor, lead author of the study from Charles Darwin University, Australia, said, "I first visited Timor-Leste in 2002. On my second day working for BirdLife, I got the bus to the village of Tutuala in the far eastern district of Lautem, then walked eight kilometers down the coast where I spotted the Timor green pigeon for the first time. It wasn't that difficult to see back then in a good forest. But it was still exciting because it's only found on Timor and some of the neighboring islands.

"I finished my fieldwork in 2006, but have kept going back to Timor Leste ever since. Though Nino Konis Santana National Park was founded in 2008, this hasn't prevented the rapid decline of this and many other species in the area.

"Since 2004—when I had two records on Rote Island off West Timor—remarkably I have had no records outside Lautem district in Timor-Leste, with the conclusion that they have become increasingly restricted to this well-forested district.

"It's very sad to see so few green pigeons left. What we need now is the government, conservation organizations and local communities to come together to stop it being lost forever."

The study is based on over 1,400 days of field surveys by the authors between 2002 and 2025 throughout the Timor green pigeon's range, covering Timor-Leste, Jaco Island, West Timor, Rote Island, and Semau Island. Other historical and contemporary records by ornithologists and birdwatchers going back to 1969 were also included.

In total, there were 96 records of Timor green pigeon, with 74 in Timor-Leste and the majority of these in Lautem district. The majority (82%) of the sightings were located in protected areas, particularly Nino Konis Santana National Park.

Based on an assessment of all known field records, the authors estimate that there are 100–500 individuals left, with the authors suspecting that the true number is likely to be at the lower end of this estimate.

Jafet Potenzo Lopes, an author of the study from Conservation International, said, "I was born in Lautem District and have been working here as a conservationist for many years. But so much has changed in that time. Ten years ago you could hike to see the Timor green pigeon, but now it only lives in the most remote areas.

"It is very difficult to convince hunters to change their behavior, because it's part of the culture. But I think we need to ask people how they'd feel if this bird disappears. Hunters may like the meat, but if nothing changes soon there will be none."

The island of Timor is divided into Indonesian West Timor and Timor-Leste, which gained independence from Indonesia in 2002 and was formerly known as East Timor. The island is located in a unique area, known as Wallacea, that separates Asian and Australian fauna, and hosts a high number of species found nowhere else on Earth (endemic species).

The Timor green pigeon, a fruit-eating bird the color of a green mango, is one of these endemic species. It is part of the Columbidae family (pigeons and doves), which is one of the most threatened bird families globally. Despite being listed as Endangered since 2000, little has been done to protect the species since then.

Alex Berryman, Senior Red List Officer at BirdLife International and a co-author of the study, said, "The Timor green pigeon may now be one of the bird species most likely to go extinct anywhere in Wallacea—a biodiversity hotspot renowned for its concentration of threatened species. Unfortunately, our conclusion is that the species is already functionally extinct in Indonesia, leaving conservation efforts in Timor-Leste crucial for its survival. Timor-Leste remains frustratingly overlooked in conservation—and that urgently needs to change."

Dr. Trainor concluded, "Though the situation is dire, there is still hope for the Timor green pigeon. The biggest threat to the remaining population comes probably from quite a small number of hunters, so there is an opportunity to change their minds, either through reason, financial support or a combination of both. Hunting is part of the local culture, but unless something changes there will be no Timor green pigeons left to hunt within a few years. We need urgent action and we need it now."

Banner image: Deforestation, climate change and trade pose threats to the species, which has dwindled to a few hundred from some 750,000 in the 1960s. Image by kaysud via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

US proposes endangered species protections for an imperiled Jamaican butterfly

• The U.S. has proposed listing a rare butterfly from Jamaica, the Jamaican kite swallowtail under the Endangered Species Act.
• The striking blue-green and black butterfly, endemic to this island country, hovers on the brink of extinction. Scientists have observed no more than 250 adults in the wild in recent years.
• Deforestation, devastating hurricanes and droughts on the island have destroyed much of this butterfly’s breeding sites; only four remain. Demand for framed butterflies used in home decor is another factor in their disappearance.
• ESA listing would bring attention to the species and stop its trade in the U.S. Conservationists hope it will also fund efforts to protect the butterfly’s habitat.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) recently proposed listing Jamaica’s most imperiled butterfly, the Jamaican kite swallowtail, as endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

The species (Protographium marcellinus), a small, fast-flying butterfly, flutters through its limestone forest home. Its wings, painted in streaks of bright turquoise and black with a dash of red, sport long, narrow tails.

These charismatic butterflies live on this island and nowhere else. In recent years, they’ve nearly disappeared. Back in the 1960s, scientists recorded about 750,000 individuals; that number has plummeted to between 50 and 250 today. In some years, they’ve seen none.

It’s such an alarming decline that scientists say this swallowtail should jump two categories on the IUCN Red List, from vulnerable to critically endangered.

“This listing would be a real turning point for this species,” said Dianne DuBois, senior scientist at the U.S.-based NGO Center for Biological Diversity, which has been fighting for ESA protections for the butterfly since 1994. After a few failed attempts, it sued USFWS in 2021, which resulted in the agency drawing up the current proposal.

ESA listings prevent extinction in 99% of the species under the act, but the wait is often quite long, about 12 years on average. Time may not be on its side for the Jamaican kite swallowtail, which hangs on the brink of extinction.

“We wish this proposal had come three decades ago,” DuBois said. “We really want to urge the Fish and Wildlife Service to work quickly to finalize these protections and let the ESA work its magic.”

Vaughan Turland at Jamaica’s Windsor Research Centre, who has studied the species for decades, welcomed the U.S. proposal. “Any formal recognition of the potential demise of such an iconic species is important,” he said, because it raises awareness and urges urgent conservation actions.

The Jamaican kite swallowtail is a small, endemic species that lives in Jamaica’s limestone forests. Image by Vaughan Turland.

Hammered by vanishing habitat, climate change and trade

Jamaica is rapidly losing its forests, and along with it, the Jamaican kite swallowtail is losing its homelands. Trees are felled to make way for mines, quarries, expanding farmlands, human settlements and livestock grazing.

Baby caterpillars feed only on the leaves of the black lancewood trees (Oxandra lanceolata) found in limestone forests. Cocooned pupae stay buried in the leaf litter for months before turning into showy butterflies. Meanwhile, black lancewood is targeted by loggers: Thousands of these trees are cut down to make furniture, fish pots, stakes for growing yams and charcoal for cooking, among other things.

As a result, the butterfly’s breeding habitat has shrunk by about 70% since the 1960s, according to a study by Turland and his colleague Thomas Turner from the Florida Museum of Natural History, who’s also considered an authority on the species. Today, the swallowtails breed in just four sites on the island where a few dense stands of black lancewood remain.

Extreme weather events, including hurricanes and drought, pose an increasing threat. Hurricane Melissa, one of the strongest hurricanes on record in the Atlantic basin, made landfall in Jamaica in October 2025, damaging one of the butterfly’s few remaining breeding sites, Turland said.

Caterpillars only eat the leaves of the black lancewood trees, which are logged by the thousands to make furniture, fish pots and charcoal, and more. Image by Vaughan Turland.

Because of its striking appearance, the rare butterfly is also in demand for home décor, framed and hung on the wall. It’s part of a massive trade that includes more than 3,700 butterfly species the world over, mostly coming from the Global South. They’re bought primarily by consumers in the U.S. and Europe.

Fewer than 70 butterfly species have trade protections under CITES, the global wildlife trade agreement. All others, including the Jamaican kite swallowtail, can be traded internationally without restrictions.

“The Jamaican kite swallowtails are one of many butterfly and invertebrate species that have kind of caught the eye of collectors that pin and frame them for display,” DuBois said.

How many are captured and sold remains unclear, as it’s illegal to catch them in Jamaica, but it’s likely a lucrative activity in a country where workers average $34 a day. Dubois said this butterfly sells online for as much as $178 apiece.

For an animal this rare, every sale matters. “Even low levels of collection can be devastating for a species with such a small population,” DuBois said.

This is where the ESA listing could make the most impact. If finalized, the listing would “ensure that this species no longer gets caught up in this popular online decor trade,” DuBois said. It could also bring more attention to the butterfly’s perilous state, and with it, funding to protect its habitat, she added.

(Left) Deforestation has resulted in a nearly 70% loss of the butterfly’s breeding sites. (Right) A Jamaican kite swallowtail. Images by Vaughan Turland and kaysud via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

The ESA listing proposal is currently open for comments until June 16, and it’s an open forum: Anyone with information about the species or who is interested in butterfly conservation can post statements. USFWS will then have a year to make its decision. If the listing is finalized, it would be the first addition to the ESA since U.S. President Donald Trump took office for his second term.

“If we can get it listed, there’s a very good chance that it will avoid extinction,” DuBois said.

Spoorthy Raman is a staff writer at Mongabay, covering all things wild with a special focus on lesser-known wildlife, the wildlife trade, and environmental crime.

Banner image of Andean cock-of-the-rocks (Rupicola peruvianus) in Ecuador. Photo by Rhett A. Butler for Mongabay.

Climate change could erase most South American cloud forests, study warns

• Climate change could eliminate up to 91% of South America’s cloud forests by 2070 under a high-emissions scenario; even the most optimistic projections show significant losses.
• Because cloud forests capture moisture from fog and release it into streams, their disappearance threatens the drinking water supply of an estimated 16 million people who live downstream.
• Only about one-third of South America’s cloud forests fall within protected areas, and those protections cannot shield the forests if the climate itself becomes too warm and dry to support them.
• Scientists say cutting greenhouse gas emissions is the most essential step, alongside stronger protections and financial incentives for landowners to conserve and restore forests in areas projected to remain climatically suitable.

Up in the misty mountains, teems a kaleidoscope of life: trees drip with epiphytes, hummingbirds sip from bright blossoms, and rare creatures occupy every nook in the cloud forests, which scientists have likened to terrestrial coral reefs. But a new study warns that climate change could strip away the conditions that make cloud forests possible, and in the worst case, erase nearly all of them within 50 years.

The research, published in the Journal for Nature Conservation, used machine learning and modeling to project how cloud forest distribution in South America could shift under two different climate scenarios by 2070.

The study reports that under a high-emissions pathway, up to 91% of cloud forest area could be lost. Even under the most optimistic scenario, researchers calculate a 12% reduction, roughly 21,000 square kilometers (8,100 square miles), an area the size of El Salvador.

Cloud forests occupy a narrow band of land, typically between 1,000 and 3,000 meters (about 3,300-10,000 feet) above sea level, and are defined by persistent fog, cool temperatures and high humidity. That humidity shapes everything, from the mosses and orchids draped across surfaces, to the birds and amphibians found nowhere else on Earth.

Epiphytes in the cloud forest of Peru’s Kosñipata valley. Image credit: Rhett A. Butler

The study notes these ecosystems harbor some 1,946 restricted-range species, representing roughly 8% of the world’s mammals, birds, amphibians and tree ferns. Among the species endemic to South American cloud forests are the flamboyant Andean cock-of-the-rock (Rupicola peruvianus), whose brilliant orange-plumed males perform elaborate courtship dances on the forest floor; the critically endangered yellow-tailed woolly monkey (Lagothrix flavicauda), Peru’s largest endemic primate; and countless glass frogs — delicate, translucent amphibians whose eggs can be seen developing through their own skin.

As temperatures rise, the base of clouds climbs higher up the mountain slopes, effectively shrinking the zone where cloud forests can exist. Species are pushed upward into increasingly fragmented habitat. For those species that live only near the summits, there is nowhere left to go.

A resplendent quetzal, an iconic bird of Central America’s cloud forest. Image by Cephas via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The verdant cloud and mossy evergreen forests in the Pacific Forest are a critical habitat for the Ecuadorian white-fronted capuchin monkey (Cebus aequatorialis). Image by Andreas Kay via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

A male emerald glass frog (Espadarana prosoblepon) in Costa Rica. Image courtesy of Anthony Garita/Cloudbridge.

But the stakes go beyond biodiversity. Because cloud forests capture fog on their leaves and branches and release it steadily into surrounding watersheds, communities downstream depend on them for reliable drinking water, particularly during dry seasons when other sources run low.

The researchers estimated that about 19.5 million people live within 5 kilometers (3 miles) of rivers whose flow is influenced by upstream cloud forests. Study lead author Patrícia Vieira Pompeu, a professor at the State University of Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil, warned that under the high-emissions scenario, that supply would be compromised for an estimated 16 million people, or 83% of current beneficiaries.

“Cloud forests play an important role in regulating water in the headwaters of many Amazonian rivers, especially those originating in the Andes and other elevated regions of northern Amazonia,” Pompeu told Mongabay. “Their loss could reduce dry-season water availability and increase hydrological variability in Andean–Amazonian tributaries, potentially affecting downstream ecosystems and human populations.”

The study also found that only about one-third of South America’s cloud forests currently fall within protected areas. But that protection offers no guarantee of survival if the climate itself becomes unsuitable. Under the high-emissions scenario, the remaining protected patches would shrink dramatically in size, potentially becoming too small and isolated to support viable populations of many species.

A stream in a cloud forest in Peruvian Amazon. The condensation droplets in the canopies of the world’s cloud forests make up water that replenishes rivers, streams and reservoirs, filters down to thirsty farmland, and flows through pipes into homes and industry. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

“Cloud forests are already known to face many threats from human land-use change,” Walter Jetz, a biodiversity scientist at Yale University in the U.S., who wasn’t involved in the study, told Mongabay. “Montane cloud forests exist in a slim and globally rare climate space marked by cold and foggy conditions. There is no doubt that changing climate, combined with their narrow distribution and encroachment, makes montane cloud forests some of the most vulnerable highly biodiverse ecosystems on the planet.”

The study’s authors argue that two strategies are especially critical for the survival of cloud forests: stronger implementation of payments for ecosystem services, which provide financial incentives for landholders to conserve or restore forests upstream of populated watersheds; and better management of existing protected areas. Identifying which cloud forest patches are likely to remain climatically suitable even under future scenarios, they argue, should guide where those resources are focused.

But Pompeu said the most fundamental solution remains the same as for every climate-driven ecological crisis. “The key message is that we need to care about CO2 emissions,” she said. “We need to stop, or we will have problems with everything.”

Liz Kimbrough is a staff writer for Mongabay and holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Tulane University, where she studied the microbiomes of trees. View more of her reporting here.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/ZQGwr

Scientists are raising concerns about an under-the-radar threat hiding in everyday environments: free-living amoebae. Credit: Shutterstock

A team of environmental and public health scientists is raising concerns about a largely overlooked group of microscopic organisms that may pose a growing danger worldwide: free living amoebae. In a recent perspective article published in Biocontaminant, researchers explain that these tiny life forms are becoming an emerging global health risk. Their spread is being driven by rising temperatures, aging water infrastructure, and limited systems for detecting and tracking them. Although most people have never heard of free living amoebae, scientists say they deserve far more attention.

What Are Free Living Amoebae

Amoebae are single celled organisms that live naturally in soil, freshwater, and even some man made water systems. They move and feed by extending parts of their cell body, a process that gives them their distinctive shape. Most amoebae are harmless and play a role in natural ecosystems. However, a small number of species can infect humans and cause severe illness. These infections are rare, but when they do occur, they can be extremely serious. One of the most well known examples is Naegleria fowleri (often called the brain eating amoeba). This organism can enter the body when contaminated water goes up the nose, such as during swimming in warm lakes or poorly treated water. Once inside, it can travel to the brain and cause a fast moving infection that is almost always fatal.

Why These Microbes Are So Hard to Eliminate

Scientists say one of the most concerning features of these amoebae is their ability to survive harsh conditions that would normally kill other microorganisms. "What makes these organisms particularly dangerous is their ability to survive conditions that kill many other microbes," said corresponding author Longfei Shu of Sun Yat sen University. "They can tolerate high temperatures, strong disinfectants like chlorine, and even live inside water distribution systems that people assume are safe." This resilience means that standard water treatment methods may not always be enough to eliminate them, especially in older or poorly maintained systems.

The Hidden Role of Amoebae in Spreading Other Pathogens

The risks go beyond the amoebae themselves. Researchers highlight that these organisms can act as protective hosts for other harmful microbes, including bacteria and viruses. Inside the amoeba, these pathogens can survive in a kind of safe shelter, shielded from disinfectants that would normally destroy them. This process is often described as a so called Trojan horse effect. It allows dangerous microbes to persist in drinking water systems and potentially spread more easily. Scientists are also concerned that this protective environment could help promote antibiotic resistance, making infections harder to treat over time.

Climate Change Is Expanding Their Reach

Rising global temperatures are expected to make the problem worse. Many of these amoebae thrive in warm conditions, so as water temperatures increase, they are likely to expand into new regions where they were once uncommon. In recent years, several outbreaks linked to recreational water use have already heightened public concern in different parts of the world. These incidents suggest that the risk is no longer limited to a few isolated areas.

Calls for Better Monitoring and Safer Water Systems

To address the growing threat, researchers are calling for a broader, more coordinated response. They recommend a One Health approach, which brings together experts in human health, environmental science, and water management to tackle the issue from multiple angles. Improving surveillance systems is a key priority, along with developing faster and more accurate diagnostic tools. The team also emphasizes the need for advanced water treatment technologies that can better target these resilient organisms before they pose a risk to the public.

A Problem That Crosses Boundaries

"Amoebae are not just a medical issue or an environmental issue," Shu said. "They sit at the intersection of both, and addressing them requires integrated solutions that protect public health at its source." As scientists continue to learn more about these microscopic organisms, one message is becoming clear: something largely invisible to the naked eye could have a much bigger impact on global health than previously thought.