A frog smaller than a pencil eraser has hopped into the record books as the one of the smallest vertebrates known to science. Researchers formally described the species in late October 2024 after encountering it in the Atlantic Forest in southeastern Brazil’s São Paulo state.

At a length of 6.95 millimeters (0.27 inches), Brachycephalus dacnis has given scientists a new appreciation of just how small vertebrates can get. The only known frog smaller than this, found in February 2024 in northeastern Brazil, beats it by just 0.5 mm (0.02 in) but struggles with balance.

Frogs in the tiny Brachycephalus genus are notorious for their clumsy landings, often tumbling over or falling on their heads after jumping, as their vestibular systems were compromised in their evolution to be small.

But the B. dacnis retained its inner ear structure, allowing it to hear and leap quite proficiently. Researchers found that it can jump an impressive 32 times its own size, with surprising grace.

“The size makes this frog very special,” Edelcio Muscat, one of the researchers who described B. dacnis and a coordinator at Projeto Dacnis, a conservation NGO working in the Atlantic Forest, told Mongabay by phone. “The miniaturization process hasn’t affected any of its organs or its skeleton.”

In 2016, Muscat was on a typical nighttime expedition carefully turning over leaves on the forest floor when one of the frogs jumped out. Recordings of its croak, more akin to a cricket’s chirp than a typical toad’s ribbit, would confirm it was a unique species years later.

Brazil is home to the world’s largest number of amphibian species, most of them in the Atlantic Forest, a biodiversity hotspot encompassing Brazil’s largest cities, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, with dozens of species described every year. Just 13% of the original Atlantic Forest remains.

“The discovery of this species reveals how much we’ve lost without even realizing it,” Adrian Garda, a herpetologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, not involved in the study, told Mongabay by phone. “Right before our eyes, such a peculiar and extremely miniaturized vertebrate existed. What might we have lost over the past 40 to 80 years of industrialization?”

Worldwide, nearly 41% of amphibian species are threatened with extinction, compared with 26.5% of mammals, 21.4% of reptiles and 12.9% of birds.

B. dacnis is speckled brown and white and has survived by blending in and laying low. Its tiny size helps it avoid predators, and the leaves of the forest floor provide thermal comfort, which might help protect it against the brunt of climate change, Muscat said.

“The discovery shows us how much we need to preserve the Atlantic Forest,” Muscat said. “There are still species it supports that we have not yet found.”

Banner image: A B. dacnis rests on a fingertip, courtesy of Lucas Machado Botelho.

A recent report says that a new Philippine law meant to hold companies responsible for their plastic waste is showing “promising results,” with most of the country’s largest plastic packaging producers going beyond the minimum recovery target. But critics say the law has several shortcomings.

The Philippines’ Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) law of 2022 requires large companies with more than 100 million pesos ($1.7 million) in assets to take responsibility for reducing their plastic waste. They’re expected to recover 20% of their plastic waste by the end of 2023 and 80% by 2028, preventing it from entering the environment. 

Companies can comply with the recovery targets on their own or authorize a “producer responsibility organization” like the nonprofit PCX Solutions, which published the report.

The report estimates based on available data that 626,725 metric tons of plastic packaging in the Philippines need to be recovered annually.

By the end of 2023, the first milestone, 947 companies had registered for the country’s EPR program and helped recover and divert 163,000 metric tons of post-consumer plastic packaging waste, the report says. While government is yet to validate the numbers, the report added that this suggests plastic packaging recovery has already surpassed the 20% target for the year. 

However, not all firms obliged to comply with the EPR law have done so, the report says, suggesting education and awareness to improve compliance are still needed. The report also noted several challenges, including addressing decades of legacy plastic pollution, creating the supply and demand for recycled materials, and reducing unnecessary plastic packaging. 

Dominic Hogg, founder of U.K.-based environment consultancy Equanimator and author of a report about EPR in the Philippines and other countries, said the PCX Solutions report “makes some sensible comments” about the law, but cautioned it doesn’t address its “key shortcomings.”

Hogg said the data in the report also fail to clarify “what the scheme has achieved that was not already happening in the Philippines: there is no clear indication of who received how much money for doing what under the scheme.”

The report emphasized the role of incentives to boost compliance, like plastic credits, where companies can pay other groups to clean up plastic waste and earn credits in return, without having to rely on their own efforts. However, Emma Priestland from the NGO Break Free From Plastic (BFFP), told Mongabay that “plastic credits can be deeply problematic and can actually incentivize harmful waste treatment methods,” such as burning plastic in cement kilns that causes air pollution. 

Miko Aliño of BFFP added that the Philippine EPR “is limited to plastic collection targets, having little impact on reduction.”

“The law doesn’t mandate companies to reduce their plastic footprint through production reduction, product redesign, or reuse systems — higher-priority strategies in the Zero Waste hierarchy,” he said. 

Banner image of waste pickers in the Philippines, courtesy of PCX Solutions. 

Ship strikes are a leading threat to large whales, with global shipping routes overlapping 92% of their habitats, a new study finds. But protecting whales in the most dangerous collision hotspots would require action over just 2.6% of the ocean’s surface, researchers conclude, potentially saving thousands of whales with minimal disruption to global trade.

The study looked at four of the largest and most impacted whales: blue (Balaenoptera musculus), fin (B. physalus), humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae) and sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus). Researchers overlapped locations of 430,000 recorded sightings of these whales with the courses of 176,000 cargo ships to pinpoint high-risk areas for whale collisions.

The endangered blue whale, the largest animal ever to live, was found to be disproportionately impacted around the Azores Islands, the West Coast of the U.S. and around the southern tip of India. Meanwhile, humpbacks, famous for their haunting songs, are at highest risk along South Africa’s coast and between China and Taiwan.

“We were surprised by the lack of protective measures that are in place for guarding whales against these collisions with vessels,” Briana Abrahms, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor at the University of Washington, U.S., told Mongabay by phone. “Our study is really a big first step in identifying where across the world we need to be focusing our eyes.”

Researchers found that mandatory measures to reduce collisions, including introducing the scientifically backed safe speed limit of under 10 knots (19 kilometers per hour or 12 miles per hour), or closing high-risk areas, were rare. Restrictions overlapped with just 0.54% of blue whale hotspots and 0.27% of humpback hotspots.

Today, most ships don’t even realize when they’ve hit whales, and an estimated 80% of ship collisions go undocumented, Abrahms said. “There’s so much opportunity to improve the situation, as there haven’t been any measures to protect these whales in the past,” she added.

Shipping traffic also creates noise and chemical pollution, making it harder for whales to find food and mates in the ocean. Rerouting vessels away from whale habitats and setting up alert systems to warn authorities and crews when whales are nearby could also be implemented, the researchers write.

More than 95% of the hotspots were along countries’ coastlines, where whales also often go to breed or feed on krill. This can make it easier for countries to set up protections independently, researchers say.

“Trade-offs between industrial and conservation outcomes are not usually this optimal,” co-author Heather Welch, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in a statement. “There is a potentially large conservation benefit to whales for not much cost to the shipping industry.”

Banner image: Global shipping routes overlap 92% of the range of the blue, sperm, fin and humpback whales. Image courtesy of Asha de Vos.

Large-scale monoculture plantations have devastated tropical forests worldwide, but a recent study finds that creating islands of native trees can be a way to restore biodiversity on degraded lands.

The Indonesian island of Sumatra is one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. However, the demand for palm oil has led to rapid deforestation for monoculture plantations, leading to a tremendous loss of biodiversity.  In the recent study, an international team of researchers wanted to see if creating tree islands, or strategically planting patches of just a few native species within degraded or agricultural lands, can help restore native woody plant diversity.

Researchers cleared 40% of the existing oil palm trees for each of their 52 experimental plots. They then planted between zero and six native tree species on each of their tree islands. They also kept four control plots with oil palms standing. The tree islands vary in area from 25-1,600 square meters (269-17,222 square feet).

Six years after their establishment, the researchers found that the tree islands were home to an additional 2,788 woody plants of 58 different species from 28 families. While most of the plants typically thrive in open habitats, including secondary forests that regrow after a disturbance like agriculture, one-third of the species were associated with tropical forests. Roughly 20% of the plants were endemic and 10% were non-native. The diversity of trees in the islands was also higher than in the rest of the oil palm plantation but still far lower than in undisturbed forest, highlighting the critical conservation value of standing forests.

Furthermore, large tree islands, greater than 400 m2 (4,300 ft2), hosted 94% of the native tree species found in the study and all of the endemic species. In contrast, small tree islands hosted just 45% of native species and a quarter of the endemic species.

Previously, the researchers had found that the tree islands had greater diversity of several groups of animals, including birds and bats. Large tree islands likely provide better habitat for such animal seed dispersers, the authors write. Geographically large tree islands can also create a more stable microclimate, while more leaf litter improves soil conditions; both make it easier for new trees to get established.

In the previous study, the researchers found that tree islands didn’t reduce yields of oil palm. Palms near tree islands actually had improved yields, which made up for trees that were removed.

“This is a landmark study,” Robin Chazdon, a tropical ecologist with the University of Connecticut, U.S., who wasn’t involved in the study, told Mongabay by email.

“The outcome is a hopeful message that it is possible to provide islands of hope for native vegetation within landscapes dominated by large-scale oil palm plantations,” she added.

Banner image: Habitat loss for oil palm is driving orangutans toward extinction. Image by Marc Veraart via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0).

For decades, the slender-billed curlew, a grayish-brown migratory wetland bird with a long, arched bill, has evaded detection, prompting speculation about whether the species is still out there. Now, a new study has confirmed that the species is indeed most likely extinct.

“Speaking personally it’s a source of deep sadness,” Geoff Hilton, conservation scientist at U.K.-based charity Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, who wasn’t involved in the study, told Mongabay by email. “I spent several years working on ways to bring this species back from the brink … I’m gutted!”

While details of the slender-billed curlew’s (Numenius tenuirostris) exact population size and breeding sites have remained hazy, the species is known to have historically bred in Central Asia and migrated to Europe and North Africa. However, the bird has likely been scarce since the mid-20^th century, said Graeme Buchanan, study lead author and conservation scientist with U.K-based NGO Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

The species was last photographed in 1995 at Merga Zerga on Morocco’s Atlantic coast. Since then, experts have speculated the bird was extinct, although the IUCN Red List still classifies it as critically endangered, based on a 2018 assessment

There was a need for a formal, quantitative assessment of the species’ status to prevent withdrawing conservation support too soon or too late, Buchanan told Mongabay.

So, following the IUCN’s framework, Buchanan and his colleagues reviewed all known sightings of the species maintained by the RSPB in a database, estimated impacts of various threats to the bird, and examined past surveys. They concluded there’s a roughly 96% probability the species is now extinct, and that it likely happened in the mid-1990s.

“I agree with the authors’ approach and so unfortunately I must agree with their conclusions,” Hilton said. “Of course, the authors do not say that the species is definitely extinct, just that it is extremely likely to be extinct.”

This is a wake-up call the conservation sector “probably didn’t need,” Hilton added. “We arguably spent too much time watching the bird’s decline and not enough actually trying to fix things,” he said. “Although that’s easy to say: it’s not clear what really we could have done that would have made a difference.”

A recent IUCN update notes that various other migratory shorebirds are now more threatened with extinction than before.

As for the slender-billed curlew, the study’s authors recommend updating the species’ IUCN status to extinct. Still, they hold out a slim hope someone might spot one of the birds again.

“If someone spots it now, get a photographic evidence,” Buchanan said. “It’s very important to have no uncertainty as to whether or not this is the species. Second, call us. We’d be delighted to be proven wrong and we could try to reinitiate conservation efforts.”

Banner image of a slender-billed curlew illustration by Elizabeth Gould & Edward Lear via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).

Certain minerals and elements, including cobalt, copper, lithium and nickel, are crucial for the manufacture of renewable energy technologies, including electric vehicles and solar panels. However, the extraction and processing of those minerals often takes place in developing countries, far from public scrutiny and without consent from local communities, which can be left with the burden of pollution but little economic benefit.

Key stakeholders at the ongoing U.N. climate meeting, COP29, are pushing for greater transparency, arguing for the need to ensure local environments are protected and economies improved along the critical minerals supply chain.

Efforts for a binding global treaty on traceability for critical minerals was first launched by the Colombian government on the sidelines of the recent U.N. Biodiversity Conference in Cali, Colombia. The goal is to ensure a global pact is ready to be signed by November 2025 when the next U.N. climate talks meet in Belém, Brazil.

“We see a rush for resources, with communities exploited, rights trampled, and environments trashed. Too often, we see the mistakes of the past repeated in a stampede of greed that crushes the poor,” said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres while calling for the world to enact stricter rules for those involved in the value chain for critical minerals.

“The aim is to empower communities, create accountability and ensure that clean energy drives equitable and resilient growth. That includes advancing efforts to ensure maximum value is added in resource-rich developing countries,” Guterres added.

At the 2023 U.N. climate meeting, the global community set a goal to triple the world’s renewable energy capacity by 2030. Such an increase in renewable energy is needed to fight the climate crisis but would likely result in a commensurate increase in demand for critical minerals as well. That makes efforts to ensure greater transparency in the value chain more important than ever for local communities and Indigenous people living in resource-rich areas.

“This is a time when cooperation is paramount for nations to effectively address multiple crises,” said South African Nozipho Joyce Mxakato-Diseko, who co-chairs the U.N. panel on critical energy transition minerals.

The principles underpinning the U.N.-backed initiative include advancing fairness, justice, equity and human rights across the critical minerals value chains. It seeks to source critical minerals in a way that protects the environment and ensures prosperity in resource-rich developing countries.

“We must now seize the opportunity to grow our economies, protect our societies, preserve our environment and share benefits more justly while we tackle the climate crisis,” said Ditte Juul Jørgensen of the European Commission and co-chair of the Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals­­­­­. “Only in this way, will we tap the potential of the energy transition and create new and shared benefits for all,” she added.

Banner image: A cobalt mine in Central Africa. Image by Fairphone via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).