Authorities in Vietnam have intercepted more than a ton of elephant ivory along with big-cat bones in a shipment from the Republic of Congo.

Gia Lai provincial authorities announced that the haul of 1,193 kilograms (2,630 pounds) of ivory and 79.3 kg (175 lb) of bones was uncovered at Quy Nhon Port in early August. It’s the first seizure of this scale at the regional port, according to local media.

The shipment contained 165 wooden crates declared as African sawn timber, which arrived in July under the name of the Thanh Cong Trading Services and Translation Joint Stock Company, according to Gia Lai provincial police.

Investigators used specialized scanning equipment to discover hidden compartments inside 12 timber crates that were hollowed out, local media reported. Traffickers had packed the ivory and bones in wax in those compartments and sealed them with wood to make the packages appear ordinary and bypass inspections.

The Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology subsequently tested the ivory and bones and confirmed they came respectively from elephants and big cats.

Chris Shepherd, who campaigns against wildlife trafficking with the U.S.-based Center for Biological Diversity, told Mongabay by email that the massive seizure is a reminder of the persistent demand driving the illegal wildlife trade market.

“For me, the red flag is that this is still continuing in Southeast Asia, as it has for decades, regardless of raised levels of awareness among governments and enforcement agencies, significant investment to build capacity to tackle the illegal trade, and most of all, the continuing decline in species in Southeast Asia and around the world,” Shepherd said.

He noted that a shipment from Africa that includes big cat parts reflects a changing landscape as local species disappear. “As Southeast Asian cats, such as tigers and leopards, dwindle, cat parts are sought elsewhere,” he said.

Shepherd added that lion bones are heavily traded from African countries to Southeast Asia to meet the demand for traditional Asian medicine.

While Shepherd applauded the Vietnamese government’s enforcement action, he said issues like corruption still undermine conservation efforts. “Corruption is a major facilitator and enabler of wildlife trade,” he said.

Governments need to invest heavily to take down the organized crime networks that carry out these activities, Shepherd added. “Sadly, this is not often happening. However, Vietnam’s actions against syndicates trafficking ivory is a very positive step in the right direction.”

Gia Lai provincial police said investigators have launched criminal proceedings and temporarily detained several suspects connected with the shipment.

Mongabay reported earlier this year that since the mid-2000s, China and Vietnam have emerged as global hotspots for the illegal wildlife trade, with Africa being the prominent source of the contraband.

Banner image: An elephant in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

On the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, in the buffer zone of a national park, a women-led farming group has come up with a solution to reduce encounters with elephants.

Deforestation and oil palm encroachment have stripped Tesso Nilo National Park of more than three-quarters of its old-growth forest. This has forced the park’s roughly 150 Sumatran elephants (Elephas maximus sumatranus) into frequent, costly clashes with local communities, report Mongabay Indonesia contributor Suryadi and Mongabay’s Yenni Kwok.

To prevent elephants from coming too close, some villagers elsewhere in Indonesia resort to setting out poison bait or putting up electric fences. However, in the village of Lubuk Kembang Bunga in Tesso Nilo’s buffer zone, the Batang Nilo Women’s Forest Farmer Group, known as Perbani, has championed an alternative for protecting their crops: dense fences made of citrus trees, a natural repellent for elephants.

“Before we had the citrus trees, elephants always ate our oil palm fruits,” Ernita, a 33-year-old farmer and Perbani member, told . “Praise be to God, since we planted the citrus trees, the elephants haven’t eaten our oil palm fruits.”

To foster peaceful coexistence, the group elsewhere plants elephant-friendly fruit trees like jackfruit, its cousin cempedak, and stink beans, known in Indonesian as petai.

Yuliantony, the executive director of the Tesso Nilo National Park Foundation (YTNTN), the community-based organization that proposed the citrus initiative, said women are often overlooked in conservation efforts, although they frequently have in-depth knowledge of local ecology. “That is why it is important to involve women in the conservation and management of natural resources,” Yuliantony told Mongabay Indonesia.

A study by researchers at the University of Riau highlights how Perbani’s actions have transformed local dynamics. “Perbani demonstrates that women are not ‘victims’ of conflicts with elephants who need to be saved but creative problem solvers,” lead study author and sociologist Mita Rosaliza told Mongabay.

Perbani also empowers its 30-plus members through monthly classes on leadership skills and a dedicated savings-and-loans scheme, allowing members to borrow money to pay for home repairs, children’s school expenses, and farming costs.

Their efforts earned the group official Wanawiyata Widyakarya status from Indonesia’s forestry ministry in 2024, an award given to community organizations that successfully run conservation and forestry-related enterprises and provide training to residents.

Read the full story by Suryadi and Yenni Kwok here.

Banner image: A female elephant and her calf in Tesso Nilo National Park. Image by Rahmi Carolina/Mongabay Indonesia.

European Black oil beetle larva lures unsuspecting bees by manufacturing smells that mimic floral scents, new research suggests. The larva then hitches a ride on the bee to its burrow, where it eats the bee’s eggs and pollen, and develops into an adult beetle. This is the first known instance of an animal hijacking the smell of a flower to lure another animal to parasitize it, the study’s authors say.

Larvae of the European black oil beetle (Meloe proscarabaeus) are orange and gather on the tips of plants to attract bee hosts, which they then parasitize. The research team hypothesized that the larvae emit some kind of chemical to attract the bees. 

Using chemical analysis, the researchers found that the beetles emit compounds called floral monoterpenoids, the same chemicals that produce the scent of flowers in many plant species. 

The researchers prepared a synthetic mix of the compounds in the lab and found that bee species in the wild were attracted to them, supporting the hypothesis that the beetle’s larvae imitate flowers to lure bee hosts. 

Ryan Alam, the study’s lead author from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany, told Mongabay by email that the team hasn’t identified a specific flower with a scent that matches the floral chemical profile the larvae emit. However, he added that the compounds are known components of the scent of willow flowers, which makes the plants an intriguing candidate.

“Determining the precise floral source (if any!), and understanding how closely the larval scent matches it, would be an exciting next step,” Alam said.

He added that there’s a closely related beetle species in North America that releases chemicals that mimic the sex-pheromones emitted by female bees to lure male bees and parasitize them. This suggests that chemical-based mimicry has evolved in multiple beetle species, Alam said.

The researchers suspect that chemical mimicry may be more widespread in beetles than currently known, but may be much harder to detect than visual mimicry, Alam added,  “It is quite possible that similar examples exist in other groups of insects, or even in other animals, but they may have gone unnoticed so far.”

Jim McLean, an evolutionary biologist at Macquarie University in Australia not involved in the study, told Scientific American that Alam’s research “presents a convincing case that the beetle larvae are mimicking flowers chemically, and perhaps visually, so as to deceive and attract bees.”

Banner image: A cluster of European oil beetle (Meloe proscarabaeus) larvae on a blade of grass: Not only could they be mistaken for a flower at first glance, but to wild bees, their smell cannot be distinguished from the scent of many flowers. Image courtesy of Danny Kessler, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology.

On the banks of the Aguarico River in the Ecuadorian Amazon, a group of Indigenous Siekopai women are combining traditional knowledge and modern technology to help a threatened native turtle recover.

Their efforts center around charapa turtles  (Podocnemis unifilis), also known as the yellow-spotted Amazon River turtle, Mongabay Latam’s Astrid Arellano reported. The animal’s populations have declined due to hunting adult turtles, harvesting eggs from nests and pollution from garbage, oil and gasoline.

“Sometimes we see plastic, garbage bags,” Janeth Piaguaje, a Siekopai community leader of the project, told Mongabay Latam. “We also see dead animals floating down the river. We can’t control all of that, but we do make a significant effort to clean the beaches where we work.”

Boat traffic is also eroding riverbanks, and climate change has caused water levels to rise, flooding the flats where turtles make their nests. Charapa turtles are listed as vulnerable by the IUCN, the global conservation authority.

To help the turtles recover, a group of seven Siekopai women, who call themselves Tari Nomiowa’i, or “turtle women,” patrol the riverbanks looking for turtle tracks and nests. When they find nests, the women carefully collect the eggs, a skill Piaguaje said she learned from her father.

“He taught me how to handle the eggs, how to see on what dates and in what months the turtles lay their nests,” she said.

The women document the date, time, location and number of eggs in each nest using the Epicollect5 app, a field data collection tool.

Then they take the eggs to an incubation facility where they are protected from predators, flooding and pollution. Once the eggs hatch, the women continue to care for the baby turtles for another month, feeding them cassava, sweet potato and taro leaves.

Their painstaking work has paid off. Over the 2025-26 nesting season, the women collected 235 eggs and successfully hatched and released 208 hatchlings into the Aguarico River over March and April this year. The group invited the local community, including schoolchildren, to participate in the turtle release and attend workshops.

“A little girl said, ‘I’m going to take care of them, I’m going to tell them not to touch the eggs,’” Piaguaje recalled.

A driving force behind the work of the Tari Nomiowa’i is their culture and the ancestral belief that the turtles are a link between the visible and spiritual worlds, each swimming with protection from Koouwajëo, the spiritual chief, mother and ancestral guardian of the turtles.

“I want Koouwajëo to be proud,” said Piaguaje. “When we protect turtles, we don’t just care for a species; we honor the spirits of the river, strengthen our culture and maintain the sacred pact between our community and nature.”

Read the full story by Astrid Arellano in Spanish here.

Banner image: The Tari Nomiowa’i women collecting charapa turtle (Podocnemis unifilis) eggs, taking data and measuring the nest. Image courtesy of CI Ecuador.

In a strategic retreat, the United Nations concedes that Earth has lost its chance to prevent some of the worst impacts of global warming. A report released Wednesday by the United Nations Environment Programme reveals that the planet will soon exceed the temperature threshold set by the 2015 Paris climate accord. Instead of giving up, scientists and U.N. officials recommend limiting excessive warming and then bringing temperatures back down. It’s called overshoot. This involves slashing fossil fuel use and finding ways to remove carbon dioxide from the air. In the meantime, the world will face decades of increased disasters, rising seas and extinctions.

By Seth Borenstein, Associated Press 

Banner image: Firefighters watch as a wildfire called the Plaskett Fire burns towards Highway 1 on Friday, Aug. 28, 2026, in Big Sur, Calif. Image courtesy of Ethan Swope, Associated Press. 

In July, following relentless bursts of rainfall, flash floods covered pockets of Lagos, disrupting commerce and traffic in Nigeria’s commercial capital. Experts have found that the city now faces increased flood risk due to human-induced climate change. Other recent studies have identified another common factor exacerbating flooding risk in Lagos: rapid urbanization.

In a study published in June, for example, a team of researchers examined satellite images of Lekki, a densely populated Lagos district, from 2015 to 2025. Their analysis showed that vegetation cover in the neighborhood had decreased by 13% in the last 10 years, while water bodies had reduced by 6%. Meanwhile, within the same timeline, settlements had risen by 10% on natural land cover, which was “causing an increase in flooding events in the area,” the authors concluded.  

The study is the latest in a series of investigations linking worsening flooding across Nigeria’s coastal cities to eroding wetlands.

A study published in February found that between 1984 and 2023, areas with buildings and infrastructure in Lagos expanded by 38%. Meanwhile, forest cover had declined by 32% and water bodies reduced by 11%, “reducing the natural flood buffering capacity of Lagos Megacity,” the authors wrote. With the persisting loss of vegetation and wetlands, the authors predicted, more than 60% of Lagos’ urban areas will be affected by extreme flooding by 2050.

Mark Ofua, the West Africa representative for Wild Africa, a conservation nonprofit, said that a real estate boom was to blame for the increasing ecological loss. “Lagos was historically surrounded by extensive wetlands and mangroves, but everywhere you turn now, especially around the suburbs, there’s land reclamation and construction going on.”  

Meanwhile, a recent analysis by World Weather Attribution, a network of global scientists who analyze extreme weather events, concluded that the sprawling expansion of housing and development on wetlands, which soak up excess rainwater, puts low-lying coastal cities like Lagos at a high risk of flooding.

In May, Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency issued a flood alert for 15 Lagos communities likely to face flash floods between July and September, typically the peak of Nigeria’s rainy season.

While the impacts of floods on the people living in Lagos are well documented, far less understood is how flooding affects the city’s biodiversity.

There have been some sporadic reports of wildlife deaths. In 2024, for instance, more than 80% of wildlife, including snakes and birds, reportedly fled from a zoo in northern Nigeria after heavy flooding. The zoo managers were later alerted to an ostrich seen strutting around a neighborhood in a viral clip.

To control future flooding, Ofua said tougher enforcement on wetland encroachment is crucial.

“The government has to declare these areas as protected and stop more companies from land reclamation. We have to move from lip service to action,” he said.  

Banner image: Commuters wade through heavy floodwater after a downpour in Lagos. Image courtesy of Folakemi Olaoni.