A sweeping genetic study of howler monkeys has revealed two previously unrecognized species in the Amazon, identified a potentially distinct species in the Caribbean and prompted researchers to reconsider how several populations are classified.

The new study examined genetic relationships across the genus Alouatta, using genomic data, physical characteristics and museum specimens. Researchers formally described two Amazonian red howler monkeys: the Pantepui red howler monkey (Alouatta iroi) in northwestern Amazonia and the Mato Grosso red howler monkey (Alouatta matogrossensis) in the southern Brazilian Amazon.

The research builds on more than a decade of fieldwork and sample collection. Lead author Romina Batista, a biologist at the University of Salford (UK) and Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research, analyzed more than 2 terabytes of raw genomic data.

The scale of the dataset helped reveal evolutionary differences that earlier studies had missed. While examining the results, Batista noticed that monkeys on opposite sides of the Branco River in northern Brazil formed distinct genetic lineages. Physical differences, including the more yellowish fur of A. iroi, supported the findings.

“When I saw that, I literally called Jean and I said, ‘Jean, there is something different here,’” Batista said, referring to co-author Jean Boubli.

Historical museum specimens also helped researchers identify characteristics distinguishing the populations. Batista said the findings demonstrate the importance of preserving natural history collections, which allowed the scientists to revisit older specimens with newer research tools.

“If it was not for the natural history museums holding all this information, I think we also wouldn’t be able to find this,” Batista said.

The study also recommends recognizing the howler monkey population in Trinidad and Tobago, previously classified as A. seniculus insulanus, as a separate species, A. insulanus.

The findings could have important conservation implications, especially for A. matogrossensis. Its range overlaps with Brazil’s arc of deforestation, where agricultural development has contributed to forest fragmentation and extensive habitat loss. The researchers say the species may qualify as critically endangered, although a formal assessment is still needed.

“We want to make the scientific community aware, and we need to evaluate it urgently,” Batista said.

The other newly recognized population also faces potential threats. The proposed Bem Querer hydroelectric dam on the Branco River could affect A. iroi and its close relative, A. macconnelli.

Researchers are sharing distribution data with colleagues and the public to support a potential IUCN assessment. In Mato Grosso, the Reconecta project has also installed canopy bridges to reconnect fragmented forests. Researchers have documented A. matogrossensis using the structures, including a female carrying an infant.

Batista described the findings as “a piece of the puzzle” in understanding how Amazonian biodiversity evolved.

Banner image: A Mato Grosso red howler monkey (Alouatta matogrossensis) photographed in Brazil. Photo by Kakau Oliveira.

Photographer Andrew Zuckerman took a moment longer than usual to look closely at a bean that was sprouting in his studio.

“There was this one bean that sort of had this incredibly elegant curve, and I thought, ‘God, that’s exactly like the flamingo from like 15 years ago,’” Zuckerman tells Mongabay in a video call. He took out an old photo he’d taken of a flamingo, set both side by side, and kept looking at the pair.

The connection set off a journey through his own archive of some 2,500 images, taken over the last 25 years, and culminated in his latest book, United Nature.

Zuckerman’s method for documenting the natural world involves taking several photos, shifting the focus slightly with every shot. A camera, like the human eye, can keep only a thin slice of a close-up subject in focus at once.

He then combines the sharpest details into a single image, a technique known as focus stacking. “I can use this optical tool, this technique, to give you something that your eyes can’t see,” Zuckerman says.

Unlikely connections emerged between seeds and birds, jellyfish and crystals; pairings that cut through shapes, colors, sizes, and textures. He says he tries to turn his brain off to do this work.

“No intellect, all feeling, all intuition, trying to get to a more primordial part of my response system where I could feel my way through something rather than think my way through something,” Zuckerman says.

“I began noticing these kinds of remarkable relationships between very different things [and] became very interested in what happens when normal categories fall away,” he says. “We’re living in such a disconnected moment, and attention and active looking and being able to have an encounter with something is more and more rare.” 

One page of the book pairs an aquamarine crystal with a pale blue jellyfish. They share a similar color and translucent quality. One is soft, the other hard. And they come from completely different places on the planet.

“What they share is a kind of dependence on their environment,” Zuckerman says. A jellyfish can pump itself forward, but relies on tides and currents to move. The crystal emerges inside a host rock over millions of years, under enormous pressure.

“Living things have so much detail. There is so much going on in a living thing that the more you look at it and the more you spend time with it, the more it reveals its own sense of textures and forms and colors. And it just takes time,” he says.

Banner image: A sprouting bean and a flamingo. All images courtesy of Andrew Zuckerman.

The ongoing search for the saola, a critically endangered tropical bovid that hasn’t been recorded by scientists since 2013, faces an uncertain future in Laos due to severe funding shortfalls, reports Mongabay’s Jeremy Hance.

Scientists first described the saola (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis) in 1992 in the Annamite Mountains that run along the eastern border of Laos and Vietnam. Often called the “Asian unicorn,” it’s the sole member of its genus and is believed to have remained largely unchanged for 15 million years. However, the animal hasn’t been officially recorded since a camera-trap photograph in 2013, leaving fewer than 50 individuals estimated to survive in the wild. There are none in captivity.

In 2025, the nonprofit Saola Foundation launched a search for the species across 300 square kilometers (116 square miles) of remote forest in Laos’s Bolikhamxay province. It deployed expert local trackers, sniffer dogs, and rapid field DNA testing kits. The saola is vulnerable to wire snares set in forests to trap other animals, according to Mongabay’s previous coverage.

The saola search initiative is now operating on a month-to-month basis. “The team comes out of the forest each July for the wet season. This year a sharp contraction in our funding meant we could not confirm they would go back in October,” said Lorraine Scotson, CEO of the Saola Foundation for Annamite Mountains Conservation.

While emergency donations from several zoos secured field operations for October, long-term funding remains unresolved.

Conservationists are divided over whether the saola still survives.

Barney Long, senior director for conservation strategies at the conservation NGO Re:wild, said the species’ odds of survival are slim, as a recent two-year search led by WWF-Vietnam, of which Re:wild was a partner, yielded no detections. “Unfortunately, I personally think we have lost the saola,” Long said. “It has not been seen for 13 years, and even if one or two remain hidden away in some pocket of remote rainforest, the likelihood that they are able to maintain a viable population is close to zero.”

Scotson disputed conclusions of extinction, pointing out that saola population densities could be as low as one animal per 300 km2, making them challenging to spot.

“We see no sound scientific reason to conclude the saola is extinct. Years without a record do not mean the species is gone,” Scotson said. She added that stopping the field team also halts vital documentation of other wildlife in the Annamites, a global biodiversity hotspot holding more than 3% of the world’s land-based vertebrate species on less than 0.2% of Earth’s land surface.

Without sustained financial support, the opportunity to locate saola for potential captive-breeding programs could permanently disappear. “If we aren’t searching, no one is searching for the saola,” Scotson said.

Read the full story by Jeremy Hance here.

Banner image: This 1999 camera-trap photo of a saola in Laos is one of the few images of the animal in the wild. Image courtesy of Ban Vangban Village/W. Robichaud/WCS.

In the Himalayan region of Uttarakhand, India, traditional homes have a dedicated space to accommodate bees. Women then care for the bees as part of a beekeeping practice that has become a crucial sanctuary for indigenous bee populations facing severe environmental threats, reports contributor Swati Thapa for Mongabay.

For generations, households in the region have shared their homes with the Indian honey bee (Apis cerana indica), using traditional “wall hives”, rectangular cavities constructed directly into mud house walls through which bees can enter. A small door, accessible from inside the house, is sealed with clay and cow dung. The seal is removed when it’s time to harvest honey.

Historically, it’s the women in households who tend to the bees, especially as many men have left rural villages for job opportunities elsewhere.

“The only reason A. cerana indica is still surviving in Uttarakhand is the women,” said Nagma Parveen, assistant professor of biomedical sciences at Kumaun University, India. Nagma added that traditional beekeeping is practiced as a sacred cultural custom rather than a commercial enterprise, with women regularly maintaining hives and feeding colonies amaranth or hemp seed powder during winter months when food is scarce.

The thick mud construction of traditional wall hives provides essential insulation against extreme mountain cold, storms and rain, protecting bees that cannot safely forage when outdoor temperatures drop below 10–13°C (50–55°F).

But this traditional ecosystem is increasingly threatened by rapid architectural changes and climate impacts. A study in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district revealed that the proportion of traditional houses dropped from 61% before 1980 to 26% between 2001 and 2010, causing the average number of wall hives per home to drop to 8.4 per house by 2010.

Modern cement houses contain zero observed bee colonies, depriving native bees of essential nesting structures. At the same time, shifting weather patterns, heavy rains and high winds have dramatically reduced honey yields and altered local flora profiles. Saraswati Devi, an 80-year-old resident, said that honey harvests have fallen from roughly 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds) per hive in past years to barely 1 or 2 kilograms (2.2-4.4 pounds) today.

Extreme weather events have left many wall hives empty as bees exhaust their stored honey while trapped indoors during prolonged storms. “Rain, storms and cold also impact the well-being of the bees. Inside the wall hives, they are safe, but outside they cannot fight the natural forces,” said Shakuntala Devi, a local beekeeper.

While women’s stewardship provides vital shelter, broader deforestation and habitat destruction continue to drive native bees out of wild ecosystems. “Bees only need humans because humans are devastating their natural homes,” Nagma said. “On one hand, people destroy forests and drive climate change, destroying hundreds of colonies. On the other hand, they offer shelter to just one or two hives in their walls.”

Read the full story by Swati Thapa here.

Banner image: Indian honey bees find refuge in traditional homes in Uttarakhand in India. Image © Afsar Nayakkan via iNaturalist (CC BY 4.0).

Cambodia’s mangrove forests and the wetlands associated with them provide critical refuge for several threatened and elusive species, including fishing cats and hairy‑nosed otters, according to a recent study.

Researchers from the Phnom Penh-based private company Fishing Cat Ecological Enterprise (FCEE) deployed camera traps across 156 coastal and riverine mangrove sites within the Peam Krasop Wildlife Sanctuary and the adjacent Koh Kapik Ramsar site between 2017 and 2023. Both the sanctuary and the Ramsar site form Cambodia’s largest mangrove expanse.

The camera footage revealed that the mangrove forests are a rich habitat of threatened species: Fishing cats (Prionailurus viverrinus) slipping through mangrove thickets away from shores, smooth‑coated otters (Lutra perspicillata) patrolling fringe river channels, leopard cats (Prionailurus bengalensis) and hairy‑nosed otters (Lutra sumatrana) favoring mangroves by rivers, and large‑spotted civets (Viverra megaspila) moving through swamp forests dominated by paperbark trees (Melaleuca spp.).

Researchers also found that four threatened species had declined over the seven-year study period. These included the endangered long‑tailed macaque (Macaca fascicularis) and large‑spotted civet, and the vulnerable fishing cat and smooth‑coated otter.

Only the common palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus), an adaptable species, showed signs of increase. The critically endangered Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica) and the endangered hairy‑nosed otter remained difficult to detect.

“Our results also showed that it’s essential to protect not just the mangrove forests, but [also] the surrounding Melaleuca forests which are important for the Endangered large-spotted civet, and the riverine mixed mangroves which are critical for the Endangered hairy-nosed otter, considered the rarest otter in the world,” the study’s corresponding author and FCEE director Vanessa Herranz Muñoz told Mongabay via email.

A 2023 biodiversity survey by the conservation NGO Fauna & Flora and the FCEE, in which Herranz Muñoz was also involved, identified more than 700 unique species in Pream Krasop and Koh Kapik.

Herranz Muñoz said the research team initially focused on the fishing cat, but later included other mammal species to ensure their conservation as well.

The team mapped the various species’ presence across habitat types and found that fishing cats, smooth-coated otters and macaques showed tolerance of human proximity, while hairy-nosed otters, large‑spotted civets, and Sunda pangolins were more likely to stay away from settlements.

“We found that fishing cats, smooth-coated otters and long-tailed macaques were often photographed not too far from villages, which is great news,” Herranz Muñoz said. “It means that there is peaceful co-existence between the local communities and these species, rather than hunting or conflicts near villages.”

However, the researchers also expressed concerns about threats from human-wildlife conflict, poaching, and loss of forest habitat due to fire and urbanization.

“The Cambodian government, conservation organisations and the local community need to work together to ensure all these habitats are protected from loss or degradation,” Herranz Muñoz said.

Banner image: A fishing cat in the Koh Kapik Ramsar site in Cambodia. Image courtesy of the Fishing Cat Ecological Enterprise.

The Daasanach people in the Turkana Basin of northern Kenya experienced the worst drought in 40 years between November 2020 and March 2023. The Daasanach are pastoralists who have lived semi-nomadically for roughly 6,000 years, supported by herds of livestock including cows, camels, donkeys, and goats.

A group of researchers worked with the Daasanach to study the effects of the drought on their culture and access to food. They examined water and food access as well as coping and dietary strategies for 515 adults and 384 children in communities around Lake Turkana in Kenya.

During the drought, livestock herds dropped precipitously, with little recovery by 2024. Prior to the drought in 2019, each household had an average of 24 sheep and goats; by 2022 and 2023, they had just eight on average. Similarly, before the drought, the average family had six cows, and during the drought, just two. Such livestock are central to the economy and food security of the Daasanach pastoralists. With fewer animals to feed themselves, many Daasanach families moved to the town of Illeret during the drought to be closer to food aid.

As the drought progressed, nutrition worsened for the Daasanach amid a drop in milk and meat consumption. Researchers found that children who had access to milk had significantly better nutrition over time compared to children without access to milk.

The study also found an increase in water insecurity during the drought, compounding food insecurity challenges.

“The lived experience of Daasanach is important to understand and can tell us more than just how much rain has fallen, but how people are experiencing the drought so that the particular issues can be addressed,” Asher Rosinger, lead researcher of the study, told Mongabay in an email.

The Turkana Basin historically experiences frequent droughts, Rosinger said. “Pastoralism as a livelihood has developed primarily in what we call patchy, or ecologically marginal environments,” and pastoralists typically migrate to find better pasture conditions during drought, he added.

“With an increasing number of droughts, Daasanach adapt by finding ways to diversify,” Rosinger said. They began fishing for both food and income when livestock failed. “But the interesting thing is that as conditions have improved since the end of the drought, many are still fishing and using the fishing income to replenish their livestock. This diversification has increased resilience and is another source of income.”

Rosinger said he hopes conditions will improve so people can sustain the ancient practice of keeping livestock in this region of northern Kenya. “Pastoralism in this region has been going for more than 6000 years strong, and I hope it will continue for another 6000 years.”

Banner image of Daasanach warriors, by Rod Waddington via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)