Mozambique has formally protected Mount Mabu, a hotspot of endemic wildlife and home to more than 200 species of butterflies, located in the Lugela district of northern Mozambique.

The decree, published on Aug. 24 by the Ministry of Agriculture, Environment and Fisheries, created the 9,341-hectare (23,082-acre) Mount Mabu Community Conservation Area, with stewardship of the land granted to the local communities that have preserved the forest for generations.

“It’s a great relief,” Julian Bayliss, an ecologist who led several surveys over 20 years that helped build the case for protecting Mount Mabu, told Mongabay by phone. “These forests are very important because they’ve got high levels of endemism.”

Every year in October and November, hundreds of butterflies gather in the morning on the 1,700-meter (5,577-foot) summit of Mount Mabu, a mating behavior scientists call hilltopping. In 2013, the phenomenon was documented by naturalist David Attenborough who lent Mount Mabu the nickname “butterfly forest.”

Scientists have recorded more than 200 butterfly taxa at Mabu but say the real number could reach 250 with further surveys. Since 2005, more than 30 species, including frogs, chameleons, bats and insects, have been discovered in the forests of Mabu.

Bayliss and colleagues most recently described a new-to-science cobalt-blue butterfly, Iolaus mabuensis, found by a research team he led in Mabu in 2008. Only one specimen of the species has been collected to date, Bayliss said.

Bayliss was also the first scientist to encounter the Mount Mabu forest viper, Atheris mabuensis, described in 2009, after he accidentally stepped on one under a pile of leaf litter.

According to the decree, the land is dedicated to the protection, conservation and sustainable use of natural resources by local communities. Any specific restrictions on activities are expected to be defined under the community management plan that has not yet been finalized.

Mount Mabu hosts “the largest continuous block” of medium-altitude forest left in southern Africa. The terrain has steep ridges and valleys, which create microclimates and isolated flora and fauna that evolved over millions of years into a plethora of species found in few other places, and in some cases nowhere else in the world, Bayliss said.

Today, the forest’s main threats are from encroachment of small-scale agriculture and logging, but overall, the area is well-conserved and treated as sacred by locals, according to the 2024 conservation area proposal reviewed by Mongabay.

“All of this effort is a recognition of the community that protected the forest,” José Monteiro, executive director of ReGeCom, one of the organizations working with the local communities at Mabu, told Mongabay by phone. “The community, over a long time, kept the forest standing.”

Banner image: Butterflies on Mount Mabu. Image courtesy of Julian Bayliss.

Nine dolphin species, and several more subspecies and local populations, are currently critically endangered or endangered, according to the most recent assessment by the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority.

September 12 marks World Dolphin Day, an awareness day created in 2022 by marine conservation nonprofit Sea Shepherd to bring attention to the threats that these highly intelligent mammals face.

In late 2025, Lahille’s bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus gephyreus), a subspecies of the common bottlenose dolphin, was reclassified from vulnerable to endangered, with fewer than 400 individuals estimated to remain in the wild. Its main threat, according the IUCN, is being killed as bycatch in gillnet fisheries that operate along the coasts of southern Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina.

While threats to species and sub-species remain, efforts are being made to protect and better understand dolphins across the globe, from research uncovering novel behaviors, and increased formal protections, to steps to end cruel confinement practices. For this World Dolphin Day, we present three recent Mongabay stories reporting on dolphins around the world.

Illegal drift nets trap dolphins in the Mediterranean despite ban

The use of drift nets to catch swordfish is banned in the Mediterranean because the gear often traps dolphins, whales, sharks and turtles. But recent investigations by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) found it was still widely in use in the Alboran Sea between northwestern Morocco and the south coast of Spain, Mongabay’s Victoria Schneider reported in July.

“We can see that it is having an impact on precious ecosystems in a unique area, which is the Alboran Sea,” Jesús Urios Culiañez, an ocean policy officer at EJF, told Mongabay.

The EU is expected to present fisheries regulators with a proposal for stronger international rules in November 2026.

Singapore resort says it will stop breeding and sourcing wild dolphins

According to insiders, a resort in Singapore has suspended captive breeding of wild dolphins and stopped sourcing wild dolphins for its oceanarium, contributor Robin Hicks reported for Mongabay in March.

As of March, the facility held more than 20 Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus), most descended from animals captured in the Solomon Islands in 2008 and 2009. The company that owns the oceanarium also said it was assembling experts to determine the future of its captive dolphins.

Anbarasi Boopal, the former co-chief executive of Singapore’s Animal Concerns Research and Education Society called the move “long overdue progress for animal welfare in Singapore” as long as the decision was motivated by welfare concerns.

Dolphins use shells to catch fish in Eastern Australia

Bottlenose dolphins off Australia’s east coast have been filmed trapping fish inside empty sea snail shells — a foraging technique previously recorded only in western Australia, thousands of kilometers away, Mongabay’s Bobby Bascomb reported in August.

“The second I saw it, I was like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, this is huge,” said Alexis Levengood, the animal ecologist behind the study into the dolphins.

Researchers suspect the behavior developed independently on both coasts.

Banner image: A striped dolphin (Stenella coeruleoalba) caught in a French drift net in the North Atlantic. Image © Peter Rowlands/Greenpeace.

Nigerian conservationist Rachel Ikemeh has been named the 2026 Rolex Award laureate, for her work with communities in the Niger Delta to protect the region’s ecology and the critically endangered Niger Delta red colobus monkey.

The red colobus (Piliocolobus epieni), a monkey known as epieni by the region’s communities, is listed as one of the world’s 25 most endangered primates by the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority. It was first described scientifically in 1993. At the time, there were about 10,000 epieni estimated to be living across its limited range in the Niger Delta. However, by 2013, their numbers had plunged to just hundreds rather than thousands of individuals, Ikemeh noted in a study.

In 2021, Ikemeh and her colleagues helped establish a 1,010-hectare (2,496-acre) community-protected area for the epieni in Apoi, a town within the monkey’s range.

By 2024, the monkey’s population had doubled within the community-protected forest, from 180-200 individuals in 2021, Ikemeh told Mongabay by email. She added the team has since helped create community conservation areas in the neighboring communities of Garnaut and Kokoloama.

The award “feels less like a personal honour and more like validation for the community model itself,” Ikemeh said.

She added she’s optimistic about the epieni’s future because she’s seen community perception around their conservation model shift over the years. “[T]he same community who once suspected we’d come to ‘collect their forest’ for the government now talk about epieni as a source of pride, something that put their village on the map,” Ikemeh said. “That change in attitude is the real conservation infrastructure; it’s what makes this conservation story very meaningful to tell.”

Ikemeh said Apoi community members have even hosted six other communities to learn about their community conservation model.

However, epieni conservation still faces challenges. “Outside the protected areas and across the Niger Delta region, there are still threats from oil pollution, logging is rampant, overfishing, indiscriminate hunting and recently black sand mining by the seashores amongst others,” Ikemeh said. “Also, the overall population of epieni is still small and confined to a tiny area, so a disease outbreak, or spike in unrest could undo a lot of this progress quickly.”

She said most funding for their work is also still tied to specific short-term grants and projects. Furthermore, while communities have embraced conservation, Ikemeh said the underlying economic pressures, including poverty and the lack of jobs, still remain.

Ikemeh said the 100,000 Swiss franc ($123,000) Rolex Award will allow for her team to set up four new community conservation areas around Apoi. This will include the first locally managed marine community conservation area in the region. She added the money will also help them establish a mobile environmental education program to reach communities they haven’t been able to visit.

Banner image: Nigerian conservationist Rachel Ikemeh is a winner of the 2026 Rolex Awards. Image courtesy of Rolex Awards.

A U.S. federal court recently ruled that residents of Jackson, Mississippi, don’t have a constitutional right to truthful information from public officials, nor the right to municipal drinking water that is free of lead, a neurotoxin.

“The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing,” Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, who was appointed by U.S. President Donald Trump, wrote in the majority opinion.

The case was brought by a group of Jackson residents in 2022 who alleged that the city allowed lead to enter the municipal water system and then lied to residents saying the water was safe, though they knew it was not.

“Knowing what is in our water is fundamental to protecting public health,” Caroline Leary, general counsel at the U.S.-based nonprofit Environmental Working Group, told Mongabay by email.

Jackson is home to roughly 150,000 people. Nearly a quarter of them are children under 18 who are particularly vulnerable to the potentially life-long toxic impacts of lead exposure including seizures, lowered IQ, impaired brain development and even death.

The plaintiffs alleged that several of their children have been diagnosed with lead poisoning and now require special educational, medical, sociological, occupational and disability services. The plaintiffs also argued that exposure to contaminated water and the failure to be informed about the risks violated their 14th amendment due process right to bodily integrity.

A November 2025 ruling by a three-judge panel of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowed these claims against the city to proceed.

However, on Sept. 4, 2026, the full court ruled against the plaintiffs, stating that the court could not recognize two new constitutional rights, “the right to be free from exposure to contaminated water and the right to accurate information from public officials.”

Writing for the dissent, Judge Catharina Haynes argued that the plaintiffs’ allegations were plausible, and the court should recognize the “state-created danger” doctrine, which allows people to sue the government if it created, or made a person more vulnerable to, danger. It has been adopted by 10 other federal appeals courts. 

“The dissent is exactly right,” Pat Parenteau, an emeritus law professor with Vermont Law School told Mongabay by email.  “The courts have uniformly recognized a constitutional right to be protected from state sponsored danger creation and violation of bodily integrity.”

He said the majority decision is “a travesty.”

“At a minimum, plaintiffs are entitled to discovery to prove that the city deliberately endangered the health of the plaintiffs and their children from lead poisoning,” Parenteau said. The dissent opinion said the same.

However, the majority opinion said the plaintiffs should instead pursue a tort claim, a civil legal action to receive compensation for damages and elect “representatives who will better manage the public-water system, and petitioning their representatives for other remedies.”

Banner image: A glass of tap water.  Image courtesy of Margaret Barse via Flickr  (CCO 1.0)

MEMPAWAH, Indonesia (AP) — A Japanese military transport ship docked on the island of Borneo on Thursday as part of a disaster relief mission to help fight wildfires in Indonesia that are causing a toxic haze impacting people’s health in other countries.

Japan deployed 300 crew members, landing ship JS Kunisaki and three CH-47 helicopters, which arrived in Kalimantan on the island of Borneo.

The mission in Indonesia marked the first known overseas firefighting operation carried out by the Japan Self-Defense Forces, or JSDF.

“To this end, we will learn from the Indonesian military’s operational experience and work in coordination and cooperation with them, striving to ensure that the Indonesian people can lead stable lives as soon as possible,” Col. Syunji Nakahara, the commander of the disaster relief activities, said at a port in Mempawah district.

Japan and Indonesia have been also increasingly strengthening their military cooperation ties, with the two sides discussing the Japanese sale of its used destroyers.

Indonesia has been plagued by forest and land fires for decades, but an intensifying El Niño pattern this year and a prolonged dry season worsened the impact of the fires.

Toxic haze and smoke have caused a health crisis in neighboring countries.

The smoke has drifted as far as the Philippines, more than 800 kilometers (500 miles) away, and breached Malaysia’s emergency-level threshold for air pollution, forcing authorities to declare an emergency last week in a town in Sarawak state on Borneo.

The air pollution has also affected several areas on the island of Sumatra, forcing schools to suspend learning activities at school. The toxic haze has affected more than 1.4 million students across the country.

Japan’s firefighting efforts will support Indonesian authorities in reaching areas that are difficult for ground teams to access.

The JSDF said in a statement on Thursday that the three CH-47 Chinook helicopters from Japan will start conducting firefighting operations on Borneo as soon as preparations are complete.

“Through these operations, we will dedicate ourselves to supporting the affected people of Indonesia and preventing further damage,” a written statement from JSDF said on Thursday.

Indonesian authorities have escalated firefighting efforts in several provinces as they seek to contain the blazes. The efforts have involved aircraft provided by countries in Southeast Asia and beyond, including Japan, the United States, Russia, Australia, Canada and Ukraine.

Indonesia’s Forestry Ministry recorded more than 202,000 hectares (nearly 500,000 acres) of burned land between January and July, almost three times Singapore’s size.

By Edna Tarigan and Andi Jatmiko, Associated Press 

Banner image: Japanese tank landing ship JS Kunisaki approaches Kijing Port amid the thick haze from forest fires in Mempawah, West Kalimantan, Indonesia, Thursday, Sept. 10, 2026. Banner image courtesy of Tatan Syuflana, Associated Press

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.

On the final day of a two-week expedition, where researchers were searching for a “lost” species along Papua New Guinea’s Sepik River, Helen Asu arrived with two small, greenish-brown fish. She had caught them while fishing for prawns with an umben, a traditional hand net, near Imbando village in East Sepik province.

They were spinach pipefish (Microphis spinachioides), a species known only from the Sepik and not recorded by scientists since 1985, reports Mongabay’s Spoorthy Raman.

“It was honestly an incredible moment,” said Jerrica Agebigo, a researcher at the Papua New Guinea University of Technology and the New Guinea Binatang Research Centre, who led the expedition. “When Helen showed the fish to us, I immediately realized that we had found something very special.”

The spinach pipefish is a freshwater relative of seahorses and seadragons. It grows to about 15 centimeters (6 inches) and uses its elongated snout to catch small prey. Its coloring helps conceal it among water lilies and other plants along the banks of the Sepik, Papua New Guinea’s longest river.

Almost everything else about it remains uncertain. The specimen used to describe the species was held at Hamburg’s natural history museum, but was destroyed during the second world war. When the fish was last assessed for the IUCN Red List in 2016, it was classified as data deficient. It later became one of the 10 most sought-after species on the “Lost Fishes” list, compiled by SHOAL, Re:wild and the IUCN Freshwater Fish Specialist Group. The wider list includes more than 300 freshwater fishes missing to science.

Agebigo’s team, made up of local scientists and community members, set out in June to learn whether the pipefish still survived and, if so, what threats it faced. Along the Sepik river they showed pictures to residents and asked fishers whether they recognized it. On June 18, Asu supplied the answer.

The rediscovery will allow scientists to begin filling gaps in knowledge left by four decades without a confirmed record of the fish.

“The fact that a species could go without a confirmed record for around four decades — and then be found through the daily activities of a local fisher — is a powerful reminder of the importance of local ecological knowledge,” Agebigo said. “Without Helen’s knowledge, experience and willingness to help us, we may not have found the species.”

Read the full story by Spoorthy Raman here

Banner image of a Spinach pipefish. Image courtesy of the New Guinea Binatang Research Centre.