New research finds that tropical forests can grow significantly faster and sequester more climate-warming carbon dioxide when additional nitrogen is available in the soil.

“With this information we can prioritise management and conservation practices to maximise forest regrowth,” Kelly Anderson, a research scientist at Missouri Botanical Garden in the U.S., told Mongabay by email. Anderson wasn’t involved with the study but does work with NEXTropics, a network of scientists who collaborate on forest nutrient studies.

During the recent study, researchers “wanted to test how either nitrogen or phosphorus limit forest recovery and specifically if there was a shift in that limitation from really young forests to older forests,” Sarah Batterman, corresponding author of the study, told Mongabay in a video call.

To test both nutrients the research team conducted a long-term field experiment in Panama. Research plots were established in 2015 and 2016 in recovering forests of three different ages: those on recently abandoned pasture; young secondary forest (10 years); and older secondary forests (30 years). They also looked at mature forest plots established in 1997, for a total of 76 experimental plots.

For each age of forest, plots received one of four treatments: added nitrogen, added phosphorus, both nutrients, and control plots where nothing was added. They also established several replicate plots where they repeated the experiments.

Batterman said the strongest response was in young trees that received additional nitrogen.

“So, in the first 10 years of forest recovery, the forests grow back about twice as fast when they have sufficient nitrogen in the soil compared to when they don’t,” Batterman told Mongabay. “That’s really fast recovery.”

The nitrogen-boosted growth declined sharply in the middle-aged trees and was undetectable in mature forests.

“We were really surprised because the strength of nitrogen limitation was so high. We were kind of blown away by that,” Batterman said.

While additional nitrogen can significantly help young tropical trees grow and sequester carbon, the researchers caution that the source of nitrogen is important. Excess synthetic fertilizer can leach into waterways, creating pollution or forming nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas.

Instead, the researchers suggest incorporating native nitrogen-fixing trees into reforestation projects. Another option is targeting reforestation efforts in areas with excess nitrogen from industry, cattle ranching and vehicles.

“Then it’s kind of a win-win because the forest will suck up that extra nitrogen, as opposed to [polluting] waterways, or it’s lost as gaseous emissions, including of nitrous oxide,” Batterman said.

“The next steps will be to replicate this type of experiment across more tropical forests,” Anderson said.

If the same results hold up globally, nitrogen-supported forest regrowth could have a significant climate impact; approximately 0.69 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide could be sequestered each year, the researchers found. That’s roughly the annual emissions of Indonesia.

“It’s not going to solve climate change but it’s a piece in the puzzle,” Batterman said.

Banner image: Sunset over a Panamanian forest. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

ROME (AP) — Scientists in Antarctica on Wednesday inaugurated the first global repository of mountain ice cores, preserving the history of the Earth’s atmosphere in a frozen vault for future generations to study as global warming melts glaciers around the world.

An ice core is something of an atmospheric time capsule, containing information about the Earth’s past changes in a frozen climate archive. With global glaciers melting at an unprecedented rate, scientists have raced to preserve ice cores for future study before they disappear altogether.

The Ice Memory Foundation, a consortium of European research institutes, inaugurated the frozen sanctuary on Wednesday at the Concordia station in the Antarctic Plateau. The foundation livestreamed the ceremonial ribbon cutting and opening of the frozen cave where the ice samples will be kept for future generations.

The first two sets of samples of Alpine mountain ice cores were drilled out of Mont Blanc in France and Grand Combin in Switzerland and arrived at the station after a 50-day refrigerated icebreaker and plane journey from Trieste, Italy.

During the inauguration ceremony, pairs of foundation team members brought box after box of ice cores into the cave, burrowed deep into a 5-meter (yard) high compacted snow drift at a constant temperature of around -52°C/-61°F.

“By safeguarding physical samples of atmospheric gases, aerosols, pollutants and dust trapped in ice layers, the Ice Memory Foundation ensures that future generations of researchers will be able to study past climate conditions using technologies that may not yet exist,” said Carlo Barbante, vice chair of the Ice Memory Foundation and a professor at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice.

The Ice Memory project was launched in 2015 by a consortium of research institutes: From France, the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD) and the University of Grenoble-Alpes; from Italy the National Council of Research (CNR) and the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, and Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute.

Scientists have already identified and drilled ice cores at 10 glacier sites worldwide and plan to transport them to the cave sanctuary for safekeeping in the coming years. The aim over the coming decade is to craft an international convention to preserve and safeguard the samples for future generations to study.

As temperatures globally rise, glaciers are disappearing at a rapid clip, and with them critical information about the atmosphere: Since 2000, glaciers have lost between 2% and 39% of their ice regionally and about 5% globally, the foundation said.

“These ice cores are not relics … they are reference points,” said Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of the U.N. World Meteorological Organisation. “They allow scientists now and in the future to understand what changed, how fast and why.”

Banner image: of the Pamir Expedition to collect ice cores in Tajikistan’s Pamir Mountains. Photo courtesy of the Ice Memory Foundation

Greenland sharks are the longest-living vertebrate known to science, topping out at more than 400 years old, and scientists have largely believed they were nearly blind. But new research suggests they actually can see, and, remarkably, maintain their vision for more than a century.

Greenland sharks (Somniosus microcephalus) mostly live in the cold waters of the Arctic and North Atlantic, in the ocean’s dimly lit twilight zone, at depths of 200-1,000 meters (660-3,300 feet). Their dark habitat led scientists to believe that the sharks could barely see. Many Greenland sharks have also been found with parasites in their eyes, raising the possibility they may even be blind.

Lily Fogg, who researches fish vision at the University of Basel in Switzerland, told Mongabay in a video call that shark biologist John Fleng Steffensen approached her to study the Greenland shark’s vision.

Fleng Steffensen originally discovered Greenland sharks’ incredible longevity, and had 10 shark specimens from an ongoing study. “He said, ‘I’ve got these eyes, would you like to do a study on them?’ And we said, ‘Why not? That’s a great opportunity.’ If they’re going in the bin, then that would just be a waste,” Fogg said.

So, Fogg and her team synthesized the shark’s genome and found that the genes involved with vision were still intact and functioning.

The team also looked at cross sections of the sharks’ eyes to see if the structure of the tissue was degraded. “We found that it’s actually beautifully intact,” Fogg said.

Furthermore, the researchers found the structure of the eyes is consistent with what they expected for an animal that spends most of its life in very dim environments.

Human eyes, for example, have two kinds of photoreceptors: cones, which function well in bright light, and rods, which are sensitive to low light and help us see at night. Greenland sharks only have rods, the study found. “They didn’t have any cones at all,” Fogg said.

While the findings suggest Greenland sharks can see, they likely don’t see well, Fogg said. “It’s not really sharp … and that’s normal for species that live in dim habitats.”

Fogg added the sharks may use their vision to tip them off to the location of prey, which they then hunt with other senses.

The Greenland sharks in the study were all between 100 and 150 years old, barely reaching sexual maturity and considered young for the species. Fogg said it would be interesting to test some older sharks to see if their vision still holds up centuries later.

Still, being able to preserve vision for more than a century is no easy feat. Fogg said the sharks appear to have a robust system for DNA repair, which might play a role and could have implications for biomedical research aimed at preserving long-term vision in humans.

Banner image of a Greenland shark by Hemming1952 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Since July 2024, three Andean condor chicks have hatched at an artificial incubation program located near Bogotá, Colombia’s capital city, contributor Christina Noriega reported for Mongabay.

The artificial incubation program is run by the Jaime Duque Park Foundation, a Colombian conservation nonprofit that has worked since 2015 to counter the birds’ population decline.

Globally, the Andean condor (Vultur gryphus) is classified as vulnerable to extinction by the IUCN Red List, with an estimated 6,700 mature individuals remaining across the species’ range, largely concentrated in Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. But in Colombia and Ecuador, the species is considered critically endangered, with fewer than 150 birds left in the wild. In Venezuela, the species is believed to have already gone locally extinct.

The chicks, named Rafiki, Wayra and Ámbar, hatched in July 2024, September 2025 and October 2025, respectively. “They are the salvation of the species,” Fernando Castro, director of biodiversity at the foundation, told Mongabay.

Rafiki and Wayra, the two older chicks, are expected to be released this year near Cerrito, a high-altitude town in northeastern Colombia where nearly half of the nation’s condor population survives today.

To boost condor survival, wildlife caretakers at Jaime Duque Park place each egg collected from captive condor nests in an oven-like incubator to provide warmth and safety. Andean condors typically raise one chick every 2-3 years, and first-time parents have been observed accidentally cracking their eggs, Castro told Noriega. But removing the egg from their nest often stimulates the birds to lay again, increasing the number of eggs they produce in a single year, Castro added.

Once a chick hatches, caretakers avoid all direct contact during early care to improve its chances of survival in the wild. Staff use condor-shaped puppets during feeding and are kept with other condors to ensure the birds remain wary of people, a trait considered critical for survival after their release.

Condors in Cerrito were previously treated as pests, as many ranchers believed the birds preyed on sheep. Some ranchers would leave poisoned carcasses to kill them, Doris Torres, a 47-year-old sheepherder, told Mongabay.

In 2018, the Jaime Duque Park Foundation began working with the community to reduce conflict and raise awareness about the condor’s ecological role. Camera traps also showed that livestock losses were largely caused by foxes, ocelots and, in some cases, their own sheepdogs, rather than condors.

Since the recovery efforts, Cerrito has become a destination for condor watching and receives nearly 1,000 yearly visitors. The shift created a new source of income for local families and helped sustain the conservation efforts.

“The condor used to be our enemy,” sheepherder Torres said. “Now it’s a great ally for development.”

Read the full story by Christina Noriega here.

Banner image: An Andean condor chick, called Marijo, in a North American zoo in 2022. Image courtesy of Mike Faix, on behalf of the National Aviary.

As the recent seizure of more than 5,000 endemic ants in Kenya reveals, ants have become part of a thriving global wildlife trade. Transnational traffickers are mopping up ants from the wild to sell them to hobbyists and collectors worldwide. In a recently published letter, conservationists are now calling for greater trade protections for all ant species under CITES, the global wildlife trade treaty.

Ants play an important ecological role as seed dispersers and soil engineers and are essential components of soil biodiversity, said Sérgio Henriques, a letter co-author from CCMAR, the Algarve Centre of Marine Sciences at the University of Algarve, Portugal. But they are being harvested “at an alarming rate for a global market that is operating almost entirely in the shadows and moved across the world,” he told Mongabay by email.

While the Kenyan seizure garnered international attention, Henriques said data show similar cases in Central Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, where traders target “visually striking” or “ecologically interesting” ant species. “Many of these are range-restricted endemics that are particularly vulnerable to disturbance by poaching,” he added.

Ants can also become invasive pests when introduced in areas outside their range. On Australia’s Christmas Island, for instance, yellow crazy ants (Anoplolepis gracilipes) from Asia have wiped out native red crabs (Gecarcoidea natalis). Meanwhile, little fire ants (Wasmannia auropunctata) from Central and South America cost a whopping $170 million in damages in Hawai`i annually.

“Any of these places that have invasive ant problems are spending bazillions,” Chris Shepherd, a letter co-author from the Center for Biological Diversity, told Mongabay in an interview. “If ant trade is becoming popular, we should be putting things in place right now to prevent these nightmares and to prevent these incredibly expensive messes to clean up.”

Currently, no ant species are listed on CITES Appendices, meaning none of them have any protections from international trade. Data on the scale, hotspots and destinations of ant trade are also patchy.

Henriques said that adding all ants to CITES Appendix II, which allows commercial international trade with permits, can help better monitor and manage ant trade. “Without regulation, the trade remains clandestine, unmonitored, unchecked, often moving across borders through informal online channels and mislabeled shipments,” he added.

However, listing a species on CITES Appendix I or II, which affords tighter international trade regulations, involves years-long bureaucratic processes and voting at CITES meetings. More immediately, Shepherd said, countries can add their ant species to Appendix III, which does not need parties’ consensus or votes. “Then there’s a mechanism in place, at least, to monitor what’s going on or prevent the illegal export of the ants.”

“Parties should be looking at [the ant trade] as a really serious issue,” Shepherd said. “It’s really creating a demand for what could be an ecological nightmare.”

Banner image: Leafcutter ants from South America are kept in zoos across the world. Image by Pjt56 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Great white shark populations in South Africa are disappearing, driven largely by human activities that are likely responsible for the collapse of a locally critical apex predator. That’s the conclusion of a review paper published by a group of scientists and conservationists who analyzed data on the abundance of great whites in South African waters.

Once considered the global hotspot for great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias), in South Africa, populations have largely vanished from their main aggregation sites on the Western Cape since 2018.

“This synthesis of various pieces of historical and newly acquired data tells a worrying story about the state of the white shark population in South Africa,” Neil Hammerschlag, one of the authors, told Mongabay via email.

Researchers have been trying for years to explain the almost complete disappearance of white sharks from the area. Some researchers argue that the population has simply shifted eastward.

As a top ocean predator, the only documented natural threats to great white sharks is predation by orca pods. Recent studies have found pressure from orcas (Orcinus orca) is likely contributing to changes in the sharks’ distribution. However, humans are responsible for a significant portion of the decline, the researchers found.

For instance, South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Sharks Board (KZNSB) maintains a program of lethal control of great whites to ensure beach safety. Between 1978 and 2018, KZNSB’s nets and drumlines were responsible for an average of 28 great white shark deaths annually. The sharks are also caught as bycatch in the country’s demersal shark longline (DSL) fishery. Together, such human activity could result in an average of 44 great white deaths annually, the researchers note.

That’s between 5% and 10% of the entire population. “With a population of 500 to 1,000 white sharks left, that is not sustainable,” said marine biologist Enrico Gennari, one of the paper’s authors.

Great white sharks have generated roughly $240 million in conservation and tourism value over the last 30 years. In 1991, South Africa became the first country in the world to legally protect its great white shark population requiring the species to be managed using a precautionary approach. This means measures should be implemented to prevent ecosystem degradation even in the absence of full scientific certainty.

“We hope to be wrong, but if the direction the data is clearly pointing in is consistent with our common-sense interpretation, then the outcome of waiting is dire,” Hammerschlag said.

The authors advise the South African government to reduce anthropogenic sources of white shark mortality to prevent possible local extinction. Gennari advocates for updating fishery guidelines to better protect endangered species, including great white sharks.

South Africa’s Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment did not respond to Mongabay’s request for comment by the time of publication.

Banner image: A great white shark in South Africa’s False Bay, before the species largely disappeared from the area. Image courtesy of Chris Fallows.