Researchers have developed a noninvasive DNA tool to help monitor hard-to-trace African carnivores, including caracals and leopards, making it potentially useful in the conservation of elusive and increasingly threatened species.

“Carnivores are really difficult to study/observe in the wild, and even if a fecal sample is found, it is often difficult to determine which species it comes from,” Anne Schmidt-Küntzel, a co-author of a new study detailing the tool, and director of animal health and research at the Namibia-based Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF), told Mongabay in an email.

Researchers analyzed DNA material in fecal samples from wild carnivores in Southern Africa to identify a specific genetic marker, called a “mini-barcode,” that can be used to determine the species it came from.

“Using the marker allows us to find out which species was present in the study area,” Schmidt-Küntzel added.

The researchers collected 157 samples to analyze, and compared their results with known data collected in Namibia 13 years earlier. They were able to successfully identify the carnivores nearly 95% of the time, finding six different species, including leopards (Panthera pardus) and caracals (Caracal caracal). The researchers suggest the marker could also be a useful monitoring tool for lions (Panthera leo), cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus), servals (Leptailurus serval) and African golden cats (Caracal aurata).

“We have created a guide that allows researchers to predict how well the marker will perform in their study area and with their species of interest, and thus improve their chance of success in carnivore monitoring,”  Schmidt-Küntzel said.

The researchers also used the tool to obtain mitochondrial DNA sequencing data for the Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus), which they uploaded to GenBank, a U.S.-funded research database. That means other researchers can now access genetic information about the large, rare species of otter for the first time.

Philip Muruthi, vice president of species conservation and science at the Kenya-based African Wildlife Foundation, who wasn’t involved with the study, said this type of DNA analysis is an important tool for monitoring presence of species, especially elusive ones.

“The DNA can be obtained directly from the animal or from the environment (hair, scat, etc.) which means you get to know the animal’s presence even if you did not see the actual individual,” Murithi told Mongabay.

He added it could potentially help “prioritize interventions to secure the species, their habitat and to manage their interactions with people.”

Schmidt-Küntzel said the research can serve as a “guide that other researchers in Africa can use to see how well the marker will work for them in their jurisdiction, as well as provided new reference sequences for understudied African carnivore species.”

Banner image of a leopard in South Africa’s Kruger National Park by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

A new study finds that scientists have likely underestimated heat stress on coral reefs in the South Atlantic Ocean, further raising concerns for coral bleaching amid climate change.

The study notes that while the Caribbean and Indo-Pacific have well-established long-term ocean temperature and coral monitoring programs, the South Atlantic Ocean has lagged behind, causing gaps in understanding. Many Brazilian reefs, for example, lie in deep, murky waters. Previous studies suggest these cool low-light conditions could make the reefs a refuge for coral as oceans warm.

However, “It’s tricky to say that it is a refuge because we don’t know our history. So, we cannot say that with certainty,” Giovanna Destri, a Ph.D. student with the University of São Paulo in Brazil and study lead author, told Mongabay in a video call.

To better understand that history, Destri and her team looked at 40 years of data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for 33 reef sites across the southern Atlantic Ocean, mostly off the coasts of Africa and Brazil.

They assessed the intensity, duration and frequency of each heating event over the last four decades to create a complete picture of warming trends in the region.

The study found a sharp increase in heat stress episodes over time. From 1985-89, there were 10 significant episodes, two per year on average. From 1990-99, there were 31 episodes, a figure that held steady from 2000-09. However, from 2010-19 there were 81 events. In just the last five years, 2020-24, there have been 75 episodes, roughly 15 per year.

“We had a lot of events that we didn’t even notice,” Destri said.

Many of those heat stress events coincide with global bleaching episodes that happen when ocean waters become too warm and reefs expel their symbiotic algae, becoming brittle and susceptible to disease. Given time, many reefs can recover. But stressful heat events are increasingly frequent, and many corals don’t have enough time to recover before another marine heat wave strikes. Some reefs in the southern part of the study area, near Queimada Grande Island, for instance, faced more than 20 heat stress events in the last 40 years, every two years on average, the study notes.

The researchers found a few bright spots: One site near Rio De Janeiro showed no recorded heat stress at all, perhaps due to upwelling of cool water. Furthermore, at Africa’s São Tomé Island and Libreville, the longest interval between stress events was nearly 29 years.

“The frequency of thermal stress episodes increased over time … across all regions except for Africa,” the researchers note.

Destri said she hopes this study can be used to prioritize protecting the most vulnerable reefs from pollution and physical damage to help make them more resilient to the much harder to control effects of climate change.

Banner photo: a coral reef in Brazil’s Abrolhos Marine National Park by Roberto Costa Pinto via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Most countries that pledged to reduce the number of birds being illegally killed along an important migratory route in Europe and the Mediterranean region are failing to do so, a new report shows.

For the report, conservation organizations BirdLife International and EuroNatur tracked the progress of 46 countries in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, which have committed to the Rome Strategic Plan (RSP), a 10-year goal to halve the illegal killing, taking and trade of wild birds by 2030 compared to 2020. RSP was jointly developed by members of the Bern Convention, an international treaty for wildlife conservation in Europe and parts of Africa, and an intergovernmental task force of the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS MIKT).

Five years into the plan, the report found that 38 of the 46 countries are not on track to meet the 2030 commitments. The 10 countries responsible for about 90% of the illegal killings are seeing little to no progress; four even showed worsening trends compared to 2015-2019.

“The number of birds killed illegally each year remains unacceptably high. For many migratory birds, it spells death before they can even reach their breeding grounds,” EuroNatur project manager Justine Vansynghel said in a press release.

Around 2 billion birds from more than 500 species migrate across the African-Eurasian flyway each year, flying between their breeding grounds in Europe and their wintering grounds in Africa or parts of Asia. But the birds are often indiscriminately shot, especially as they cross the Mediterranean.

An estimated 375 bird species, according to a 2016 study, or an average of 25 million birds, are illegally killed or removed from the wild annually in the Mediterranean alone. Species including the vulnerable European turtledove (Streptopelia turtur), the critically endangered sociable lapwing (Vanellus gregarius), and the endangered Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus) “have suffered severe population declines,” partly due to the “ immense scale” of the illegal killings, the new report said.

Some countries that showed significant decreases in killings from 2020-2024 compared to 2015-2019 were Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus and Spain.

Of the 10 countries with the highest levels of bird killings, Croatia and Greece showed slight improvement since 2020, but the progress was considered not enough. Azerbaijan, Italy, France and Lebanon showed no significant change. In Egypt, Syria and Libya, illegal bird killings rose starting 2020. Cyprus showed major improvement since 2015 but also showed a slight increase since 2020. Mongabay reported earlier this year that Maltese hunters often head to Egypt for mass bird-hunting trips.

“High levels of illegal killing in one country can wipe out conservation successes in another. We urgently need stronger, coordinated, cross-border action across the full flyway,” Barend van Gemerden, global flyways program coordinator at BirdLife International, said in the statement. “Reaching the 2030 goal is a tough challenge, but not an impossible one.”

Banner image of an Egyptian vulture by Mildeep via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The Republic of Congo has one of the lowest deforestation rates in the world, but “uncontrolled gold mining” in recent years could harm the country’s biodiversity, especially in the Sangha region, Mongabay’s Elodie Toto reported in a video published in February.

Sangha, located in the country’s north, on the border with Cameroon and the Central African Republic, is home to 5 million hectares (12.4 million acres) of forest. The forests are part of the Congo Basin that hosts many threatened species and is estimated to store more net carbon dioxide than the Amazon Rainforest, making it important in the fight against climate change, Toto reports.

In 2020, the Republic of Congo government set up the Sangha-Likouala REDD+ program, meant to reduce deforestation and forest degradation and carbon emissions. The government reported that the program had sequestered more than 1.5 million metric tons of carbon by 2020. If the claims are verified, the World Bank will buy the resulting carbon credits for $8.3 million, Toto writes in an article about the investigation.

However, since the start of the REDD+ program, Mining Minister Pierre Oba has issued 79 exploration and semi-industrial gold mining permits in Sangha, Mongabay learned over the course of an eight-month investigation. About 14% of the territory has already been allocated to gold mining.

Aristide Elong, a Sangha local, told Toto that he can no longer recognize the area where he was born due to mining operations that started in 2017. Not only were trees felled, waterways were also destroyed, and the fish and other animals have disappeared.

“The river used to run through the forest. You can see that the landscape has been devastated, there are no longer any trees around,” he said.

Mongabay was able to capture footage of mining operations at an area in Sangha that was once a primary forest. The workers could be seen using water from nearby sources to wash the soil in search for gold.

Cameroonian scientist and environmental activist Justin Chekoua, said the footage showed trees that “are over 100 years old. It will take a long time for the forest to regenerate and regain its ability to sequester the carbon it once did.”

He added the plant cover has been totally destroyed, especially since access roads had to be created to reach the mining area. “There are rare and endangered species in these areas. So there are threats to their ecological habitat,” he said.

Although national laws require mining companies to carry out environmental impact studies and submit a land rehabilitation or development plan, geoscientist and environmental consultant Noël Ndoudy told Toto, “There should be monitoring … unfortunately, inspections are not carried out regularly, so operators take advantage of it.”

Watch the documentary here. Read the investigation by Elodie Toto here.

Banner image of an excavator at a gold mining site in Sangha by Elodie Toto/Mongabay.

Flamingos, often pictured standing still with their heads submerged in water, make for a pretty picture. But peep underwater, and you’ll find the tall, elegant pink birds bobbing their heads, chattering their beaks, and creating mini tornados to efficiently guide microscopic prey into their mouths, according to a new study.

“Think of spiders, which produce webs to trap insects. Flamingos are using vortices to trap animals, like brine shrimp,” lead author Victor Ortega Jiménez, from the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement.

Jiménez and his colleagues discovered the birds’ deft use of physics while observing three Chilean flamingos (Phoenicopterus chilensis) at Nashville Zoo in the U.S. They trained the birds to feed from a water-filled aquarium, and used high-speed cameras and other equipment to film and analyze the flamingos’ feeding behavior underwater.

The researchers also used 3D-printed models of the flamingos’ feet, head and L-shaped bills to confirm their observations through experiments and simulations in the laboratory.

The team found that flamingos aren’t passive feeders waiting for prey to come to them. Rather, the birds work hard: they stomp their floppy webbed feet to churn up the bottom sediments, and move their angled, chattering beaks in ways that create tiny vortices that trap tiny plankton and invertebrates, propelling them into their mouths.

Experiments with the 3D replicas helped break it down.

Moving like dancers, flamingos slightly stomp their feet in shallow water while positioning their heads upside down in front of their feet. During each downward stomp of the cycle, the webbed feet spread out. Moving upward, they fold slightly. Simulations showed this movement creates vortices that travel to where the beak is.

Furthermore, the way a flamingo jerks its head straight upward from the water creates a vortex along the vertical axis. Its beak chattering, in which it opens and shuts its lower beak at a rate of about 12 times per second, generates more vortices, while the L-shaped beak itself triggers vortices near the water’s surface while skimming. All these motions concentrate and move the sediments and prey efficiently, the researchers found.

Alejandro Rico-Guevara, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington, who wasn’t involved in the study, told The New York Times that while several hypotheses have been put forward about how flamingo beaks work, “until recently we didn’t have the tools to study it.” He added this study reveals “a uniquely evolved way to capture tiny and evasive prey.”

The study’s authors write that understanding how flamingos use fluid dynamics to improve collection of sediments and prey could help design systems to better capture other tiny particles, like microplastics, from water.

Banner image of a Chilean flamingo feeding in shallow water. Image courtesy of Victor Ortega Jiménez/UC Berkeley.

Every third Friday of May is Endangered Species Day.

More than 900 known species are already extinct to date, while at least 28,500 others are listed as endangered or critically endangered by the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority.

As the world’s natural biomes get chipped away by aggressive resource extraction, mammals, fungi, corals and more are being squeezed into increasingly smaller islands of life, with the risk to their survival compounded by climate change.

Despite these challenges, conservationists from Africa to the Amazon are working on the ground to prevent further extinctions. For three threatened species, conservation efforts have brought them a step closer to recovering their numbers in recent years.

An okapi returns to Epulu in the DRC after a decade

In February 2025, an okapi (Okapia johnstoni), a rare, endangered relative of the giraffe, often called the “forest unicorn,” returned to the Okapi Wildlife Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ituri Rainforest for the first time in more than 10 years. In 2012, a brutal militia attack had killed seven people and 14 okapis at the site.

The individual was rescued in a nearby city and relocated by rangers working with the Okapi Conservation Project, Mongabay reported, giving the species, whose uncertain numbers are estimated as low as 3,000, another chance for recovery.

“The okapi is the pride of Mambasa,” Andy Kambale Matuku, the coordinator of the local environment organization Journalist Friends of Nature, told Mongabay contributor Saïbe Kabila. “If it were to disappear, the Mambasa territory would be consigned to oblivion.”

Endangered Cape vultures recover in South Africa

Once nearing collapse, South Africa’s Cape vulture (Gyps coprotheres) population is stabilizing after decades of decline, Mongabay reported.

South Africa spent more than 50 years building protections for the species, from power line retrofits to rehabilitation centers and safe zones spanning thousands of square kilometers.

“With a stable to increasing population at present, the Cape vulture does indeed provide hope for our conservation efforts,” André Botha of the IUCN Vulture Specialist Group told Mongabay contributor Sean Mowbray. In 2021, the species’ global IUCN status improved from endangered to vulnerable.

Tiny marsupial makes a comeback in South Australia

On Australia’s southern Yorke Peninsula, the brush-tailed bettong (Bettongia penicillata), a tiny marsupial that looks, and jumps, like a tiny kangaroo, made an impressive recovery.

The species was reclassified in January 2025 from critically endangered to near threatened after its numbers rebounded thanks to a local conservation project. This included creating a 25-kilometer (15.5-mile) predator-proof sanctuary in a region where the bettong had already been declared extinct.

“We are on a mission, if you like, to bring back some of these native species that have gone missing in our landscape since European colonization,” Derek Sandow of the Marna Banggara initiative, dedicated to restoring the Yorke Peninsula’s biodiversity, told CNN.

Banner image: An okapi at Bronx Zoo in the U.S. Image by Ryan Schwark via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).