Male bonobos are larger and stronger than females, so researchers have found it puzzling that the female apes enjoy high status in bonobo society. After analyzing three decades of behavioral data, researchers recently shared a study that pinpoints their source of power: female alliances and coalitions.

“Only [among] bonobos, females form coalitions to gain power over males,” the study’s lead author Martin Surbeck of Harvard University told Mongabay by email.

Surbeck said there are other examples of animal species in which females are dominant over males, including spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) and vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus). What sets bonobos (Pan paniscus) apart is how they dominate.

Researchers analyzed 30 years of demographic and behavioral data from six wild bonobo communities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and found that “the propensity of females to form coalitions against males was positively associated with the degree of power that females had over males.”

While females “often had power over males,” it was not exclusive or consistent. Of the 1,786 conflicts recorded, 61.5% were won by females compared with 38.5% won by males. The majority, or 85%, of such incidents were directed at males, the rest against females.

“To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that female solidarity can invert the male-biased power structure that is typical of many mammal societies,” Surbeck said in a press release. “It’s exciting to find that females can actively elevate their social status by supporting each other.”

The formation of female coalitions was often triggered by male aggression against adult females or their babies. The researchers said further studies are needed to understand the source of conflict, as it wasn’t always clear to the researchers.

Co-author Barbara Fruth with the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior has led the LuiKotale bonobo research station for 30 years. In the press release, she said female bonobo coalitions can involve screaming that is so unbearable, “you have to block your ears.” Females have been observed following a target male through the trees as they screamed. “It’s a ferocious way to assert power,” Fruth said. “You know why these males don’t try to overstep boundaries.”

The release said such power allows female bonobos to decide when and with whom they mate. They can also have control of food resources.

Surbeck told National Geographic the study shows that “male dominance and patriarchy is not evolutionarily inevitable” and that “apes and humans are very innovative and flexible in their behavior.”

In the same article, biological anthropologist Laura Simone Lewis, who wasn’t part of the study, said it “could provide insight into how women could build power to better protect ourselves from male violence.”

Bonobos are one of our closest living relatives, so better understanding bonobo society might “help us tremendously to reconstruct where we come from,” Surbeck said.

Banner image of the Ekalakala bonobo group in the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the DRC courtesy of Martin Surbeck/Kokolopori Bonobo Research Project.

Researchers have released new maps documenting the “Great Nile Migration,” the Earth’s largest-known land mammal migration across South Sudan and Ethiopia.

The maps chart the seasonal movements of two antelope species, the white-eared kob (Kobus kob leucotis) and the tiang (Damaliscus lunatus tiang). Every year, around 5 million white-eared kob and 400,000 tiang migrate across 100,000 square kilometers (38,612 square miles) of South Sudan’s wetlands and Ethiopia’s Gambella National Park.

Grant Hopcraft of the University of Glasgow told Mongabay by email that the mass migration of ungulates has “profound impacts” on how the ecosystems function. For instance, the millions of moving animals change the amount, diversity and regrowth of vegetation through grazing and depositing waste. This in turn affects the diversity of insects and birds that eat those plants. Hopcraft is a scientific advisory board member of the Global Initiative on Ungulate Migration (GIUM) under the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, which published the maps.

“Migrations used to be a common occurrence globally. Now they only occur in a few relatively undisturbed places around the world. Protecting this migration in South Sudan should be a major priority for conservation,” Hopcraft said.

The mapping used GPS data collected over the past 15 years by contributors including Malik Morjan from the University of Juba in South Sudan, Kassahun Abera at the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority and African Parks, an NGO that manages a network of protected areas across Africa. The maps also built on aerial surveys and tracking data released by African Parks and South Sudan’s Ministry of Wildlife Conservation and Tourism in 2024.

Melinda Boyers, spatial ecologist for GIUM, told Mongabay their detailed mapping revealed the white-eared kob and the tiang “exhibiting several unique movement patterns in response to seasonal floods and human activity.”

The maps can help protect both antelope species, which face threats such as illegal harvesting, habitat fragmentation and increased human access to their core seasonal ranges, GIUM spatial ecologist Steffen Mumme told Mongabay.

“These issues are exacerbated by oil and gas exploration, which may provide roads and easier entry into critical kob and tiang habitats,” he said. “Energy development may create new barriers to movement and potentially increase illegal killing, significantly disrupting kob migrations and triggering population declines.”

Hopcraft said such explorations can also lead to the loss of connectivity between habitats, in turn affecting ungulate genetic diversity.

“Mapping their migration routes gives more precise information on where to direct conservation efforts, where bottlenecks are and where certain areas are essential to protect the entire migration,” Mumme said.

Additionally, the mapping data can help establish no-go zones and wildlife corridors, Hopcraft said. He added that GIUM plans to distribute large prints of the maps to government partners, educational institutions and schools through an outreach program led by Morjan and supported by the local advocacy group White-eared Kob Heritage Society.

Banner image of tiang in South Sudan ©Marcus Westberg/African Parks.

The World Bank promotes expansion of private land ownership and title to improve efficient land use and recently announced billions of dollars to support these policies, claiming it will also facilitate carbon projects including offsets and afforestation. But analysis by the Oakland Institute (OI) argues those investments overwhelmingly benefit big business at the expense of local and Indigenous communities.

“The Bank is hijacking the climate crisis to pursue an agenda that is not about climate but about catering for the financial and corporate interests fueling the crisis,” Frédéric Mousseau, policy director at OI, told Mongabay by email.

In the Philippines, for example, land reform in the 1980s created agricultural cooperatives allowing farmers to collectively manage their resources. In 2020, the World Bank began promoting land title for farmers, allowing them to use their land as collateral to access credit. Instead, many farmers sold their land to corporations or wealthy families, sometimes “persuaded” to do so by home visits from soldiers, the report says.

The bank’s push to overhaul land tenure is particularly pronounced in Africa, where large tracts of land are collectively owned by communities. The report details “an explicit agenda to drive African farmers out of agriculture,” citing a 2024 World Bank report that promotes private ownership to address climate change and economic development. OI argues such reforms will displace smallholders and pave the way for land consolidation by agribusiness — as was the case in the Philippines.

“Whereas the Bank’s push for large-scale agribusiness is global, the African continent is its central target,” the report states.

The report also challenges the World Bank’s assertion that private tenure will ensure Indigenous and local communities benefit from the green energy mineral mining boom. OI questions the bank’s assumption that people will consent to mining on their newly titled land. As Mongabay has reported from Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and  Zimbabwe, mining often results in environmental and social damage.

OI also questions the World Bank’s support for carbon credit projects. Mongabay investigations from Cambodia, Suriname, the Republic of Congo and Brazil found that such projects often result in land-grabbing and human rights abuses, despite a growing shift for community-led carbon projects.

“We used to have land grabs. Now we are having carbon grabs,” Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank told the Financial Times.

Mongabay reached out to the World Bank but it did not reply.

Michel Pimbert, of Coventry University in the U.K., cited in the OI study, wrote to Mongabay that the World Bank initiatives “will push millions of people out of the countryside and undercut local livelihoods and food security.”

Mousseau said the answer to the climate crisis and support for the Global South lies in taxing global wealth to “address the chronic underfunding of climate action” and at the same time “constrain the ability of corporations to pursue activities that contribute to more GHG emissions.”

Banner image: by Rena Singer via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

On the morning of May 25, a Liberian-flagged cargo ship, MSC ELSA 3, carrying roughly 640 declared containers, sank off the coast of Kerala state in southern India. Indian authorities rescued all 24 crew on board, but most of the containers remain untraced and their contents unknown, raising environmental concerns, reports contributor Navya PK for Mongabay India.

MSC, the ship’s operator and the world’s biggest shipping company, is headquartered in Geneva, while the ELSA3 was registered in Liberia, Navya writes.

India’s defense ministry said 13 of the ship’s containers were carrying hazardous materials, although it didn’t give details. Another 12 containers held calcium carbide, used in steelmaking and fertilizer production. In its raw form, it reacts with water to form flammable gases and can increase water alkalinity, posing a risk to the local marine ecosystem, Navya writes.

By May 27, 46 containers had washed ashore in south Kerala; the rest were still unaccounted for. “None of the recovered containers have calcium carbide, which means we need to have a thorough search for the declared materials,” Biju Kumar, a marine biologist at Kerala University, told Mongabay India.

The ship also had 367 metric tons of furnace oil and 84 metric tons of diesel. Atul Pillai, a defense ministry spokesperson in the Kerala port city of Kochi, said the Indian Coast Guard had largely contained the oil spill.

“Earlier, the spill was visible from the aircraft; now, there are only patches. Coast Guard has also now dispatched a pollution response strike team and a pollution response vessel from Mumbai to analyse and handle the contamination,” Pillai said.

Kumar said that while no immediate fish deaths had been reported, the oil contains hydrocarbons that can be persistent organic pollutants. “The oil will ultimately settle down, get converted into paraffin balls, and spread over long distances. That is a threat to the [seafloor] ecosystem.”

Since the ship’s sinking, large quantities of nurdles, or tiny plastic pellets used in plastic manufacturing, have washed ashore. However, items like plastic pellets “were not disclosed earlier,” Kumar said. “So, what is in the containers is a concern,” he added, noting this is India’s first reported case of plastic pellet pollution from a ship’s sinking.

Kumar said nurdles are tiny, buoyant and can travel far. They resemble fish eggs, and are thus easily mistaken for food for many aquatic animals. Nurdles can also further break down into micro- and nanoplastics, and enter the food chain, he said, adding that the plastic pellets should be removed from the spill sites and beaches as soon as possible. The Kerala state government said volunteers are being trained to remove pellets from the shore guided by drone surveys.

Marine fisheries and ocean research organizations are conducting surveys to understand the extent of the environmental damage.

Read the full story by Navya PK here.

Banner image: Containers floating at the site of the shipwreck. Image by Spokesperson of the Indian Navy via X.

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

At the close of SF Climate Week, María Isabel Torres, program director of Mongabay Latam, shared how local journalism is driving environmental change across Latin America.

Speaking as a Peruvian journalist based in Lima, María Isabel detailed investigations that have exposed hidden threats to both biodiversity and Indigenous communities.

One investigation revealed 67 clandestine airstrips built deep in the Peruvian Amazon to support drug trafficking.

Working with satellite analysis experts including Earth Genome, Mongabay combined AI, drone footage, and interviews with more than 60 local sources to uncover the network. Our reporting, which took a year to complete, sparked national and international media coverage, caught the attention of lawmakers and authorities, and empowered Indigenous leaders with evidence to advocate for protections.

María Isabel also highlighted how Mongabay Latam documented more than 8,000 oil contamination sites across four Amazonian countries, of which 600 are located inside Indigenous territories or protected areas.

In the Gulf of Mexico, Mongabay’s reporting exposed that nearly 60% of oil spills in recent years, previously dismissed by companies as “natural emissions,” were in fact human-caused.

And in the open seas, Mongabay has tracked the movements of 200 Chinese fishing vessels operating just outside Latin American countries’ maritime borders — raising serious concerns about marine biodiversity loss near places like the Galápagos Islands.

Across all this work, María Isabel emphasized the importance of amplifying the voices of Indigenous peoples — not just as victims, but as defenders and leaders actively protecting the rainforest.

In Latin America, Mongabay Latam now partners with more than 70 influential regional media outlets, maximizing the reach and impact of these investigations.

It’s a powerful reminder: Locally grounded, solutions-driven journalism can shift narratives, drive accountability, and support frontline communities.

Banner image: Mongabay’s reporting has sparked national and international media coverage, caught the attention of lawmakers and authorities, and empowered Indigenous leaders with evidence to advocate for protections.

Peatlands are one of the world’s biggest carbon sinks. These naturally waterlogged boggy swamps can hold thousands of years’ worth of compressed, partially decomposed vegetation matter — despite covering just 3-4% of Earth’s land surface, they’re thought to store more carbon per area than the world’s forests combined.

In honor of World Peatland Day on June 2 we present three recent Mongabay stories that shed light on this critical ecosystem.

World’s peatlands are underprotected

Peatlands only function well as carbon sinks if they remain wet and undisturbed, Mongabay’s John Cannon reported recently. As people drain or burn peatlands, often to make way for agriculture, peatlands turn from a carbon sink into a carbon source.

Researchers recently found that only about 25% of peatlands in the tropic and temperate regions, and 11% of boreal peatlands, have some form of protection, Canon reported. Additionally, more than 25% of peatlands, covering some 1.1 million square kilometers (about 425,000 square miles), overlap with Indigenous territories.

Researchers told Cannon that there are “massive benefits” to protecting and restoring peatlands, especially given the density of carbon that peatlands hold on a relatively small portion of the planet. “The return on investment is quite high,” said study lead author Kemen Austin.

Colombia’s unexpected peatlands

A recent study in Colombia found peatlands are more widespread than previously known, making the country South America’s second-largest peat reserve, after Peru, contributor Erik Iverson reported for Mongabay.

Researchers took sediment cores in 100 wetlands and combined that data with satellite imagery to build a model to predict other peat-forming wetlands in the country.

The researchers estimated that Colombia’s peatlands hold 1.9 billion metric tons of carbon, or as much as 70 years’ worth of carbon emissions from fossil fuels in Colombia.

Moreover, they found peat in unexpected ecosystems, including Colombia’s seasonally dry Llanos and nutrient-poor white-sand forests, which are home to a unique type of stunted forest. Both findings suggest there may be more undiscovered peatlands in similar ecosystems across other South American countries.

Flooding risk for Indonesia’s peatlands

In Indonesia, unchecked exploitation has left nearly half of the country’s peatlands vulnerable to flooding, Mongabay’s Hans Nichols Jong reported recently.

Peatlands can absorb 100-1,300% of their dry weight in water. In comparison mineral soils typically absorb only 20-30%. However, peatlands across Indonesia have been drained or burned to make way for industrial oil palm or pulpwood plantations. The degradation has compromised their ability to act like a sponge and efficiently absorb water. Instead of soaking up water, standing water on these peatlands now become uncontrolled runoff, causing flooding in nearby areas, Jong reported.

“The floods occurring are not a natural cycle commonly found in peatland ecosystems,” said Wahyu Perdana from the peatland watchdog group Pantau Gambut. “These floods result from peatland degradation due to improper land use and the mismanagement of peatland functions.”

Banner image: Peatland deforestation in Indonesia. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.