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

For more than a century, Vatsala stood. Through wars and heatwaves, bureaucracies and monsoons, she moved through India’s forests with a gait that outlasted the institutions around her. She died where she had lived for decades, in the Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, after slipping into a forest drain. By then, she was blind, her body worn by time and injury—yet her presence remained steady until the very end.

Born in Kerala’s Nilambur forests, Vatsala began her life in the timber trade, hauling felled logs long before conservation laws came into force. In 1972, she was transferred north to Madhya Pradesh, and by 1993, she had become a fixture at Panna. There, she led tiger patrols, assisted in elephant births like an experienced midwife, and became a steady maternal figure to a younger herd that came to trust her slow certainty.

She survived two violent attacks by a male elephant, recovered from hundreds of stitches, and bore no known calves. Yet she raised generations. “She wasn’t the oldest,” one forest officer said. “She was the soul.”

Asian elephants once ranged widely across the continent, from Syria to Southeast Asia. Today, they are confined to fragmented habitats in 13 countries. Shrinking forest cover, competition for space and water with humans, and human-elephant conflict have taken their toll. India is home to over half the remaining wild population, but even here, the pressures mount. Elephants are now listed as endangered, and individuals like Vatsala—who bridged centuries and brought dignity to their shrinking world—are ever rarer.

Asian elephants rarely live beyond 60. Vatsala may have reached 100, or even 109. No documents survive to confirm it, so Guinness will not record her. That suited her legacy. She needed no plaque. Her record was etched in memory—in the caretakers who called her Dadi (grandmother), in the calves who leaned into her for comfort, and in the tourists who paused quietly, sensing something older than spectacle.

Her body was cremated at Hinauta Camp, the place she called home. The paths she once walked are still now. But those who watched her lead, and those who once held her trunk as she took her slow steps, will not forget.

Researchers in Brazil’s Amazonas state are testing easy-to-use scanners that can help them identify animal species they come across in the wild, Mongabay contributor Miguel Monteiro reported in June.

The scanners use a technology called near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), which currently has many applications, from measuring food quality to monitoring blood oxygen levels in the medical field. The idea is simple: A portable NIRS scanning device emits near-infrared light onto an animal’s body surface. Some of the light is absorbed while some gets reflected. The device measures the reflected light, producing a “spectral signature,” unique to each species, like a fingerprint.

To get to the final step of identifying species using the scanner, researchers first need to build a robust reference database linking each species in its environment to its spectral signature. Kelly Torralvo, a senior researcher in the Terrestrial Vertebrates Ecology Research Group at the Mamirauá Institute, is working to build such a database for reptiles and amphibians of the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in Brazil’s Amazonas state.

Every night, Torralvo sets out with her flashlight, searching for herpetofauna among branches and leaves. Whatever she finds, she brings back to her field base’s laboratory within the reserve. There, Torralvo uses a device to scan each animal and detect its “spectral signature” using NIR technology.

Torralvo co-authored a study in 2023 in which the researchers showed that NIRS technology could identify five out of the eight amphibian species they tested, with an 80% reliability, using only one spectral reading per individual.

“NIR is a revolutionary technology,” Pedro Pequeno, ecologist and researcher at the National Institute of Science and Technology in Syntheses of Amazonian Biodiversity, told Monteiro.

He said it is already widely used in chemistry and has “huge potential for application in biology.” Pequeno explained that species identification can be tricky, typically requiring experts, expensive genetic testing or labor-intensive bioacoustics methods. “With NIR, it’s almost like magic! With a calibrated database, all you have to do is pass the light beam through it and, voilà: the species is recognized,” he said.

Torralvo said the potential of the NIR tool lies in combining the knowledge of biodiversity experts with available technology. “By assisting in species recognition, this method can facilitate processes in countless activities related to academic studies, monitoring, inspections, and management and conservation actions. [Also] in places where there is no expert to perform recognition.”

The technology also has the potential to be used to monitor the illegal wildlife trade, Torralvo said — it can help identify if seizures include the meat of endangered animals mixed with other species, a tactic used by criminals to confuse inspectors.

“The method is very promising because it involves portable and relatively low-cost equipment,” Torralvo said.

Read the full story by Miguel Monteiro in English here and in Portuguese here.

Banner image of experts using NIR technology for laboratory analyses. Image by Miguel Monteiro.

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

In the world of conservation, good intentions have not always made for good outcomes. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), one of the most recognizable environmental organizations on the planet, learned this the hard way. In 2019, it faced allegations that park rangers it supported had committed serious human rights abuses — including torture and killings — in several countries. The ensuing scandal did more than tarnish the organization’s reputation. It forced a reckoning.

Six years on, WWF says it has overhauled not just its protocols, but its philosophy.

“What started off as a response to a criticism … has now really been internalized at the highest strategic levels of WWF,” Kirsten Schuijt, the group’s director-general, told Mongabay’s David Akana in a recent conversation at the Villars Institute Global Learning Conference in Switzerland.

At the heart of this change is a shift away from “fortress conservation” — the long-dominant model that prioritizes protected areas often at the expense of the communities that live in them — toward what Schuijt calls “locally led conservation.”

WWF has implemented nearly all of the 170 reforms recommended by an independent panel it commissioned after the scandal. Among them: grievance mechanisms, risk assessment protocols and an ombuds office. It has also appointed its first Indigenous board member and created a consultative group of Indigenous leaders to advise senior management.

Yet trust, once lost, is slow to rebuild. Critics point out that power over conservation planning remains concentrated in the hands of international actors. Representation, while improved, is not the same as devolution. Schuijt acknowledges the challenges.

“We’re achieving that in some places,” she said, “but still have a long way to go in others.”

That ambivalence reflects a broader tension in conservation: between technocratic ambition and social legitimacy. WWF’s new strategy, Roadmap 2030, recognizes that saving biodiversity requires not only science and funding but the consent and leadership of those who live closest to nature. It also highlights that conservation outcomes cannot be separated from the global economic system.

“Biodiversity loss is being driven by the way we produce and consume food, how we power our economies and how finance flows,” Schuijt said.

WWF remains a large, complex bureaucracy. But in places like Madagascar and Colombia, its rhetoric of change is beginning to translate into action. Whether this signals a structural shift in global conservation or simply institutional adaptation remains to be seen. What is clear is that the future of conservation will be shaped as much by humility as by ambition.

Read the full story here.

Banner image: Kirsten Schuijt, director-general of WWF International, during a field visit to local communities in Madagascar. Photo courtesy of WWF Madagascar.

Researchers have devised a way to make a commonly used pain and fever reduction medication from plastic waste. Yes, you read that right.

They used genetically engineered microbes to transform a molecule obtained from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic into paracetamol. Also known as acetaminophen, paracetamol is the active ingredient in widely available over-the-counter pain and fever reduction medicines, sold under brand names like Tylenol, Panadol or Dolo.

Upward of three-quarters of the common medicines that we rely on are currently derived from fossil carbon. “Paracetamol is a really good example of that,” Stephan Wallace, the study’s corresponding author and professor of chemical biotechnology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, told Mongabay in a video call.  “It’s currently derived from benzene, which is a really unsustainable petrochemical, by industrial processes that emit, quite frankly, unacceptable amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”

Nearly all plastic is derived from fossil fuels and very little is recycled. The vast majority of plastic waste ends up in landfills, incinerators or the environment, especially oceans. So, the researchers wanted to see if they could turn a problem waste product into something useful.

They first discovered that a commonly used synthetic chemical reaction called the Lossen rearrangement can actually occur in living bacterial cells. The reaction has previously only been observed in labs but not in nature.

The researchers found that phosphate within bacterial cells can catalyze this Lossen rearrangement, converting terephthalic acid — derived from the breakdown of PET plastic — into para-aminobenzoic acid (PABA), inside the bacteria. They then engineered the bacteria by introducing genes from soil bacteria and mushrooms, enabling the bacteria to convert PABA into paracetamol.

“And not only did that give us a sustainable way to make paracetamol in biology for the first time, but we were able to connect that to plastic waste so that we could complete that whole sort of transformation of waste into paracetamol,” Wallace said.

The researchers could convert more than 92% of the degraded PET plastic, commonly used in food packaging and textiles, into paracetamol using this method. The emissions from this new process “are fractional” compared with those from the current paracetamol manufacturing process, Wallace said.

The researchers acknowledge that converting plastic into paracetamol will not solve the enormous plastic crisis. However, Wallace said it’s a step in the right direction. He said he sees plastic waste as an untapped resource that can be transformed into something useful, though it will take time.

“It’s going to be a while until you can go to the bar and get your beer in a plastic cup, take it home, put a bacterium in it and turn it into your hangover cure the next day.”

Banner image of plastic bottles ready for recycling. Image by Hans Braxmeier via  (Pixabay Content License).

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — A wildfire along the Grand Canyon’s North Rim grew rapidly over the weekend and destroyed a historic lodge and visitors center. Firefighters are working to slow down the fire that began on July 4 after a lightning strike. The fire is in a less popular area of the Grand Canyon that draws only about 10% of the park’s millions of visitors. Evacuations were ordered over concerns that include chlorine gas exposure after a treatment plant burned. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has called for a federal investigation into the fire’s management. Another wildfire in Colorado has closed Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, prompting evacuations and a disaster declaration by the state’s governor.

Reporting by Felicia Fonseca and Jaimie Ding, Associated Press 

Banner image: This photo provided by National Park Service shows the charred remains of a building at the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, in northern Arizona, on Sunday, July 13, 2025. (National Park Service via AP)

The more we try to understand chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives, the more we find ourselves humbled by the richness and complexity of their lives — and of their intelligence.

Today, on World Chimpanzee Day, we look back at some of the latest studies that reveal facets of these great apes’ long, powerful memories.

Finding hidden ant nests

Previous research has confirmed chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in the wild remember where their favorite fruit trees are, season after season. A recent study that monitored chimpanzees in Dindefelo Community Nature Reserve in Senegal has found chimps also remember locations of hidden underground ant nests for years. They repeatedly return to these sites, using their sight, smell, taste and touch to detect the availability of ants in the nests, Mongabay contributor Charles Mpaka reported in February 2025.

“We realized that the fact that the chimpanzees in our study were going back to the same ant nests, even though these were almost never visible, was really important because it suggested that their repeated ant nest visits were not opportunistic, but rather that the chimpanzees relied on their memory to find the nests and revisit them over and over again,” said study co-author R. Adriana Hernandez-Aguilar.

Remembering friends and family

Another study found that chimpanzees also have rich, long social memories. In an experiment, zoo chimpanzees and bonobos were shown images of former group mates and of individuals who were strangers. The participating chimps and bonobos paid more attention to the known faces than those of the strangers, suggesting the great apes can remember friends and family even when they’ve been apart for years, Mongabay’s Malavika Vyawahare reported in September 2024.

They also paid more attention to individuals they’d shared a more positive relationship with previously, compared to those with whom they hadn’t been very close. “Their social relationships seem to shape their memory,” said study lead author Laura Simone Lewis.

Losing love language

The flip side of this culture of building up long-term memories is that the loss of individuals in a population can lead to the slow erosion of learned practices and traditions. A recent study found that a group of chimpanzees in Côte d’Ivoire’s Taï National Park that lost many male individuals to poaching over the past decades has lost the distinct auditory mating gestures the males would use to attract females, contributor Ryan Truscott reported in March 2025.

“We’ve shown that a behavior that is totally learned can be lost,” said study lead author Mathieu Malherbe.

This loss of a mating signal suggests other socially learned skills, such as using tools to access insects in hard-to-reach-places, are also at risk of disappearing as chimps are lost to poaching or habitat destruction. “If you go and disrupt, basically, the possibility for individuals to pass on any knowledge, then you have a huge issue,” Malherbe said.

Banner image: A family of chimpanzees. Image by Michele W via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0).