KLAMATH, Calif. (AP) — A group of several dozen Indigenous youth from across the Klamath Basin recently emerged victorious after a month-long journey paddling the Klamath River. The river is newly navigable after a decades-long fight to remove its four dams to restore the salmon run — an ancient source of life, food and culture for local tribes for millennia long before miners, farmers and cities moved in and built dams. The dam removal is part of a movement among tribes and environmental groups to restore the natural flow of rivers and the wildlife they support. Through the Rios to Rivers program, these youth had spent several years learning to navigate white water and training with Indigenous people across the Americas, all in preparation for the journey.

Reporting by Brittany Peterson, Assocated Press

Banner image: Young native paddlers hold hands and cheer as they walk across a sandy stretch that separates the Klamath River from the Pacific Ocean on Friday July 11, 2025, in Klamath, Calif. (AP Photo/Brittany Peterson)

Camera traps in Tangkulap Forest Reserve in Malaysia’s Sabah state have photographed a Eurasian otter — a grainy image of an individual ambling next to a waterbody. This is the first confirmed sighting of the species in Malaysia in more than a decade, bringing cheer to conservationists.

The last confirmed Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) sighting by scientists in Malaysia was in 2014, near Danum Valley Field Centre, a conservation area also in Sabah.

Thye Lim, project coordinator for Panthera Malaysia, told Mongabay by email that this latest sighting “was an ‘unexpected discovery,’” made while they were trying to monitor the flat-headed cat (Prionailurus planiceps), an endangered small wildcat native to Southeast Asia.

Panthera, a wildcat conservation NGO, had set up camera traps as part of a survey to study the elusive cat in Tangkulap, which was once heavily logged and where restoration efforts are currently underway.

With the sighting of a Eurasian otter, Tangkulap Forest Reserve becomes the only place in Malaysia where all four East Asian otter species coexist. The three others are the smooth-coated (Lutrogale perspicillata) and Asian small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinereus), both listed as vulnerable, and the endangered hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana).

“It highlights the positive impact of conservation and management efforts in the Tangkulap Forest Reserve, including the Forest Management Plan implemented by the Sabah Forestry Department,” Lim said.

While Eurasian otters are widespread in other parts of the world, they’re extremely rare in Southeast Asia, and are listed as near threatened. Once abundant in the rivers, wetlands and lakes of Southeast Asia, their numbers have plummeted due to pollution, habitat loss, loss of prey species and hunting. A key threat in recent years has been the surge in illegal trade, primarily for the pet market despite all otter species being listed on CITES, the international convention on wildlife trade. The small-clawed otter is especially coveted in the pet trade.

Although not much is known about the Eurasian otter individual spotted in Tangkulap or others of its kind in the forest reserve, Lim said the sighting is still “immensely significant” because it “shows how dedicated research, even when targeting one species, can lead to groundbreaking findings about the broader biodiversity of an ecosystem.”

As apex predators in rivers and waterways, otters are indicators of ecosystem health and are very sensitive to changes in their environment.

Chris Shepherd from U.S. nonprofit the Center for Biological Diversity, who has studied the otter trade in Southeast Asia for more than two decades but wasn’t involved in Panthera’s work, told Mongabay the sighting is “a real hopeful sign.”

“It really highlights the urgency to protect habitat for otters in Malaysia [which] stands out in Southeast Asia as still having a lot of opportunity to keep wildlife from vanishing,” Shepherd said.

Banner image: The Eurasian otter captured by a camera trap in Tangkulap Forest Reserve in Sabah. Image courtesy of Sabah Forestry Department/Sabah Wildlife Department/Panthera.

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).