For nearly 20 years, the blue-spotted bamboo shark, found only in Madagascar, went scientifically undetected and unrecorded. But researchers have now found four new records of the “lost” shark while surveying fishing villages and a Malagasy university’s fish collection. These recent records, and interviews with fishers, suggest the species may be more common than previously thought, according to a new report in Oryx. 

The blue-spotted bamboo shark (Chiloscyllium caeruleopunctatum), so named for the blue-white spots on its brown body, was first described based on a specimen caught off Madagascar in 1914. A second record of the species came 92 years later — a photograph of a shark caught in 2006.

Since then, the species largely went unconfirmed, until researchers began surveying fish markets and landing sites in Madagascar in September 2025.

Report’s lead author Tsarahasina Fanomenzana, a young Malagasy intern from the NGO Madagascar Whale Shark Project, was showing photos of sharks and rays he’d seen at a fishing village on the east coast to shark expert and co-author David Ebert.

“One of the photos was of the blue-spotted bamboo shark,” Ebert told Mongabay by email. “He didn’t think too much of it as there were some other images of shark and ray species he thought were more interesting.”

However, Ebert said he was “more than excited,” because the pictures confirmed the blue-spotted shark was still around. He was in Madagascar for the Lost Sharks project, supported by the Save Our Seas Foundation, which aims to find and raise awareness about little-known shark and ray species that could be disappearing unnoticed.

Ebert and his colleagues eventually confirmed two more individuals of the shark from the fishing village, and a fourth specimen housed in the University of Tulear’s fish collection, on the west coast. “Since these new records were published I have had some more evidence in the forms of photos come out further confirming this species,” Ebert said.

The blue-spotted bamboo shark is currently listed as data deficient on the IUCN Red List, meaning not enough is known about the species to determine its conservation status.

The lack of information could partly be because the species is sometimes misidentified as the white-spotted bamboo shark (Chiloscyllium plagiosum), “so most Malagasy’s do not realize that it is endemic to Madagascar,” Ebert said.

He added that interviews with fishers revealed they also mistake it for young leopard sharks, also called zebra sharks (Stegostoma tigrinum).

“So, I believe now that [the blue-spotted bamboo shark] is more common than previously thought, but due to its being misidentified it has been underreported,” Ebert said. “Hopefully, now that people in Madagascar are more aware of it, they will start to note its occurrence going forward.”

Ebert added that whether these additional new records will prompt the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, to revisit the shark’s conservation status is unclear, “but hopefully we can build more information for the future such that when the time does come to review it, we might be able to elevate the assessment.”

Banner image: A blue-spotted bamboo shark photographed in Madagascar in 2025. Image courtesy of Tsarahasina Fanomenzana.

Over the next 15 months, major sensor arrays that have provided crucial, decade-long observations of the ocean, marine ecosystems and climate change will be dismantled.

These sensors are part of the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), a $386 million network of more than 900 instruments funded by the U.S. government’s National Science Foundation (NSF), which has provided real-time data on the world’s oceans for more than a decade. The sensors are distributed across both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to monitor coastal environments, marine ecosystems, and ocean currents that influence the global climate.

The decision to end OOI, described by the foundation as a “descoping,” will remove nearly all in-water infrastructure located off the states of Alaska, Washington, Oregon and North Carolina, and the Irminger Sea, an area between Iceland and Greenland. As the instruments are recovered, data streams from those areas will go dark, Jim Edson, principal investigator of the initiative, said in a statement. “However, all previously collected OOI data will remain accessible through the OOI Data Center.”

The OOI was designed as a 25-to-30-year project specifically to capture long-term climate signals, which scientists say require at least three decades of continuous data to be meaningfully detected. The network has achieved just 10 years of observations.

While satellites can monitor the ocean’s surface, the OOI arrays provided a rare look into the deep sea, measuring low-oxygen zones, carbon absorption, and currents critical to regulating weather patterns. The Associated Press (AP) reported that the removal comes at a particularly sensitive time, as an El Niño event, marked by unusually warm ocean waters, is predicted to arrive this summer, potentially leaving scientists blind to its subsurface impacts.

Chris Robbins, associate director of scientific initiatives at U.S.-based environmental nonprofit the Ocean Conservancy, called the decision to abandon the observation system “absolutely myopic.”

“This system is a vital scientific asset that quietly protects American lives, communities and the economy through unfettered access to world-class scientific data,” Robbins said in a statement. “Its loss would create an irreparable blind spot for our country in predicting earthquakes, fishery health, storm forecasting, coastal flooding and more. It just doesn’t make sense.”

The dismantling of OOI follows proposed budget cuts to the NSF by the Trump administration, which has repeatedly sought to reduce funding for the project.

The NSF said in a statement to the AP that the descoping is part of a “wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio.”

Craig McLean, former acting chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told The New York Times that the move would “push the United States back yet again into a rear seat in global scientific leadership.”

Banner image: A map of OOI’s arrays. Image by Center for Environmental Visualization, University of Washington via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Small-scale gold mining is a major cause of deforestation in the Amazon, and researchers found that in Guyana it destroys dung beetle communities and prevents their recovery for decades.

Gold mining causes 90% of the deforestation in the Guiana Shield, which contains a quarter of the Amazon rainforest as well as large gold deposits, according to a recent study. Most of the gold mining in this region, including in Guyana, is artisanal, driven by small-scale mining rather than large industrial mines.

To understand the long-term “ecological legacy” of such mining, a team of researchers measured dung beetle communities at 16 abandoned small-scale gold mine sites in northwest Guyana. They choose dung beetles, because the insects are easily sampled and play key roles in rainforest functions like nutrient cycling, seed dispersal and pollination. For control, the team monitored dung beetle communities at five nearby intact forests.

At every mining site, the researchers sampled dung beetles at three locations: the center of the mine where vegetation was regrowing, at the edge where the mine met the forest, and about 100 meters (328 feet) away into the forest. They trapped dung beetles using human feces as bait. 

Study lead author Sean Glynn from the University of Kent, U.K., told Mongabay by email that because they were camping remotely, they didn’t have reliable access to feces from other animals to use as bait, “however, human seems to always be the best.” 

The team also recorded air temperature and vegetation structure at each of the mining and control forest sites.

In total, the researchers collected 8,187 dung beetles from 44 species. They found that both dung beetle numbers and diversity increased as you moved away from the center of mining activity, with the most dung beetles in the control sites.

The team didn’t find any “discernible recovery trend” of the dung beetle communities at mined sites, even two decades after they were abandoned. At the same time, the mine centers had higher temperatures and reduced canopy cover than the other sampled sites.

The team said the findings suggest that “severely degraded soils, disrupted seed banks, and altered microclimates” from mining may prevent the recovery of forest structure critical for dung beetle habitat.

Glynn said while some research shows that planting trees is effective, more needs to be done to understand what can “improve and speed up the recovery of vegetation that will then enable biodiversity to return to these sites.”

Trond Larsen, a dung beetle expert not associated with the study from the NGO Conservation International, told Mongabay that dung beetles can be effective bioindicators to understand environmental impacts.

“We can’t measure everything,” he said. “Dung beetles represent ideal cost-effective indicators that can help us understand patterns of biodiversity loss in response to human disturbance, including gold mining, which poses a rapidly increasing threat to tropical forests.”

Banner image: Oxysternon festivum, the most common dung beetle found in the study. Image by Tom Murray via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Researchers have found a new-to-science species of a tiny sea slug with black and yellow spots resembling “scattered sesame seeds.”

Measuring just three millimeters long (0.1 inches long), the researchers have named it Thecacera sesama, according to a recent study.

Study lead author Ho-Yeung Chan first spotted the sea slug during a recreational dive in the coastal waters of Keelung, northern Taiwan, in 2019. At the time, he was still an undergraduate student and did not realize the animal was unknown to science until he consulted an expert on Facebook, according to a statement.

To formally identify the species, researchers collected six specimens of the sea slug during diving expeditions conducted between May 2021 and June 2025. Between May and September, typhoons can make diving risky.

The research team then examined the specimens’ structure and appearance and analyzed their DNA to confirm that it was a new-to-science species.

T. sesama is the seventh Thecacera species to be described, and the first one to be named in the genus in nearly three decades.

Despite its small stature, T. sesama is visually striking, the researchers wrote. It has a translucent white body covered in small black and yellow spots that look like sesame seeds.  While the species looks similar to another sea slug Thecacera pennigera, which has black and orange spots, T. sesama is significantly smaller and genetically distinct.

The researchers found that T. sesama lives on and feeds exclusively on bryozoans, small aquatic invertebrates known as “moss animals” that live in colonies.

The discovery of T. sesama highlights the hidden biodiversity of the Western Pacific, a recognized marine hotspot where many smaller organisms remain “poorly documented,” the authors said.  They added that research in Taiwanese waters is particularly challenging due to environmental constraints; seasonal typhoons and low water temperatures limit suitable diving conditions to only a few months each year.

The authors also noted that many more cryptic species of sea slugs, also called nudibranch, may still be waiting to be discovered in the region’s overlooked marine habitats.

“Nudibranchs are one of the key players in the marine food web,” the researchers said in the statement. “They are extremely colourful and can be spotted on coral reef ecosystems. However, many nudibranchs are very small in size and are extremely difficult to spot underwater with the naked eye.”

Banner image: Two individuals of Thecacera sesama sp. nov. feeding on a bryozoan; Image credit to Ho-Yeung Chan, via ZooKeys.

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

The European wildcat is not one conservation story, but several.

In the Czech Republic’s Lusatian Mountains, the signs are encouraging. Conservationists have found a male and female wildcat, which they named Jonáš and Tonka, the first recorded in the region in nearly a century. Tonka has since given birth to at least three kittens. For a species once pushed out by habitat loss, persecution, and the spread of domestic cats, that is a meaningful foothold, reports contributor Sean Mowbray for Mongabay.

The animal itself is easy to overlook. The European wildcat (Felis silvestris) is roughly the size of a large housecat and lives mostly out of sight in forests. The species, found across Europe, is listed as least concern on the IUCN Red List. That label can make the picture look simpler than it is. Yet its fortunes vary sharply from place to place.

In parts of Central Europe, wildcats are moving back into former habitat as forests recover and hunting pressure has fallen. Germany and France show what can happen when habitat protection, legal safeguards, and time line up. Italy, too, has seen enough progress for the species to be downlisted nationally.

Elsewhere, the picture is much more fragile. In Scotland, the wildcat was declared functionally extinct in the wild in 2018. A breeding and release program in Cairngorms National Park, in the Scottish Highlands, is now trying to rebuild a population from scratch. Portugal may be heading in the same direction, with perhaps only about 100 animals left and numbers still declining. In southern Spain, fragmented populations face pressure from roads, disease, prey scarcity, and limited official recognition of their status.

Hybridization with domestic cats adds another complication. In some landscapes, it remains limited. In others, it threatens to erase the genetic distinction between wildcat and housecat.

Roads are a more immediate danger: one European study found collisions were the leading cause of recorded wildcat deaths.

The point is a practical one. A species can look secure at the continental level while disappearing locally. For the European wildcat, that means connected habitat, better monitoring, feral-cat management, and action before reintroduction become the only options. Jonáš and Tonka show that recovery is still possible. Scotland shows what happens when attention comes late.

Read the full story by Sean Mowbray here.

Banner image: A European wildcat in Scotland, where 46 captive-bred wildcats have been released as part of an ongoing reintroduction project. Image courtesy of Saving Wildcats.

In the remote, over-the-water village of Muara Enggelam in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, the introduction of reliable solar energy has become a catalyst for female entrepreneurship and economic stability.

Historically cut off from basic services and reliant on expensive, noisy diesel generators that ran only from dusk to dawn, the village underwent a transformation starting in 2015 following a solar power allocation from Indonesia’s energy ministry, reports Mongabay Indonesia contributor Yuda Almerio.

For women like Asniah, a mother of three, 24-hour electricity thanks to a solar array meant the ability to scale a home business. She began using electric blenders to produce amplang (fish crackers), a task that was previously difficult due to the high cost and unreliability of diesel fuel. “Using a blender was a bit of a worry, because the fuel would run out quickly,” Asniah told Mongabay Indonesia. “A liter [of diesel] wouldn’t last an hour — now it’s much more convenient.”

Asniah has since expanded her ventures to include a food stall and a digital boutique, utilizing social media for marketing.

Muara Enggelam’s solar infrastructure is managed by a village-owned enterprise, BUMDes, led by Jam’ah, a mother of one. This makes it a rare example of female leadership in the energy sector; the United Nations Development Program estimates that women make up less than 5% of energy managers in Indonesia. “Using a generator was expensive, that’s why so few people started businesses,” Jam’ah said. “The solar energy has been a relief for people.”

While Muara Enggelam serves as a successful pilot, rural energy inequality remains a significant hurdle across Indonesia. A 2026 report by NGOs Celios and Greenpeace revealed that the energy transition in rural areas has largely stalled, with the number of villages and subdistricts using at least some household solar power declining by 26.4% between 2021 and 2024. This decline is attributed to structural challenges, including a lack of local technicians, limited power capacity, and government fossil fuel subsidies that favor traditional energy sources.

Despite national electrification rates reaching 99%, at least hundreds of thousands of households in remote Indonesian islands remain without electricity. While Muara Enggelam has successfully expanded its capacity to 80 Kilowatt Peak through community fees and government support, many other rural and eastern regions continue to lag significantly behind urban centers.

Read the full story in Indonesian by Yuda Almerio here.

Read the full story in English by Yuda Almerio here.

Banner image: Rows of solar panels installed in Muara Enggelam. The energy from this has now become the primary source sustaining the residents’ lives and economic activities. Image by Yuda Almerio/Mongabay Indonesia.