Authorities in the U.S. state of Florida have cleared a controversial startup of criminal neglect after dozens of wild-caught sloths that it imported from South America for tourism purposes died.

The Orange County Sheriff’s Office (OCSO) opened an investigation following the closure of the Sloth World facility in April this year. On Aug. 19, it released its findings, with OCSO detective Aaron Bennet concluding the 57 deaths “appear to be consistent with a multifactorial animal health incident rather than the result of criminal activity or improper care.”

As part of the investigation, Bennet interviewed 20 witnesses, including Sloth World administrators, former workers, and veterinarians with the Central Florida Zoo and Botanical Garden, where the surviving sloths now live.

In April, Ben Agresta, the owner of Sloth World, told local media, “we lost sloths that had a virus of which showed barely any symptoms and was undetectable even after necropsy.”

However, according to the OCSO report, multiple veterinarians stated the sloths were in extremely poor condition: dehydrated, malnourished, and emaciated. Adam Stern, a veterinarian forensic pathologist, said that “the pathology findings reveal a consistent pattern of disease affecting multiple organ systems.”

Pathology reports found multiple viruses present, which wasn’t surprising; 70-80% of sloths in the wild carry several viruses. But autopsies revealed lesions across respiratory, gastrointestinal, immune and neurological systems. Common findings also included pneumonia, bone marrow depletion, and degeneration of the brain and spinal cords, among other health concerns.

Stern said chronic stress likely contributed to the animals’ rapid health decline. These two- and three-toed sloths were captured from the wild and shipped from Guyana and Peru, exposed to different noises, light, food and overcrowded housing — all stressors “which are recognized as factors capable of suppressing immune function and increasing susceptibility to infectious disease,” the OCSO report notes.

Peter Bandre, who oversaw the sloths’ import and care at Sloth World, said two sloths had died by the time they arrived in Florida.

Pathologist John Roberts said, “Sloths have a specialized diet and the minute they go off that diet they’re going to get mineral deficiencies,” particularly copper deficiencies. Roberts said the animals “came in sick” and that “the food was killing them.”

Former Sloth World caretaker Rebecca Lynn Restrepo described concerns about the care and feeding the sloths received and said she believed the Sloth World owners “lacked the necessary knowledge and experience to properly manage the number of animals,” but hadn’t “intentionally neglected or abused the sloths.”

Rebecca Cliffe, the founder and director of the Costa Rica-based Sloth Conservation Foundation, told Mongabay that if this wasn’t a criminal act then the laws protecting animals aren’t strict enough, “because it shouldn’t be possible for that number of sloths to die.”

Sloth World paid to remove the sloths from the wild, which led to the death of at least 57 of them, she noted.

Banner image: courtesy of Suzi Eszterhas.

European coastal waters recorded unprecedented sea surface temperatures in July 2026. A new study has found that human-induced climate change primarily drove the temperature surge, pushing marine ecosystems past their limits.

The rapid analysis was conducted by World Weather Attribution (WWA), a global network of researchers who analyze the influence of climate change in extreme weather events.

WWA scientists focused their analysis on the warmest 14-day periods within July. They chose this specific time frame because sea surface temperatures normally peak in late summer (August-September). The authors analyzed July to isolate how early-season ocean heat is changing as the planet warms.

Across all four regions studied — the Celtic Sea, the Bay of Biscay and Iberian Peninsula (BIP), and the western and eastern Mediterranean — these sea surface temperatures averaged 2.4° Celsius (4.3° Fahrenheit) warmer than historical July baselines. In individual basins, the Celtic Sea was 1.9°C (3.4°F) above normal, while the Eastern Mediterranean was 2°C (3.6°F) hotter than typical July conditions.

The WWA report notes these extreme July temperatures would have been “virtually impossible” in a preindustrial climate, which was 1.4°C (2.5°F) cooler, but are “relatively common” in today’s climate.

The study’s rapid attribution analysis reveals that burning fossil fuels directly drove this extreme warmth. In both Mediterranean regions, climate change added about 2°C of direct heat. In the Eastern Mediterranean, climate change accounted for the entirety of the 2°C anomaly. In the Celtic Sea and BIP, climate change directly added 1.1-1.4°C (2-2.5°F).

“We find that without human-caused global warming, we would expect only 30% of the area for the Celtic region would have experienced a marine heat wave, in comparison to 80% in today’s climate,” Claire Bergin, lead author from Maynooth University, Ireland, said at a press briefing. “In the Western Mediterranean, the change is from 40-80%, and in the Eastern Mediterranean, the change has gone from a startling 9-70% in today’s climate.”

According to the study, the ecological consequences of increasing frequency and intensity of marine heat waves are devastating: they trigger mass mortalities of habitat-forming species like corals and macroalgae, causing cascading failures up the food web.

“Generally speaking, the primary impact is simply when organisms … exceed the physiological thresholds they can tolerate,” co-author John Bruno, a marine ecologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, U.S., said at the briefing. “The temperature increases … are way beyond the thresholds that are required for mass mortality.”

Most marine animals are cold-blooded, meaning their body temperature generally tracks that of the surrounding seawater, so heat accelerates their metabolism, leading to starvation and collapse of biodiversity, Bruno said.

Bergin said these observed temperatures are expected to be another 1.3-1.9°C (2.3-3.4°F) hotter by the end of this century “without a rapid transition away from fossil fuels.”

Banner image: Anomalies in July 2026 sea surface temperatures around Europe with respect to the 1990-2020 climatological average for July. Data: OISST NOAA.

Sloth bears play a critical role in structuring India’s dry deciduous forests by dispersing viable seeds and influencing plant regeneration, reports contributor Sneha Mahale for Mongabay India.

“Dry deciduous forests’ plant compositions are a function of sloth bear presence, movement, and dietary habits,” study co-author K.S. Gopi Sundar, an independent scientist, told Mongabay India.

For the study,  the researchers surveyed the mountainous south-central Aravalli range in the western state of Rajasthan between November 2021 and July 2022. They analyzed 180 droppings or scats of sloth bears (Melursus ursinus)  and discovered that the bears’ diet shifted from plant-dominated in the winter to animal-dominated in the summer.

In winter, ants appeared in more than 80% of the scats, whereas termites dominated summer samples. Among fruits, donkey berry (Grewia flavescens) was the most critical food source in both seasons, while Ziziphus nummularia was favored in winter and the golden shower tree (Cassia fistula) in summer.

“The strong shift in diet was of great surprise,” said study co-author Utkarsh Prajapati, a senior project associate at the Wildlife Institute of India. “Previous studies on sloth bears in semi-arid regions have shown that they consume a lot of fruits during the summer.”

Study co-author Vijay Kumar Koli  with the Department of Zoology at Mohanlal Sukhadia University, Udaipur, said this seasonal change “showed that bears were highly adaptable, switching to foods that were more available.”

To test whether bears help in seed dispersal, the researchers monitored the germination of eight plant species most important in the bears’ diet. They planted 50 seeds of each species — 25 removed from scats and 25 collected directly from fruits — and found that seeds of six species remained highly viable after passing through the bears’ digestive tracts.

In some instances, seeds obtained from scats germinated faster. For example, Ziziphus nummularia seeds from bear droppings germinated in just 50 days, compared to 100 days for seeds collected directly from tree fruits.

The researchers found that the bears may also act as vectors for invasive flora. Seeds of Lantana camara, one of India’s most aggressive invasive shrubs, collected from bear droppings germinated, while none collected directly from fruits did. (But they cautioned only three out of 25 scat-collected seeds germinated.)

“I was surprised that lantana germinated only after the sloth bear had eaten it,” Prajapati said. “Because sloth bears have relatively large home ranges, it is likely that they are dispersing lantana across large landscapes.”

While conservation efforts in India typically focus on predators and large herbivores, the study shows the overlooked ecological contributions of omnivores, Sundar said. “But being an omnivore gives species like bears a lot of dexterity to survive in harsh locations where most species would find it hard to live throughout the year.”

Read the full story by Sneha Mahale here. 

Banner image: Sloth bears ate a plant-dominated diet in the winter and animal-dominated in the summer. Image by Utkarsh Prajapati.

A small population of dolphins in Shark Bay in Western Australia have a documented history of using an unusual tool to help them catch fish: Large, empty snail shells. For the first time, scientists have now observed the same behavior in a different dolphin population on Australia’s east coast.

Researchers even filmed a baby dolphin and its mother using a shell to capture fish, suggesting the baby may have learned the skill from its mother — this hadn’t been observed before now, they write in a recent study.

“The second I saw it [on the east coast], I was like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, this is huge,” study lead author Alexis Levengood, a lecturer of animal ecology at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia, told Mongabay in a video call.

In a behavior called “shelling,” bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) can chase fish into large empty sea snail shells, stick their beak inside to trap the fish, and then raise the shell to the water’s surface where the fish slides out into the dolphin’s mouth.

“It essentially gives them a competitive edge over other dolphins that aren’t using this type of tool use because it makes it easier for them to catch harder-to-catch fish,” Levengood said.

The behavior was first described in 2011 when researchers found roughly 2% of dolphins in Shark Bay demonstrated the skill. It was believed to be a localized behavior until Levengood confirmed three dolphins in Great Sandy Marine Park, Queensland, using the same technique in 2025. The researchers note that photographers aboard a tour boat took photos of dolphins shelling in the same area in 2013 and 2019.

The two dolphin populations on opposite sides of Australia don’t migrate, so the Queensland dolphins couldn’t have directly learned the skill from the Shark Bay population, Levengood said.

She added that while it’s possible the behavior is common, but not observed by trained scientists, their “leading theory is that it’s independently innovated.”

Both dolphin populations live in bays with shallow water and large gastropod shells — the right environments to innovate “shelling,” Levengood said.

In Shark Bay, scientists believe dolphins learned the behavior from peers. In Great Sandy Marine Park, Levengood’s team observed a dolphin calf repeat the behavior immediately after its mother.

“It’s pretty exciting because it gives us a different insight into how this is learned,” Levengood said.

Some dolphins are also known to put sea sponges on their beaks to protect delicate skin while foraging on the rocky seafloor. “Sponging” is a challenging skill, Levengood said, and one that dolphins can only learn from their mothers as babies. “Shelling” is easier to master and can be learned as a baby from mom or from peers later in life.

Levengood said such behavioral flexibility “shows how incredibly intelligent the dolphins are.”

Banner image: An adult dolphin “shelling.”  Image courtesy of the University of the Sunshine Coast Australia.

Aug. 19 is World Orangutan Day, a day to honor the three species of Southeast Asian great apes, all of which are classified as critically endangered by the IUCN, the global conservation authority.

Orangutans were classified into two species: The Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) found in northern Sumatra, Indonesia, and the Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), endemic to its namesake island. But in 2017, scientists described the Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis) as a third, distinct species, also found in northern Sumatra.

Here are the major orangutan developments over the past year:

Whirlwind year for Tapanuli orangutans

In September 2025, researchers confirmed a previously unknown Tapanuli population in a peat swamp forest in the Lumut Maju village forest in North Sumatra.

Scientists previously believed the species, estimated at 716 wild individuals, lived only in Batang Toru, about 32 kilometers (20 miles) east of the new population.

Two months later, Cyclone Senyar triggered tens of thousands of landslides in Batang Toru and killed an estimated 58 Tapanuli orangutans.

Habitat destruction for small-scale agriculture and logging accounts for around 70% of direct forest loss. Large-scale industrial projects, including the Batang Toru hydropower plant and the Martabe gold mine, are also encroaching into the orangutans’ range.

Newborn Sumatran orangutan’s mother saved from trafficking

In July 2026, a formerly trafficked Sumatran orangutan named Bulan gave birth in the wild seven years after being reintroduced. Her infant was the 10th confirmed birth from reintroduced orangutans at the Jantho reservation in Aceh, Indonesia’s westernmost province.

“This birth demonstrates how orangutans, once victims of the wildlife trade, can be given a second chance to live and reproduce in the wild,” Ujang Wisnu Barata, head of the Aceh provincial conservation agency, told Mongabay contributor Ayat S. Karokaro. “Successes like this can only continue if their habitat remains protected.”

Female orangutans breed only once every seven or eight years, the longest interval between births of any mammal.

Despite conservation successes, a 2026 orangutan population assessment estimated the Sumatran population fell 19.5% between 2011 and 2023.

Bornean orangutans face pressure from palm oil and fire

Bornean orangutan habitats faced significant losses from palm oil expansion and fires over the last year.

A palm oil company cleared more than 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) of forest in a UNESCO biosphere reserve, Mongabay reported in March.

In May, fires consumed more than half of a 300-hectare (740-acre) orangutan habitat restoration effort in Indonesia’s West Kalimantan province.

Another fire hit the edge of an orangutan rehabilitation center in August, which raises concerns about further fires in the coming months as El Niño is expected to exacerbate drought in the region.

Banner image: Sumatran orangutan. Image © naturalistnatasha via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Agents of Brazil’s Indigenous agency, FUNAI, spent 60 days in June and July 2026 physically marking the borders of the Rio Pardo Kawahiva Indigenous Territory. The 411,000-hectare (1 million-acre) area in the Amazon biome of Mato Grosso state is home to the Kawahiva, an isolated Indigenous group.

The government agency confirmed the presence of the Indigenous group in 1999 and began demarcating its territory in 2001.

“The uncontacted Kawahiva have been under threat in their own forest home for decades, while simply trying to exercise their right to live as they choose without contact,” Caroline Pearce, director of the UK-based NGO Survival International, said in a statement.

The territory has been invaded by land-grabbers and loggers, causing deforestation. Historically, the Kawahiva territory was intermittently protected via temporary land protection orders, which faced opposition from logging companies.

To officially demarcate the territory, FUNAI agents opened a path around the land and installed roughly 140 signs at strategic locations, FUNAI agents told Mongabay. 

“Here in our region, all owners of plots of land do this,” Jair Candor, coordinator of the FUNAI unit that safeguards the Kawahiva, told Mongabay in an audio message. “The limits of land are marked by opening a path around that territory, whether it belongs to the white man or to an Indigenous person.”  

The last known invasion of the territory was in 2023 when a farmer cleared 4-5 hectares (10-12 acres) of Kawahiva land, Candor said. When confronted, the farmer noted that there were no physical markers identifying the Indigenous land.

“The physical demarcation is for this purpose,” Candor said. “So that people can identify that there is an Indigenous land there and a people who inhabits it and needs that territory.”

Physically marking the territory is the penultimate step to full legal recognition. The only thing remaining is for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to sign a decree formally creating the Indigenous territory.

The president’s office told Mongabay by email that the administration is awaiting Supreme Court decisions concerning the marco temporal, a controversial cutoff date for Indigenous land claims, before proceeding with further land recognition to ensure legal certainty.

“If we can keep it the way it is there, without invasions, they will be OK,” Candor said, adding that monitoring expeditions indicate the forest still provides sufficient game, fish, honey and other food sources for the Kawahiva to survive on the land. “They are also human and just need a place where they can live in peace, like everyone else.”

Banner image: The first sign demarcating the Rio Pardo Kawahiva Indigenous Territory. Image courtesy of FUNAI.