World Oceans Day is celebrated every June 8 to raise awareness about the conservation of Earth’s oceans. In honor of World Oceans Day 2026, the United Nations is focused on marine protected areas (MPA), and the goal of protecting 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030.

The world collectively reached a third of the goal in April 2026, MPAs now cover 10% of oceans. Another 20% will need to be protected over the next four years to reach the 30% goal.

New Marine Protected Areas

The latest additions of MPAs included 284 marine or coastal protected areas in Indonesia and Thailand. This year, Ghana also declared its first MPA, the Greater Cape Three Points MPA, after more than 15 years of efforts. And in September 2025, Pakistan protected the key biodiversity hotspot of Miani Hor Lagoon, home to dalmatian pelicans (Pelecanus crispus) and great black-headed gulls (Ichthyaetus ichthyaetus).

French Polynesia, a Pacific territory controlled by France, declared the world’s largest MPA in June 2025. It covers the archipelagos’ entire exclusive economic zone; 4.8 million square kilometers (roughly 1.9 million square miles) of ocean gained official protection with overwhelming local support.

Some MPAs allow bottom trawling

While there has been progress, experts have also highlighted that some MPAs do not have enough protection. Throughout Europe, many MPAs still allow bottom trawling, a damaging fishing practice that drags weighted nets across the seafloor. Though bottom trawling targets just a few commercially viable species, a recent study found such nets collect roughly 3,000 distinct marine organisms, including threatened ones.

A recent win in a Dutch court may curb the practice in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, public pressure is gaining traction in the U.K., where “paper parks,” or MPAs with minimal actual protection, have garnered infamy.

Campaigns for new MPAs

One of the world’s largest new protected areas was put on hold in Chile following an administrative change. On March 10, the outgoing president of Chile expanded two MPAs to include 337,000 square kilometers (130,000 square miles) of mega-biodiverse ocean habitats. They received the highest levels of environmental protection for one day.  Then the new president suspended the MPA on his first day in office. The administration says that it’s a routine suspension, but local artisanal fishers have expressed frustration with the delay.

In South Africa, a campaign to protect the Great African Seaforest, the world’s only expanding kelp forests, is taking shape. The underwater forest stretches for around 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) along South Africa’s Atlantic coast but is only partially protected. Campaigners and scientists are now pushing to expand these protections.

Banner image: Jannes Landschoff diving in the Great African Seaforest. Image courtesy of Jannes Landschoff.

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

The platypus offers a useful lesson in conservation: before acting, it helps to know where the animal still lives, and where risks are growing.

Australia’s best-known oddity is also difficult to count, reports contributor Paul Harvey for Mongabay. It feeds around dawn and dusk, spends much of its life underwater in rivers, and leaves few obvious signs. That makes its decline harder to measure and harder to manage. The IUCN Red List classifies the species as near threatened, based on an estimate of about 50,000 animals, though researchers say the true number is uncertain.

That uncertainty has become more important as pressure on rivers increases. Drought can shrink the pools where platypuses feed. Bushfires can damage riverbanks and nearby vegetation. Floods can inundate burrows before animals can escape. Pollution from wastewater, mining, industry, and urban runoff can reduce the aquatic invertebrates that make up much of their diet.

There is room for optimism because scientists have now developed a framework for deciding when to help platypuses where they are and when animals may need to be moved. Zoos are also preparing for a clearer role in emergencies, including temporary care for animals stranded by drought, fire, or flood.

Citizen science can help close the information gap. Projects that map sightings show where platypuses are still being seen. Environmental DNA, collected from water samples, can detect their presence without needing to trap or even observe them. That makes monitoring faster and more accessible to local groups, landowners, and river managers.

For conservationists, there’s a clear lesson. Protecting a hard-to-detect species starts with a map, a baseline, and a plan made before disaster strikes. For river managers, platypus conservation is also river-health work: protecting riparian vegetation, maintaining deep pools and riffles, reducing pollution, and keeping waterways connected.

The platypus is unusual. The response to its decline can be straightforward. Better data, healthier rivers, and earlier intervention would give this animal a better chance.

Read the full story by Paul Harvey here.

Banner image: A platypus ready for release, after being captured, weighed, measured and given a health assessment. Image courtesy of Gilad Bino/Platypus Conservation Initiative.

Researchers have identified three new-to-science species of snake mantises, two from Australia and one from Papua New Guinea, and figured out their distribution and behavior with the help of citizen scientists.

Matthew Connors, a Ph.D. candidate at James Cook University in Australia, led the effort to revisit the taxonomy of Kongobatha, a little-studied group of praying mantises known as snake mantises for the snake-like patterns on their wings. They’re also referred to as leaf-planking mantises, because they press their bodies against leaves to camouflage.

The blending in helps because they are both predators of insects, including flies and mosquitoes, and prey themselves. “They have this special organ right on their chest that is a sensory thing, and it helps them flatten themselves down really nicely against a leaf, so that they’re really hard for a predator to see,” Connors said in a news release.

Previously only two species of Kongobatha were known: one from Australia and another from Papua New Guinea. Now, there are three more, named K. serpens, K. spinosistyla and K. rufilinea.

To describe these three species, Connors collected new specimens of the mantises and sourced others from Australian and international museums and private collections.

He examined them under a microscope, focusing on male anatomical features called styli, which are a pair of small appendage-like structures located on the end of the abdomen, and may function in mating, although this remains a “mystery,” Connors told Mongabay by email.

The styli of snake mantises have many spines on them, Connors said. However, the pattern and number of spines differed between the species. “In one of our new species [K. spinosistyla], there are up to 60 spines crammed in on the surface of this structure … no other mantis species in the world has these types of structures,” he added.

The researchers also found that K. papua, previously only documented in Papua New Guinea, also occurs in Australia.

Apart from using museum specimens, the team also relied on photographs of mantises posted on citizen science platforms such as iNaturalist to help examine the insects’ geographic distribution, habitat use and behavior in the wild, Connors said.

The researchers learned, for example, one of the new mantises, K. serpens, is attracted to lights at night and is a common resident in suburban gardens in Brisbane and Sydney. It seems “to have adapted really well to living with humans,” Connors said in the release.

All four of the Australian Kongobatha mantises appear to be doing well. However, K. rufilinea, is known from only a single specimen collected in Papua New Guinea more than 50 years ago.

“We cannot protect what we don’t know about, but I have hope that this species is still out there, and formally naming and describing the species is the first step to ensuring its survival,” Connors said.

Banner image: Male and female Kongobatha spinosistyla in North Queensland. Image by Maurice Allan.

Researchers in Nepal have confirmed a rare Chinese pangolin living in a small community forest considered sacred by locals, according to a recent study. It may also be the first video evidence of the pangolin in Nepal’s Sunsari district, researchers said. 

The Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla), listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List and protected under Nepalese laws, is threatened by both habitat loss and poaching. This makes every verified population, especially those outside protected areas, important for conservation, study lead author Tujin Rai with Tribhuvan University in Nepal told Mongabay by email.

Chinese pangolins are found across Nepal. However, verified records of the species in eastern Nepal remain poor, the authors wrote.

Previous research has found indirect signs such as pangolin burrows and footprints in Panchakanya community forest in Sunsari district. The community forest, spanning just 0.56 square kilometers (0.22 square miles), is located “within a mosaic of villages, agricultural lands, transportation infrastructure, and the Sewti River,” Rai said.

To verify the presence of the pangolin in the forest, Rai and his colleagues installed camera traps on trails and around recently dug burrows in January 2025.

On Jan. 21, 2025, the cameras recorded a male Chinese pangolin.

Rai told Mongabay that during field surveys they also recorded nearly 30 pangolin burrows and other signs, especially in areas with abundant ant and termite colonies, which pangolins like to eat. These observations suggest the forest possibly supports more than a single individual; however, right now the team can only confirm one individual, he said. Long-term monitoring will be needed to assess population size and habitat use patterns, he added.

Still, confirmation of a Chinese pangolin in Panchakanya “demonstrates that even small, fragmented forests outside protected areas can provide important refuges for threatened wildlife,” Rai said.

A temple within Panchakanya that’s revered by local communities, likely offers the forest some protection. A community forest user group has also established “guidelines on harvesting forest products, livestock grazing, and other activities that could affect the forest ecosystem,” he said.

Panchakanya still has patches of relatively intact forests thanks to protection afforded by local traditions, religious beliefs and community forest management; however, human activities such as fuelwood and mushroom collection and religious and cultural gatherings do have an impact, Rai said. There is a need for proactive community stewardship to conserve the species, he added.

Kumar Paudel, a pangolin specialist from the nonprofit Greenhood Nepal who wasn’t involved in the study, told Mongabay that apart from poaching, habitat loss is a major threat in community forests outside protected areas. “Communities can help reduce poaching and prioritise not disturbing pangolin habitats while doing other forest management or development activities.”

Banner image: Camera-trap photograph of a Chinese pangolin recorded in the Panchakanya forest in Nepal on Jan. 21, 2025. Image courtesy of Tujin Rai/Nature Conservation and Study Centre.

Tuna offer a useful case study for World Ocean Day because their recovery has come through the least sentimental parts of conservation: quotas, enforcement, stock assessments, and years of difficult diplomacy.

By the early 2010s, several tuna stocks were in serious trouble. Atlantic bluefin had become a marker of overfishing. Pacific bluefin had fallen to a small fraction of its historic abundance. The risk was ecological and commercial. Governments were looking at the possible collapse of one of the world’s most valuable fisheries.

The response was slow, contested, and often technical. Regional fisheries bodies tightened catch limits, improved monitoring, began adopting automated harvest rules, and expanded electronic catch-documentation systems to make illegal and unreported fishing harder to hide. Fleets built around high catches had to accept lower quotas. The politics were difficult because the countries involved often had competing economic interests.

That is part of what makes the outcome worth studying. Atlantic bluefin are showing strong signs of recovery, backed by decades of tagging, catch data, and population modeling. Pacific bluefin reached a key rebuilding target years ahead of schedule. Across commercial tuna fisheries, a much larger share of global catch now comes from stocks assessed as being at healthy levels.

This does not mean the oceans have returned to abundance. Some stocks, particularly Indian Ocean yellowfin, remain in poor condition. Rebuilding to 20% of historic biomass is a critical scientific milestone for safety, not total restoration. Bycatch of sharks, turtles, and seabirds remains a serious problem, and some regional fisheries still lack the political will to set and enforce credible limits.

Even with those limits, tuna show that recovery is possible when rules are specific, evidence is taken seriously, monitoring is credible, and violations carry consequences. The useful point is a practical one: marine conservation can work at industrial scale, even where trust is thin, when the combination of state rules, market access, and data transparency makes restraint measurable and noncompliance costly.

Banner image: A school of albacore tuna gathered by a seine net, off the Seychelles. Photo by Marc Taquet

The short-eared dog is one of the Amazon’s least-known carnivores. In Bolivia, it’s also one of the hardest to find.

The species has a fox-like snout, small rounded ears, partially webbed toes, and a long bushy tail that often drags on the forest floor. In Spanish, it’s sometimes called perro fantasma, or ghost dog, a name that reflects how rarely even field biologists encounter it.

A long-running camera-trap study has now brought the species into sharper focus, reports Iván Paredes Tamayo. Over more than two decades, researchers recorded the short-eared dog in Bolivia’s lowland Amazonian forests, in piedmont forests near the Andes, and in large protected and Indigenous-managed landscapes. The results suggest the animal may be present in more places than earlier records showed. That is useful evidence, although it doesn’t make the species common. It remains scarce, elusive, and closely linked to well-preserved forest.

For conservation groups, land managers, and funders, the findings suggest the short-eared dog depends on large, connected areas of habitat. Small forest fragments are unlikely to provide what it needs. Its presence can help identify places where forests are still functioning well, especially where protected areas and Indigenous territories keep intact habitat at scale.

The finding also shows why long-term monitoring matters. Rare species are easy to miss in short surveys. A camera trap may sit for months without recording one. A study that runs across years, landscapes, and management types can reveal patterns that would otherwise remain hidden.

The short-eared dog will probably never become a familiar conservation symbol. That should not limit its importance. Its records give researchers a better view of Bolivia’s Amazonian forests, and they give decision-makers another reason to keep those forests large, connected, and standing.

Read the full story here.

Banner image: The short-eared dog inhabits the Amazon and prefers untouched forests. Image courtesy of Guido Ayala & María Viscarra/WCS Bolivia.