Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) is investigating the deaths of 15 elephants in the Amboseli savannah ecosystem, near the border with Tanzania. KWS told Mongabay that some preliminary laboratory investigations have found a toxic substance in the dead elephants.

The animals were found between June 24 and July 24, 2026, at the Kimana Sanctuary and Kuku Ranch, an area at the crossroads between three national parks in southern Kenya.

“Ten elephants exhibited similar clinical signs, including partial paralysis that left them unable to stand before dying within one to two days,” KWS communications Director Duncan Wanyama said in a statement provided to Mongabay.  “The remaining five carcasses were too decomposed or had been scavenged, making it impossible to establish the cause of death. The condition primarily affected adult females and their calves, with only one adult male reported.”

The University of Nairobi detected a toxic substance in the elephant samples they tested. However, test results from Government Chemist, a Kenyan national lab, were negative for toxic substances. “Further quantitative analysis is underway,” KWS stated.

Some elephants were equipped with tracking devices, and authorities were alerted to the deaths when the tracked animals stopped moving, Wanyama told Mongabay in a phone call.  He said investigations, including analysis of water sources and other resources, were underway to determine if the elephants were exposed to a common source.

“The condition observed is confined to the affected elephants, and there is no indication that it is transmissible to humans,” Wanyama said.

Meanwhile, local leaders want answers. “We have never seen something like this. We want a report stating exactly what killed our elephants,” Joseph ole Lenku, the governor of Kajiado County, where Amboseli is located, said at a public event.

At the same time, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) has called for sustained investment in services to support wildlife.

“This incident is deeply alarming. It reminds us just how vulnerable wildlife remains to emerging and often unpredictable threats,” IFAW Kenyan country director Ben Wandago said in a statement provided to Mongabay. “When we lose elephants on this scale, the impact reaches far beyond a single herd. It affects the resilience of the entire ecosystem and reinforces why we must continue investing in science, monitoring, and collaborative conservation efforts.”

Benson Leyian is the CEO of Big Life Foundation, a conservation organization operating in the mostly Maasai-owned land surrounding Amboseli National Park. He told Mongabay that decades of community-centered conservation had virtually eliminated elephant poaching in Amboseli.

“Aside from losses during periods of severe drought, we haven’t seen a cluster of elephant deaths like this for some time, so it is certainly a cause for concern,” he said.

The KWS says it has intensified surveillance across the area and continues to monitor elephant populations closely. No elephant deaths have been reported in the last week.

Banner image: An elephant at Amboseli National Park in Kenya. Image courtesy of KWS.

NEW YORK (AP) — A first-of-its-kind U.S. study suggests invasive mold infections may be an underappreciated — and potentially deadly — threat.

The researchers detected about 450 cases in Atlanta-area hospitals over five years. About a third of the patients died in the hospital.

The findings, published this week by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, come from an attempt to better gauge how common these kinds of illnesses are. The government does not require doctors to report the illnesses.

“It’s kind of the first time we’ve had an estimate like this,” said the CDC’s Dr. Jeremy Gold, the study’s senior author.

And it’s important to understand it now, because the problem may grow in the future, he added. Mold exposure is a recurring problem in the wake of hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters influenced by climate change, researchers have found.

“I agree that the frequency of fungal infections will likely increase with climate change,” said Dr. Jeffrey Jenks, an infectious disease researcher at Duke University.

Meanwhile, there’s a growing population of older people who are more susceptible to such illnesses, Gold said.

Invasive mold diseases are rare infections caused by certain species. Most people who get infected inhale mold spores, but they can also enter the body through cuts or wounds or from contaminated medical equipment.

The spores don’t cause health problems for most people, but they can be life-threatening to some, including the elderly, cancer patients and others with weakened immune systems.

Previously, CDC researchers estimated more than 15,000 hospitalizations a year could be tied to invasive mold disease.

To better understand how common cases might be at a local level, the research team worked with four Atlanta-area hospitals and their affiliated outpatient clinics to look for potential cases from 2020 to 2024.

They initially identified nearly 1,000 potential cases, but winnowed the number down to about 450 by ruling out patients who may have had signs of exposure but didn’t qualify as having invasive mold disease.

The researchers found that hospitals can expect to see 3 to 5 cases per year for every 100 inpatient beds. The rates were higher at larger academic hospitals that tend to see more complicated illnesses.

Most patients had impaired immune systems or — in a number of cases — were weakened after falling sick from COVID-19.

Mold exposures can occur in hospitals or other healthcare facilities, but the study did not try to determine where each patient was first exposed, Gold said.

It’s hard to generalize what was seen in the Atlanta area to other parts of the country where mold may be more or less of a problem, he said. But it should give hospital administrators at least a rough idea about whether the number of cases they see is what might be expected or whether it’s an outbreak, Gold added.

Jenks called the study’s findings “valuable,” but said “seeing results from similar studies done in different parts of the United States would be helpful.”

Banner image: This 1967 chest x-ray photo provided shows pulmonary aspergillosis caused by a fungal organism. Image courtesy of CDC via Associated Press

A federal judge in Brazil has given the country’s government 24 months to recognize the traditional territory of the Kajkwakratxi-Tapayuna Indigenous people in the northwestern state of Mato Grosso.

The court accepted evidence from federal prosecutors that detailed decades of government inaction following massacres, forced displacement and other human rights violations against the Kajkwakratxi-Tapayuna people.

The ruling, issued on June 11 by Federal Judge Pablo Kipper Aguilar in Diamantino, Mato Grosso, also orders the federal government to issue a public apology and pay 10 million reais ($2 million) in collective moral damages.

“It has been a very difficult journey,” Yaiku Suya Tapayuna, a leader of the Kajkwakratxi-Tapayuna people, told Operação Amazônia Nativa (OPAN). “It is a decision we have dreamed about, and we are now celebrating this victory.”

In his decision, the judge drew upon decades of evidence of violence against the Kajkwakratxi-Tapayuna, beginning with a massacre in 1953 involving armed attacks and deliberate poisoning. A dictatorship-era report published in 1967 documented that a nearby rubber tapping business left a sack of sugar laced with arsenic on a riverbank in the Tapayuna area for the Indigenous community to consume. Another poisoning attack occurred in the 1960s with meat laced with tick poison.

In 1969, a “poorly planned” official visit organized by the federal Indigenous affairs agency brought in the influenza virus, contaminating the Kajkwakratxi-Tapayuna people. An account given to national media at the time described, “Indigenous corpses decimated by the flu across the forest, and children nursing from the breasts of their dead mothers.”

Survivors of the attacks and influenza virus were forcibly removed from their territory by the government Indigenous agency. According to an account by 13 Indigenous individuals presented as evidence in the case, the Kajkwakratxi-Tapayuna survivors were transported to the city of Cuiabá in trucks typically used for animals and then put on a plane to the Xingu Indigenous Park, about 400 kilometers (250 miles) east.

In their account, the group said they were falsely promised that the removal would be temporary: “They told us we could go because we would soon come back to get our things and return to our land. But they deceived us.”

In 1976, the state stopped recognizing the Tapayuna reserve as Indigenous land, claiming that the territory had been abandoned. Shortly after, the state-level Mato Grosso Land Institute began issuing private land titles for the same land.

Federal Judge Aguilar cited a parliamentary inquiry commission that described the violence against the Kajkwakratxi-Tapayuna people as a genocide. Aguilar said the historical record documented a premeditated campaign to expel them from their traditional territory.

“It gives me great joy to see this trajectory … of our people, with generations fighting for our traditional territory and its demarcation, hoping to live once again on the land where our relatives were left,” Wetaktxi Tapayuna, president of the Tapayuna Indigenous Association, told OTAN.

Banner image: Kajkwakratxi-Tapayuna leader Yaiku Suya at an April 2026 public hearing. Image courtesy of Larissa Silva/Rede Juruena Vivo.

July 29 is International Tiger Day.

Few species have benefitted from global conservation attention and funding like the tiger. Its numbers have seen a hopeful increase in recent years, yet the big cat continues to face localized pressures.

Recent Mongabay coverage highlights three starkly different realities for tigers (Panthera tigris) across Asia.

India’s corridors under pressure

India remains the global stronghold for wild tigers, currently home to roughly 75% of the world’s remaining population. While India’s 2022 census shows numbers have rebounded to an estimated 3,682 cats, this success brings new challenges, reports contributor Nirmal Ghosh for Mongabay.

As tiger numbers grow in protected areas, the big cats are forced to disperse out in search of new homes. They end up navigating human-dominated landscapes where they’re likely to run into conflict with people or infrastructure like roads and railways. Though India has invested heavily in building some of the world’s largest wildlife underpasses, Ghosh reports that vital ecological corridors remain under severe threat, and development proposals like mining and road infrastructure in protected habitats continue to be approved.

Nepal’s controversial solution for ‘problem’ tigers

Nepal has successfully tripled its tiger population since 2009 to 355 individuals, report Mongabay’s Abhaya Raj Joshi and contributor Mukesh Pokhrel. But this boom has led to a sharp rise in human-tiger conflict.

Government records show 38 people died in tiger attacks between 2019 and 2023, leaving authorities struggling to manage the captured “problem” tigers, or individuals involved in killing and eating one or more humans.

With overcrowded zoos and holding centers, Hari Bhadra Acharya, a senior ecologist with the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, said the government is proposing a 50-hectare (124-acre) fenced safari park funded by tourism. However, Hari Sharma, zoology professor at Tribhuvan University, warned that funding from tourism can be highly unstable and unreliable.

Furthermore, researcher Babu Ram Lamichhane pointed to a 2017 study showing fewer than 5% of tigers cause conflicts, advocating instead for early-warning systems rather than large-scale captivity.

Cambodia’s risky reintroduction

In Cambodia, where wild tigers were formally declared extinct in 2016, the government is pushing an ambitious plan to introduce Bengal tigers imported from India into the Cardamom Mountains, report Mongabay India’s Arathi Menon and contributor Andy Ball. However, a 2020 study by the nonprofit Wildlife Alliance and the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research found that the proposed habitat suffers from severe prey depletion.

A recent undercover investigation by Earth League International (ELI), reported on by Mongabay’s Spoorthy Raman, exposed a thriving, cartel-run domestic black market in Cambodia catering to an appetite for tiger parts. Debbie Banks, who serves as the tiger and wildlife crime campaign lead at the U.K.-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), warned that without addressing this lack of enforcement and complicity, the fate of any translocated tigers to Cambodia “is very gloomy.”

Banner image: A tiger in India. Image ©Vinod Udhwani via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Researchers have tracked down 28 individuals of a palm tree species last recorded in Madagascar nearly 100 years ago.

Nearly every tree of the species, Ravenea latisecta, was found within four protected areas in the Andasibe-Mantadia region of Madagascar, according to a recent study.

“Andasibe–Mantadia is one of Madagascar’s best-explored botanical regions, and Ravenea latisecta is not an inconspicuous plant, it is a palm several metres tall,” Louis Aureglia, study lead author with Aix-Marseille University in France, told Mongabay by email. “Yet confirmed populations remained undocumented for almost a century. This is a good reminder that botanical exploration is far from complete.”

There are around 20 known species of palm trees in the genus Ravenea. All are only found in Madagascar and the Comoros, and nearly all are endangered or critically endangered.

For the study, Aureglia and his colleagues launched a survey in Andasibe–Mantadia in 2024 to document Ravenea palm trees in the wild. They also examined historical specimens kept in herbariums.

Palm trees are usually large and difficult to miss, yet some Ravenea species can be tricky to tell apart with confidence if they’re not flowering, Aureglia said.

The “real turning point” in their fieldwork, he added, was when they found “fertile” plants: male or female trees containing inflorescences, or branched structures with clusters of flowers.

“Ravenea latisecta is dioecious, meaning that male and female flowers are produced on separate plants,” Aureglia said. “Once we found both male and female individuals, with inflorescences matching the original description, we could confirm the identification confidently.”

Eventually, they found 28 individuals of R. latisecta, mostly at four sites: Vohimana Reserve, Analamazoatra National Park, Mantadia National Park, and Vakona Forest private reserve.

These records come nearly a century after R. latisecta was first described from a specimen collected in 1927 in eastern Madagascar. Four herbarium specimens collected in 1992 were also previously labeled as R. latisecta, but three are other Ravenea species and one can’t be confirmed, Aureglia said.

With fewer than 50 mature individuals known to exist, R. latisecta is listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List.

The researchers don’t yet know whether the palm tree is naturally rare or if certain threats have reduced the population to just a few dozen individuals. The protected areas where they’ve been found are under pressure from slash-and-burn agriculture and forest loss at the edges, Aureglia said.

But the team “found no evidence that R. latisecta itself is specifically harvested or used by local communities,” he said, adding more monitoring is needed to understand its population trends and threats.

Aureglia said his team doesn’t know if any verified individuals of R. latisecta are being cultivated in botanical gardens. “We also found no fruiting individuals during our surveys, which means that we have not yet been able to collect seeds for propagation or other ex situ conservation measures,” he added.

Banner image of Ravenea latisecta courtesy of Louis Aureglia.

In Vietnam’s Pu Mat National Park, which borders Laos, an antipoaching unit is integrating high-tech tools with on-the-ground patrols to help turn the tide on illegal wildlife poaching.

The antipoaching unit (APU) was formed through a partnership in 2018 between the NGO Save Vietnam’s Wildlife (SVW) and the park, to address the widespread use of wire snares and the limited capacity of forest rangers, APU coordinator Huu Trung Nguyen told contributor Campbell Rusden in an interview for Mongabay.

Nguyen said that about 70 forest rangers previously monitored more than 1,300 hectares (3,200 acres) of rugged terrain each on average.

Patrol information was also recorded in written notes and patrol routes, and locations of illegal activities were described in narrative form, said Trung Hau Luong, the unit’s deputy head, in the interview.

Now, the APU team uses SMART (Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool) software and remotely monitored “PoacherCams.”

Luong said that SMART allows patrol teams to record routes, wildlife observations, and snare locations via GPS-enabled smartphones, creating structured data to identify trafficking hotspots and guide strategic planning.

Meanwhile, PoacherCams, which are cameras installed at certain locations such as forest entry points, ridge crossings, or trails frequently used by hunters, help the unit better understand people’s movements through the forest and identify potential illegal activities. In one instance, a camera captured footage of a man entering the forest with a gun. After the authorities spoke with the individual and explained the legal consequences of hunting, he voluntarily surrendered his hunting gun, Luong said.

Van Nam Luong, head of the APU, said they’re already seeing changes. They’re encountering fewer snares in the park, for example, and have observed encouraging signs of wildlife recovery, such as wild pig nests, otters, and pangolin activity in areas that were once heavily hunted. Independent camera-trap surveys have further documented the presence of rare species in the landscape, including clouded leopards (Neofelis nebulosa) and Owston’s civets (Chrotogale owstoni).

Still, the team said the technologies have limits. Nguyen pointed out that the park’s rugged terrain, high humidity, and limited connectivity often challenge electronic equipment. Furthermore, while artificial intelligence holds promise for automating analysis of images and sounds to detect threats more quickly, Nguyen said “AI should be seen as a tool that supports human decision-making rather than its replacement.”

The APU aims to expand its influence through community outreach and a mobile nature center to reduce the demand for illegally sourced wildlife. For the officers, many of whom grew up near the park, the mission is deeply personal.

“For those of us working in the forest, the most encouraging moments are when we begin to see signs of wildlife returning to places that were once heavily hunted,” Van Nam Luong said.

Read the full interview by Campbell Rusden here.

Banner image: Antipoaching officers and forest rangers in Pu Mat use the SMART application in their forest patrols and protection work. Image courtesy of Save Vietnam’s Wildlife.