With no local polling station or means of getting to one from their remote community, residents of the Tumucumaque Indigenous Park in northern Brazil weren’t able to vote in October’s general elections. That’s according to Mitore Tiriyo Kaxuyana, a leader of the Tiriyó and Kaxuyana Indigenous peoples who spoke to Mongabay.

On Oct. 22, just three days before the presidential runoff vote, a federal court ruled that Indigenous voters nationwide must be provided with transportation and language interpreters to facilitate their right to vote.

Elections officials in Amapá state, where the park is located, told Kaxuyana in a meeting on Oct. 19 that they weren’t even aware of the existence of the Tumucumaque Indigenous Park.

“I felt a bit sad. I told them we have difficulty voting in our territory,” Kaxuyana, the coordinator of the Articulation of Indigenous Women of the Tiriyó, Kaxuyana and Txikiyana Peoples (AMITIKATXI), told Mongabay by phone. “They were unaware of the existence of the Tiriyó and Kaxuyana people here in Amapá. We said that we existed.”

Mongabay reached out to the Amapá electoral court, the state judicial body that administers elections, for comment, but didn’t receive a response.

Without polling stations in the territory, Tumucumaque Indigenous Park residents must travel by plane to vote in Macapá, the state capital.

“The majority of people who live in the villages normally don’t vote,” Kaxuyana said.

There are 74 villages within the 3-million-hectare (7.6-million-acre) territory, home to roughly 2,800 Brazilian citizens. The territory straddles five municipalities across two states, but most public services for its inhabitants are concentrated in Macapá.

Kaxuyana said there have never been polling stations in the territory. The only residents who vote are those who happen to be in the city during elections, often for medical reasons, or public servants such as teachers or health workers who are there for other reasons, Kaxuyana added.

Of Brazil’s 839 Indigenous territories, only 232 — less than 30% — have polling stations, according to Sumaúma, an Amazon-based news website.

About 26% of Indigenous voters in Brazil didn’t vote in October, higher than the 20% average for all eligible Brazilian voters, according to a technical note by advisers at the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples seen by Mongabay.

On Oct. 14, Brazil’s deputy electoral prosecutor-general told the Superior Electoral Court that Indigenous leaders in five states, including Amapá, had reported that voters missed the first round of the elections due to lack of transportation from their villages and Indigenous territories to polling stations.

Kaxuyana said she was barred from translating in the first round of voting for two of her relatives, who were in Macapá for medical treatment and voting for the first time.

“We cannot be prevented from voting, from exercising this right,” Kaxuyana said.

Banner image: A village in the Tumucumaque Indigenous Park. Image courtesy of Kamikia Kisedje, Nia Tero/Iepé Archive.

In the land of tigers, prey animals like deer and monkeys are often the first to sound the alarm when they sense the predator’s presence. Forest communities in Nepal, where the success of tiger conservation has come at the cost of rising human-tiger conflict, have long known to listen for these natural alerts.

This local wisdom inspired a recent pilot project using sensors dotted around a forest to detect these alarm calls and send out automated alerts telling people where tigers or leopards might be prowling, reports contributor Praveen Kumar Yadav for Mongabay. The developers said they’d hoped it could be deployed to prevent tiger attacks in the region, but they didn’t have the chance to find out: the project ended for lack of support.

Nepal’s wild tiger population recently reached a record 429 individuals, with 112 residing around Bardiya National Park in the southwest. That increase has come at a cost: Between 2010 and 2024, there were 245 tiger attacks on humans, resulting in 141 fatalities, according to a recent study.

To reduce encounters, researchers deployed solar-powered acoustic monitoring devices in the Dalla Community Forest, near Bardiya, between December 2024 and March 2025. These devices, costing roughly $50 each, ran an artificial intelligence model trained to listen to sounds coming from the forest and identify alarm calls from chital deer (Axis axis), rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), and gray langurs (Semnopithecus hector).

Communities in Bardiya, who share the same landscape as tigers to graze their livestock and collect firewood and other forest products, have long relied on these signals to watch out for tigers.

“Footprints, scat, and alarm calls from deer, langurs, red monkeys all tell us that a tiger may be nearby,” said Bhadai Tharu, chair of the Gauri Community Forest and a tiger-attack survivor.

Casey Anderson, a U.S.-based wildlife filmmaker and study co-author who led the project’s deployment, said the system built on existing human understanding. “We weren’t teaching the forest or the people who live there something new. In many ways, we were teaching a computer to recognize something those people already understood,” she said.

The system seemed promising: according to Thenghchu Tharu, a 60-year-old forest guard at Dalla Community Forest who monitored the pilot, the automated alerts matched the physical tracking signs he observed on the ground.

“If people are informed beforehand, they do not need to enter that area,” he said.

But the pilot stalled, due to running out of resources, staffing constraints, and a lack of local institutional backing, Anderson said.

His team have since moved their equipment to India to continue testing there. Sabnam Pathak from Nepal’s Department of Forests and Soil Conservation said new conservation tools require thorough long-term evaluation before they can be adopted at scale.

Read the full story by Praveen Kumar Yadav here.

Banner image: The team used a faux tiger skin to elicit alarm calls from prey species. Image by Kershenbaum et al., 2026 (CC BY-NC-ND).

Madagascar’s largest fruit bat is getting smaller, and hunting may be partly to blame, a recent study suggests.

The Malagasy flying fox (Pteropus rufus) feeds mainly on fruit and nectar, making it an important pollinator and seed disperser. But the species is also hunted for meat, both for subsistence and commercial sale. Hunting is legal in Madagascar from May to September each year; some hunters use nets to catch bats for food, while others shoot them with shotguns to sell in markets and restaurants.

Researchers from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, U.S., first noticed the apparent change while observing the bats in the wild. The animals seemed smaller than specimens held in the museum.

“I was thinking about a million different angles to explain why the bats were getting smaller,” Emily Cornelius Ruhs, the study’s lead author a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum’s Negaunee Integrative Research Center, said in a statement. “I wondered if it was related to changes in temperature or habitat.”

Co-author Steve Goodman, also from the Field Museum, suspected commercial hunting, which had intensified from the 1980s onward, might be a factor.

To investigate, Ruhs and Goodman measured the skulls and teeth of 121 Malagasy flying fox specimens collected over the past 150 years. They found the bats’ skulls had become significantly smaller since 1980, while their teeth had not. The researchers suggest this could indicate that hunters are selectively shooting larger bats because they yield more meat.

“If you’re the biggest bat in the sky, you might be the easiest target. You’re also going to provide a hunter with the most meat,” Ruhs said. She cautioned, however, that the study doesn’t prove hunting caused the bats to shrink, only that the two trends are correlated.

Targeting larger bats could also have implications for the species’ reproduction. Mid- to large-sized adults are likely to be sexually mature, the authors write. The species reaches sexual maturity at more than 2 years, and then births just one pup after a gestation period of more than six months.

Vincent Florens, an ecologist at the University of Mauritius, who wasn’t involved in the study, told Smithsonian Magazine that the fruit bat “has a big ecological role, because the dissemination of seeds is extremely important for the reproduction of plants and also for the regeneration of forests.”

Ruhs and Goodman write in their paper that the reduction in the bats’ size could also affect the species’ ecological role by limiting the size of the fruits they can eat and the seeds they can disperse.

Acknowledging that the Malagasy flying fox is an important food source in some parts of Madagascar, Ruhs said it was “critical to figure out ways to protect the bat populations.”

Banner image: Two Malagasy flying fox specimens from the Field Museum’s collections. The smaller specimen on the left is from 1995; the larger specimen is from 1948. Image © Field Museum.

Coastal communities near Bangkok in Thailand are testing artificial mangrove roots to combat severe shoreline erosion, reports Mongabay’s Carolyn Cowan.

The shorelines of Phra Samut Chedi district, located in the Chao Phraya River Delta where Bangkok’s main waterway empties into the Gulf of Thailand, is especially vulnerable to erosion. Each year, strong surges claim 20 to 60 meters (66 to 200 feet) of land, and wave energy regularly collapses dikes and inundates aquaculture farms. Several methods of protecting the coast — from mangrove restoration to bamboo fences — have proved ineffective.

Researchers recently evaluated a new method: they installed artificial mangrove root systems that mimic the shape of natural mangrove roots, to see whether these would also mimic their function and prevent loss of land to the sea.

A 15-month trial at 11 sites in Phra Samut Chedi and other parts of Samut Prakan province showed some success, according to a recent study. It found the engineered mangrove roots captured 16 to 88 centimeters (6 to 35 inches) of sediment behind them across 10 locations.

Unlike hard-engineered structures or short-lived bamboo fences that quickly break down into marine debris, the composite wood-plastic and rubber structures of the artificial mangrove roots allow water to flow through, the researchers said. This creates localized turbulence that encourages suspended mud to settle onto the seabed, they added.

“Aquaculture farmers sent us a video of the waves hitting their dikes,” Butsawan Bidorn, senior author of the study and an assistant professor of coastal engineering at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, told Mongabay. “By the next day, the dike had collapsed and they’d lost everything. They need urgent action — the erosion can cause damage overnight.”

Butsawan said that while the structures imitate root function rather than exact anatomy, their fast modular installation provides a crucial intermediate pathway for vulnerable communities.

Field evaluations several months after installation showed that raised sediment levels behind the structures had allowed shrimp farmers at one site to rebuild mud dikes. At another site, it had enabled landowners to resume replanting mangrove seedlings.

Sompratana Ritphring, an associate professor of water engineering at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, who wasn’t involved in the study, said that while the engineered mangrove roots are an interesting intervention, such a system can’t serve as a universal or permanent fix.

“At best, it should be a temporary or enabling engineering component that helps create conditions in which a real mangrove ecosystem can establish itself,” Sompratana said. “The ultimate objective should be a functioning natural system, not a coastline permanently dependent on artificial structures.”

Sompratana added the structures should also be monitored long term so the materials used in them don’t end up as marine litter.

Read the full story by Carolyn Cowan here.

Banner image: Aerial view of artificial mangrove root units installed at a study site seaward of an intensively farmed aquaculture zone, with Bangkok’s skyline in the distance. Image courtesy of Warit Charoenlerkthawin.

Researchers recently spotted the brightly colored Ghana cuckooshrike in Côte d’Ivoire’s Taï National Park. The “lost” bird hadn’t been seen in 13 years, reports Mongabay’s John Cannon.

Stephanie Bartlett, a field research fellow with the International Bird Conservation Partnership (IBCP), took a photo of the cuckooshrike while Paulo Ditzel, also an IBCP research fellow, called out its movements to her. Bartlett told Mongabay she got the identifying photo of the bird first before she even saw it.

“They’re scared of you,” Bartlett said. “You don’t get to get close to them, and so often you have to use the camera as a tool for identification.” Her photo revealed a small bird with an orange body and black and yellow wings.

The photograph was the culmination of months of fieldwork and bird surveys supported by an instrumental team of West African researchers. “To say they were vital for this project is an understatement,” Ditzel said.

The Ghana cuckooshrike (Lobotos lobatus) was last documented in 2013 in Ghana’s Atewa Forest. Ornithologists believe it’s range stretches across sections of West Africa, from Guinea to Ghana, within the Upper Guinean Rainforest. However, the bird’s likely habitat has been whittled away by logging and agriculture, leaving isolated patches of forest across its range.

Ditzel and his colleagues noted that the cuckooshrike was listed by the Search for Lost Birds (SLB), a platform that documents bird species that haven’t been scientifically documented in more than a decade. The researchers had a feeling the bird might still be around in Taï.

With no verified sightings in 13 years, researchers had little information about the bird’s population or conservation status. They could have been extinct, extremely rare or just difficult to spot in the forest canopy.

“You can’t really make an effective conservation plan for a species that nobody’s seen in 10 years,” John Mittermeier with the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) and director of SLB said. “You’re not sure how it’s doing. You’re not sure where it is.”

Finding the Ghana cuckooshrike in Taï National Park underscores the importance of protecting a biodiversity hotspot that is also threatened by artisanal gold mining and illegal hunting, researchers say.

“Taï is a treasure for biodiversity conservation in Côte d’Ivoire and indeed throughout West Africa,” said Saint Guillaume Odoukpe, an ornithologist and assistant professor at Côte d’Ivoire’s Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny who organized and accompanied the IBCP expedition in the country. “I think there is plenty more to discover in this forest.”

That’s a sentiment shared by Mittermeier. “We have this sense sometimes [that] there’s nothing left to explore. But actually, there’s so many things left to explore, and in a way, these lost birds are a call to exploration,” he told Mongabay.

Read the full article by John Canon here. 

Banner image: A Ghana cuckooshrike in Côte d’Ivoire. Image by Stephanie Bartlett.

A federal judge issued an emergency order on Oct. 23 to deploy federal security forces to the Apyterewa Indigenous Land in Brazil’s Pará state. The order came after new evidence emerged that hundreds of former non-Indigenous occupants planned to reinvade the territory on Oct. 25, the day of Brazil’s presidential runoff election.

The court order was in response to an urgent request by the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPF), which documented threats of armed violence against the Parakanã Indigenous people who live in Apyterewa. Allegations suggest that the invaders expected political support following the elections.

According to the case file, on Oct. 12, an Indigenous Parakanã man received 10 WhatsApp audio messages that warned of a planned invasion. Some claimed 100 to 300 people were preparing to invade and were buying tarps and tools to rebuild settlements inside. The messages repeatedly warned Indigenous residents to leave, including references to possible gunfire.

“The governor said the people should return,” one audio message said. “The governor who has just won, and if Flávio [Bolsonaro] wins the presidency, then the land will be released to the people again, the land to white people.”

In another audio message, an individual said: “There are a hundred, two hundred, three hundred men who used to own land there. Everyone is saying they’re going back, that the government is supporting them.”

The alleged invasion was scheduled for Oct. 25, coinciding with the election which incumbent Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won in a surprise defeat of his far-right rival who had promised to remove “environmental obstacles” in the Amazon rainforest.

“Allegations of political support for the invasion reflect how the issue of Indigenous peoples is understood by supporters of the political opposition — a faction whose representatives openly oppose the demarcation of Indigenous lands,” Márcio de Figueiredo Machado Araujo, a federal prosecutor at the MPF, told Mongabay over WhatsApp messages. “It has become clear, therefore, that political stances and statements made by leaders are factors that severely compromise the safety of Indigenous peoples.”

The threats come amid growing political pressure on Indigenous territories in Pará. A recent Mongabay investigation uncovered how politicians, agribusiness interests and social media campaigns helped legitimize the invasion of the Ituna/Itatá Indigenous Territory in Pará.

Apyterewa Indigenous land has been under attack for years. Between January 2019 and September 2022, 30,347 hectares (74,989 acres) of land were cleared for illegal logging and cattle ranching. It became the most deforested territory in Brazil during Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency from 2019 to 2023. Following Lula’s inauguration in 2023, federal agencies carried out a successful operation to remove non-Indigenous invaders from the land, many of whom had lived there for years.

Machado said no land invasions occurred after security forces were recently deployed in Apyterewa.

Banner image: A village in the Apyterewa Indigenous territory. The region has been subjected to illegal invasions from outsiders, leaving the local Parakanã people confined to just 25% of their land. Image by Marizilda Cruppe/EVE/Greenpeace.