Researchers in Hawaiʻi have described an unusual species of carnivorous caterpillar that scavenges in spiderwebs while wearing cast-off bits of the spider’s prey.

Nicknamed the “bone collector,” the caterpillar belongs to the genus Hyposmocoma, commonly known as “fancy case” caterpillars because they make variously ornamented protective cases to live in. Endemic to Hawaiʻi, they decorate their cases with bits of moss, lichen or sand to blend in with their environment. The bone collector is the only one known to encase itself in inedible insect parts, the researchers say in a recent study.

Unlike most caterpillars that try to camouflage to avoid being eaten, the bone collector “flips the script,” Daniel Rubinoff, the study’s lead author and entomologist with the University of Hawaiʻi, told Mongabay in a video call. “I want to look like your last week’s meal so that … you notice me for sure. But you think I’m garbage.” This leaves the caterpillar safe from being eaten by the spider but with easy access to a free meal caught in the spider’s web.

The bone collector is one of roughly 600 species of fancy case caterpillars, which fall within one of 18 different lineages. Each lineage is named for its distinctive case shape,  including upward of 70 species with burrito-shaped cases, 25 species with smooth cases and 20 species of oyster-shaped cases. But there is only one known bone collector species.

Using DNA analysis, Rubinoff’s team learned that the bone collector’s lineage split off from its closest relatives — other Hawaiʻian carnivorous caterpillars, including one that hunts snails — roughly 6 million years ago. That makes the bone collector older than the Hawaiʻian Islands themselves. Rubinoff says the species likely evolved on older islands that have since eroded back to the sea but not before some caterpillars migrated to nearby younger islands.

Much like Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos, the Hawaiʻian caterpillars adapted differently on each island, based on local conditions.

Part of that adaptation involved avoiding birds. “Before people got to Hawaiʻi, it was the kingdom of birds,” Rubioff said, which put enormous pressure on caterpillars to diversify their appearance to avoid being eaten. There were also no ants, leaving an ecological niche available, and the bone collectors moved in — under rocks and in rotting logs.

The newly described caterpillar is already in danger. It’s only been found on the island of Oʻahu in a 15-square-kilometer (6-square-mile) stand of forest, making it extremely vulnerable to habitat loss and invasive species.

Naomi Pierce, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, not part of the study, told National Geographic that the fact the bone collector was found “only in one tiny spot on one island is pretty sobering.”

Rubinoff says there’s more to the bone collectors than the “gee-whiz” factor. Studying caterpillar genetics and behavior could lead to a less toxic method of controlling caterpillars on crops. “Don’t we all want that?”

Banner image: Bone collector caterpillars, courtesy of Daniel Rubinoff.

The World Bank has released the first-ever framework to address environmental and social harms caused by projects the bank financed through its private sector branches, including the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

“This is historic. It’s the first actual directive mandate for the IFC that says when one of the projects they finance causes harm, they have to provide remedy,” Carla García Zendejas, director of the people, land and resources program at the Center for International Environmental Law, told Mongabay.

The IFC and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) are both part of the World Bank Group that finances projects that can cause harm to local communities. The IFC/MIGA Remedial Action Framework, published in April, aims to provide community access to remedy if they were harmed by such projects.

The World Bank has long been criticized for leaving behind a wake of social and environmental damages from the projects it finances as well as being slow to respond to problems. “You file a complaint and you are going to wait for almost a decade until they respond,” Francis Colee, head of programs at the Liberian civil society organization Green Advocates, told Mongabay.

 The IFC has repeatedly been found negligent by its independent accountability mechanism, the compliance adviser ombudsman (CAO). 

For example, Mongabay has reported on human rights abuses against communities living near the IFC-financed Salala Rubber Corporation’s plantation in Liberia. CAO investigations of the company confirmed most accusations by locals, including irregular land acquisition, gender-based violence, water pollution and desecration of graves.

The CAO found the IFC didn’t adequately consult with communities or assess the risks associated with the investment. They recommended actions to remedy the grievances. However, in the absence of a remedy framework, the IFC has done little to address the problems.

The recent policy directive won’t likely help that situation either; it only applies to new grievances.

In an email to Mongabay, an IFC spokesperson, who asked not to be named, said the Remedy Action Framework applies only to “future Management Action Plans submitted to the Board in the context of Compliance Advisor Ombudsman cases.”

“The complaint mechanisms have been a big disappointment,” Juan Pablo Orrego, the president of the Chilean environmental organization Ecosistemas, told Mongbay in a phone call. “Remedy should not be reactive but proactive,” he said.

Implementation of the framework will depend on new cases entering the accountability system. “Implementation will show whether this is working or not, and if it’s not working and it should be adjusted accordingly and in a transparent manner,” said Stephanie Amoako from the Accountability Counsel, one of the organizations involved in the framework’s consultation process.

Nonetheless, Amoako said she believes it’s a step in the right direction. “It recognizes that the IFC has a role in ensuring that communities are made whole from harms caused by its projects,” she said.

 Banner photo: Works for the Alto Maipo hydroelectric plant at the Camino Aucayes, Chile. Credit: Pablo Melo A.JPG

A regional fishery body is seeking to reduce cormorant numbers across Europe through  “coordinated” culling, citing the aquatic birds’ reported impacts on fisheries and aquaculture.

The European Inland Fisheries and Aquaculture Advisory Commission (EIFAAC), a body under the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the U.N., published its draft plan on April 25. The proposal notes that the great cormorants’ (Phalacrocorax carbo) increasing population and expanding range in Europe have caused a decline in fish stocks and loss in aquaculture production in both fresh and coastal waters, causing economic losses.

Conservation group BirdLife International called the proposed pan-European culling of cormorants “a dangerous precedent for human-wildlife conflict management.”

“Culling native species because we perceive them as competitors is a slippery slope, which could easily be applied to other animals — predators like seals are already under attack for allegedly eating too many fish,” Marion Bessol of BirdLife Europe & Central Asia told Mongabay by email.

Bessol said that while BirdLife acknowledges studies showing cormorants’ impacts on certain fish populations, those studies document local effects that cannot be generalized to justify culling of cormorants across Europe. She added that the draft plan’s proposed management measures, including the annual culling of 150,000 adult cormorants or the destruction of 50% of eggs, are “arbitrary targets.”

“Overfishing, habitat loss, river damming, pollution, and eutrophication have pushed many fish species to the brink of collapse. These systemic issues, caused by human activities, require long-term policy solutions, not the culling of a native species,” BirdLife said in its statement.

EIFAAC Secretary Raymon van Anrooy told Mongabay by email that BirdLife data shows great cormorant breeding pair numbers in Europe have increased from some 15,000 in the 1970s to 414,000-515,000 in 2021.

By extrapolating these figures, EIFAAC estimates a population of more than 1.5 million great cormorants in Europe, van Anrooy said. Each cormorant consumes some 180 kilograms (397 pounds) of fish yearly, meaning the entire population eats 270 million kg (596 million lbs) of fish annually, “equivalent to fish consumption of 12 million people in Europe.”

Bessol said this estimate is “simplistic,” since not all the fish eaten by cormorants would’ve been caught by fisheries. Moreover, cormorants, on average, eat small fish, other small wildlife and invasive fish species of no commercial interest to people, she said.

Richard King, researcher and author of the book The Devil’s Cormorant, told Mongabay by email, “The misguided blaming of cormorants for the decline in fisheries goes back centuries. The birds are particularly demonized across Europe and North America,” he said, citing the Bible, Shakespeare and observations about the species’ dark color and the bird’s ability to swallow large fish.

Anrooy said the EIFAAC will continue its discussions with stakeholders, including BirdLife and other conservation groups. It aims to submit the draft to the European Commission by October 2025 and have its possible endorsement by May 2026.

Banner image of a great cormorant by Alexis Louis via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

Researchers have for the first time filmed wild chimpanzees feasting on alcoholic fruits together. It’s the “first evidence for ethanolic food sharing and feeding by wild nonhuman great apes,” they say in a new study.

The research team, led by scientists at the University of Exeter, U.K., captured the footage on camera traps they set up in Cantanhez National Park in southern Guinea-Bissau.

The cameras recorded wild western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) sharing African breadfruit (Treculia africana) with each other on 10 different occasions. In one instance, a chimp even snatched a piece of fruit from another individual’s mouth.

Once mature, the fleshy, fibrous, volleyball-sized African breadfruits drop from trees to the ground, where they ripen further. Chimps can feast on such fallen fruits over multiple days, the researchers say.

The team found that 90% of the fruits the chimps ate and shared contained some level of ethanol, reaching up to 0.61% alcohol by volume (ABV). Beers typically have 4-8% ABV, while wine has about 12-16% ABV.

While the alcohol content in the fruits is very low compared to these drinks, chimps can consume large amounts of fruit daily, which means all the alcohol can add up. “They can feed on kilograms of the stuff every day. It’s probably analogous to us sipping on a light beer,” study co-author Kimberley Hockings from the University of Exeter told The Guardian.

Hockings and her colleagues have previously found that many different kinds of animals consume ethanol-rich fruits, from tiny flies, wasps and bees, to monkeys, chimps and elephants. In 2015, they published a study describing a group of wild chimpanzees in Guinea that would regularly use folded leaves to drink fermented alcoholic sap that people in nearby communities collected from raffia palms and left to brew.

Whether Cantanhez National Park’s chimps seek out the fermented, slightly alcoholic breadfruits deliberately for reasons other than nutrition — and if so, why — still remains unknown. However, sharing alcohol among humans is linked to social bonding, and that could be the case with the chimps too, although it hasn’t been studied yet, the authors write.

Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist from the University of Oxford in the U.K., who wasn’t involved in the study, told The Washington Post that he agreed there could be some social benefit to sharing bits of fermented fruits, but the psychobiological consequences remain to be investigated.

“Chimps don’t share food all the time, so this behaviour with fermented fruit might be important,” Hockings said in a statement. “We need to find out more about whether they deliberately seek out ethanolic fruits and how they metabolise it, but this behaviour could be the early evolutionary stages of ‘feasting.’ If so, it suggests the human tradition of feasting may have its origins deep in our evolutionary history.”

Banner image: Two adult male chimpanzees in Cantanhez National Park in southern Guinea-Bissau eat fermented African breadfruit. Image by Bowland et al., 2025 (CC BY 4.0).

In South Africa’s Kruger National Park, a mass poisoning attack this week has left 123 threatened vultures dead and another 83 recovering with the aid of a veterinary team.

On the morning of May 6, a team consisting of the South African National Parks (SANParks) rangers and staff from the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT) found a carcass of an elephant laced with highly toxic pesticides in a remote part of the park. They had responded to an automated alert for suspicious activity.

“This marks one of the largest vulture poisoning events in Southern Africa — and the most extensive coordinated response effort and rescues to date,” the EWT, a South African conservation organization, wrote in a joint press statement with SANParks.

The critically endangered white-backed vulture (Gyps africanus) was the most impacted, with 112 found dead at the scene. The IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, estimates the species has lost 81% of its population in just under 40 years.

Another 20 cape vultures (Gyps coprotheres), a vulnerable species endemic to Southern Africa, and one lappet-faced vulture (Torgos tracheliotos), an endangered bird with only about 6,500 adult living individuals today, also died.

The six park rangers and two EWT officials who were the first to respond with first aid gave the vultures atropine, commonly used to treat pesticide poisoning, as well as activated charcoal and fluids to help absorb and dilute toxins.

As of publication, veterinary teams are working to recover the 83 surviving birds. According to EWT, about half are in a good state, while the other half are still being closely monitored. Five vultures were not able to be saved, despite treatment.

Vultures are among the few animals that specialize in eating carcasses, with highly acidic stomachs that allow them to digest flesh that would kill most other species.

This ability makes them vital in preventing the spread of disease to humans, livestock and other animals. A recent study found that vultures offer an estimated $1.8 billion per year in ecosystem services in Southern Africa.

The attack may have an outsized effect on local vulture numbers, as May is their peak breeding season, and most pairs raise only one chick a year.

Officials say poachers are increasingly using poison-laced carcasses to entrap vultures, either to sell their parts in the illegal wildlife trade or prevent circling vultures from alerting park authorities to other poaching activities.

In June 2019, more than 530 vultures and two eagles were killed in Botswana, using three poisoned elephant carcasses as bait.

“We commend every individual who responded to this tragedy,” the organizations wrote in the joint statement following the attack this week. “Their courage, skill, and relentless commitment transformed a potential extinction-level event into one of the most successful vulture rescues ever recorded.”

Banner image: More than 100 vultures were killed in a poisoning attack by poachers in May 2025. Image courtesy of the Endangered Wildlife Trust.

Ozone as a layer several kilometers up in the atmosphere protects living beings, including humans, from ultraviolet rays. But its accumulation at ground level can be very dangerous, Mongabay contributor Sean Mowbray explains in an article published in April.

Ground-level, or tropospheric, ozone forms when methane, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds react with sunlight. With Earth warming due to human-driven climate change, ozone pollution is worsening as it’s linked to higher temperatures. Ozone itself is a greenhouse gas and has contributed to around 0.2° Celsius (0.36° Fahrenheit) of current global warming, Mowbray writes.

Ozone at ground level harms human health. Experts interviewed by Mowbray say the gas not only irritates the airways and can worsen underlying health issues such as asthma or chronic bronchitis; it can also affect cardiovascular and reproductive systems.

Studies have found ozone exposure to be associated with low infant birth weight and gestational hypertension. Long-term exposure to ground-level ozone is also estimated to have contributed to 365,000 deaths in 2019, a figure that’s now considered to be a conservative estimate.

In addition to harming human health, ozone at ground level also limits the growth of plants, reducing their ability to absorb and store carbon dioxide, says Nathan Borgford-Parnell, coordinator of the scientific advisory panel and science affairs at the Climate & Clean Air Coalition. This effectively doubles the climate impact of the gas, he adds.

“Overall, we have decreased photosynthesis, growth, biomass, and yield of the plants,” Evgenios Agathokleous, a professor at the School of Ecology and Applied Meteorology at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, China, tells Mowbray.

A 2024 study found that exposure to ground-level ozone can slow tropical forest growth by an average of 5.1%. Furthermore, the study’s researchers estimate that ozone may have prevented tropical forests from absorbing around 290 million metric tons of carbon per year since 2000.

Environmental ozone pollution also reduces yields of crops such as wheat, soy, rice and maize, Mowbray reports.

Jayanarayanan Kuttippurath, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, and his team estimated that in 2005, ground-level ozone in India led to a loss of roughly 7.39 million metric tons of rice. This figure rose to a loss of about 11.46 million metric tons of rice in 2020, amounting to $2.92 billion.

“The rise of tropospheric ozone is also a food security issue,” Kuttippurath tells Mowbray.

Ozone pollution also affects pollinators in many ways. For example, the gas degrades floral scents, making it harder for pollinators to find flowers, James Ryalls, a researcher at the University of Reading, U.K., tells Mongabay.

“Ozone pollution is an often overlooked but significant threat to pollinators and global food security,” Ryall says. “Addressing it requires policy action and interdisciplinary research to develop mitigation strategies that balance human activities with ecosystem health.”

Read the full story by Sean Mowbray here.

Banner image of pollution by Joe via Pixabay (Public domain).