On the Greek islet of Formicula, researchers have found rare Mediterranean monk seals will take refuge in an air-filled “bubble cave,” according to a recent study. This type of hidden chamber, accessible via underwater passages, allows the seals to breathe, and possibly hide from tourists, the researchers said.

Mediterranean monk seals (Monachus monachus), the world’s rarest pinniped, are the only seals found in the Mediterranean Sea. Fewer than 1,000 of them remain, according to the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority.    

Historically, these seals hauled out on open coastal beaches to rest, molt and give birth to pups. But with increasing human disturbance from tourism, fishing and land development, they retreated to marine caves along the Mediterranean coastline to rest and breed.

Study lead author Joan Gonzalvo of the Ionian Dolphin Project at the Tethys Research Institute in Italy described the “ideal cave” to Mongabay as one with a pool, a dry beach for hauling out, an entrance corridor and protection from adverse weather and choppy seas. Typically, these caves are accessible by entrances above or below water level.

During a habitat assessment in the Inner Ionian Sea Archipelago, the team was setting up a camera to monitor one of these “comfortable” marine caves on Formicula when they discovered that an underwater corridor connected to it led to a second smaller chamber. This “bubble cave” had water and a pocket of air on top, but no dry beach or platform to haul out. The team placed an underwater camera in the bubble cave to monitor whether seals used it.

Over 141 days, mostly during the summer and autumn months of 2020-21, researchers captured monk seals using the main cave on 30 days, the bubble cave on 119 days, and both caves on 23 days. Seals visited the bubble cave in groups of one to three and were observed resting and sleeping.

Gonzalvo said they were surprised to see the seals used the “wet, less comfortable” bubble cave more than the main cave. However, despite not being suitable for breeding and molting, the bubble cave appears to provide a space for seals “to rest and to chill and to look for shelter from unwanted human presence,” he said.

Tourism in the Ionian Sea can be intensive in the summer months, when tourists sometimes approach seals, even pursuing them inside the caves, the authors said. No-entry zones have recently been established around Formicula to protect the seals.

Gonzalvo added any future habitat assessments for Mediterranean monk seals should consider bubble caves as an important habitat.

Jason Baker, a marine biologist not involved in the study, told Science that “it makes sense to inventory these kinds of habitats,” but added that it would be ideal if more habitat could be protected so seals did not need to avoid humans.

Banner image: A Mediterranean monk seal off Formicula in Greece. Image supplied by Joan Gonzalvo/Tethys Research Institute.

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

Conservation journalists are facing a new issue: AI-generated wildlife imagery.

The issue is not just that fake images exist. That has long been true. What has changed is how convincing synthetic wildlife photos and videos have become, how cheaply they can be made, and how quickly they can spread. A clip can move through Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, or even LinkedIn before anyone has checked whether it shows a real animal, a real place, or a real event.

That matters because wildlife images carry an implicit claim. A photograph of a rare animal, a camera-trap still, or a video of unusual behavior usually tells the viewer: this happened. As generative AI improves, that assumption needs more scrutiny.

The risks are not theoretical. False videos of animal attacks can deepen fear in places where human-wildlife conflict is already difficult to manage. Fabricated images of wild animals behaving like pets can feed demand for the exotic pet trade. Misleading footage of rare species can absorb the time of researchers, journalists, NGOs, and public agencies that have to determine whether an event actually occurred.

It also changes the work of newsrooms. At Mongabay, we now spend more time looking at sourcing, provenance, metadata, reverse-image searches, forensic tools, and whether a photographer, researcher, or institution is known and trusted. AI detectors can occasionally help in some cases, but they cannot settle the question. False positives and false negatives remain common.

AI is already useful in conservation. Researchers use it to analyze camera-trap images, satellite data, and bioacoustic recordings. The problem begins when AI is used to fabricate an event and present it as observed reality.

For journalism and conservation, trust is part of the work itself. People need to know what species exist, how they behave, and what threats they face. As synthetic media becomes more common, careful sourcing and editorial judgment will matter more. So will the burden of showing that something extraordinary is real.

Rhett Ayers Butler recently spoke with Hannah Kaplan for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Wild Audio podcast about AI-generated wildlife imagery. Listen to the podcast here.

Banner image: AI generated image found on Facebook. Label added by Mongabay.

Deep below the ocean surface, at roughly the depth of 130 five-story buildings stacked end to end, a robot has unfurled a protest sign that reads: “LISTEN TO THE SCIENCE!”

A Greenpeace remotely operated vehicle (ROV) holds the banner more than 2,300 meters (7,500 feet) below the surface of the Norwegian Sea, in front of a hydrothermal vent field known as Loki’s Castle.

“This marks the deepest banner protest in history, to speak for ecosystems that have no voice of their own,” Sandra Schöttner, chief scientist for the Deep Arctic Expedition, Greenpeace International, said in a press release.

The protest, carried out on May 27 during Greenpeace’s Deep Arctic Expedition, targeted an area of the Arctic seabed that the Norwegian government opened to deep-sea mining in early 2024 before reversing course under political pressure.

Loki’s Castle was discovered in 2008 in the Arctic Ocean between Greenland and Norway. Here in the depths, hot fluid, between 300 and 320 degrees Celsius (572 and 608 degrees Fahrenheit), pours from mineral chimneys on the seafloor. These vents support a rich and unusual community of life, including microbes that resemble the distant ancestors of complex life on Earth.

A 2024 study in Scientific Reports documented the animals living around the vents, including five new-to-science species. The authors suggested areas like this along the Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge should be treated as “vulnerable ecosystems” and protected.

In January 2024, the government of Norway opened roughly 281,000 square kilometers (108,000 square miles) of Arctic waters (an area nearly the size of Italy) to mineral exploration. The decision drew condemnation from the European Parliament, which warned of risks to fisheries, biodiversity and the release of methane stored in Arctic sediments.

In December 2025, Norway’s parliament voted to halt all deep-sea mining until at least the end of 2029 and cut public funding for seabed mineral mapping.

More than 40 countries now support a global pause on deep-sea mining.

The Greenpeace protest comes months after the United Nations Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction accord (also known as the High Seas Treaty) entered into force on Jan 17, 2026. This treaty creates the first legally binding framework to protect marine life in international waters.

The “high seas” make up more than 60% of the ocean and nearly half of the Earth’s surface. They hold deep trenches, underwater mountain ranges and ecosystems that help the ocean cycle nutrients and store carbon. But less than 1.5% of this space is formally protected, even as fishing, shipping and mining reach further into it.

Greenpeace is calling on governments to use the new treaty to create ocean sanctuaries and adopt an immediate moratorium on deep-sea mining.

Banner image of ROV expedition led by Greenpeace International, Greenpeace Germany and Greenpeace Nordic. The ROV deploys an underwater robot and banner reading ‘Listen To The Science’  2,300 meters below the surface near Loki’s Castle in the Arctic Ocean.

Brazil’s Congress has passed a bill prohibiting environmental agencies from using satellite images to restrict the commercial use of illegally deforested lands. Instead, areas suspected of illegal deforestation will have to be confirmed by authorities on the ground.

Supporters say satellite-only enforcement infringes upon farmers’ right to a fair defense. Its critics, which include the environment ministry, warn the measure will weaken environmental protection and create unsafe conditions for IBAMA, Brazil’s federal environmental police.

The bill, passed May 20, could jeopardize around 70% of IBAMA’s actions in the Brazilian Amazon, Jair Schmitt, director of environmental protection with IBAMA, told Agência Pública. 

IBAMA currently uses satellite imagery to detect illegal deforestation and issue land-use restrictions, which prohibit farmers from selling products from illegally deforested land. DETER, the satellite monitoring system run by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, processes georeferenced forest cover imagery every 15 days to identify deforestation hotspots and send alerts to IBAMA, which can immediately block the area from commercial activity.

If the bill is signed into law, officials would need to send inspectors to the site in person to take immediate action. On the ground enforcement is already a significant challenge. Brazil has about 1,250 agents to patrol a forest roughly the size of Western Europe.

IBAMA officials warn banning satellite technology makes enforcement in such remote areas significantly slower and more expensive. “It’s like wanting to put down our cellphones and go back to sending messages by fax,” Schmitt told Mongabay journalist Fernanda Wenzel. 

Between January and September 2025, IBAMA issued 3,520 land blocks for deforestation; 60% of them were in the Brazilian Amazon.

The bill’s creator, congressman Lucio Mosquini, argues the bill gives farmers time to respond to an alert with further clarifications before a remote block on their land.

“We must guarantee every Brazilian citizen the right to defense and due process,” Mosquini said in Congress. “We cannot override legal procedures in the name of an environmentalist ideology.”

Congresswoman Marina Silva, Brazil’s former environment minister, said the bill will endanger environmental police agents. In March 2025, five agents were ambushed by a group of 30 people during an illegal logging operation in the Tenharim Marmelos Indigenous territory in Amazonas state. An environmental police vehicle was set on fire, and the agents hid in the forest to escape gunfire.

“It is unjust to expose [inspectors] to face-to-face operations where they are met with gunfire from people who invade and illegally seize public and Indigenous lands,” Silva said before the vote in Congress. “It’s equivalent to saying that a traffic fine identified by a radar is only valid if it is issued face-to-face between a federal highway police officer and the offender.”

The bill will now be sent to the Senate for consideration.

Banner image: Environmental police operation against illegal deforestation in Espigão do Oeste, Rondônia in the Brazilian Amazon. Image courtesy of Fernando Augusto/Ibama.

A chemical used in mosquito repellents may disorient bumblebees, stopping them from finding their way back to their nests, a recent study found.

Researchers in Finland exposed 123 buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris), one of the most abundant bumblebee species in Europe, to a standard consumer mosquito repellent containing prallethrin, a type of pyrethroid insecticide.

One group of 44 bees was exposed to the repellant for 1 minute; 35 were exposed for 10 minutes; while 44 were exposed for 20 minutes. A control group of 43 bees was exposed to an identical device that did not release the insecticide. After exposure, the researchers released the bees 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) away from their colonies.

They found 16 bees from the control group made it home. However, only six bees exposed to the repellant for 10 minutes and just two bees exposed for 20 minutes returned.

“Bumblebee colonies depend on workers collecting food,” lead author Kimmo Kaakinen, a biologist at the University of Turku in Finland, wrote in a statement. “So if they cannot find their way back to the nest, the colony’s ability to obtain nutrition deteriorates.”

Usually, the buff-tailed bumblebee forages around 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from its colony and has been found to return home from distances reaching 9.8 km (6 miles), the study noted.

Researchers suggested the reduction in homing success, or even increased travel time, could be due to a disruption to the bees’ spatial navigation and memory, compromised flight capacity or a combination.

The study’s results challenge the assumption that mosquito repellents used commonly by people are safe for pollinators.

In 2024, the European Commission approved the use of prallethrin for a 10-year period, from March 1, 2026 to Feb. 29, 2036. Laboratory tests showed exposure to prallethrin did not increase bumblebee mortality, but the researchers said sublethal effects still “remain poorly understood.”

A 2023 study in the U.S. found prallethrin did not negatively impact honeybees’ recruitment dances or their foraging ability at a feeder.

Co-author of the honeybee (Apis mellifera) study Roger Schürch, a behavioral ecologist at Virginia Tech in the U.S., told Mongabay he was surprised by the magnitude of the effects the latest study uncovered.

“The untreated controls were 8 times better at completing the homing task. Given that we did not find effect at all, further studies may be warranted that try to elucidate the causes of this difference,” he wrote in an email.

He also said the intensity of the exposure, in concentrated 10- and 20-minute sittings, may not be extreme.

“Bees will hop from flower to flower, which may be at variable distances from a repeller… I find it unlikely that an individual bee is getting 20 minutes of full exposure in one sitting,” Schürch added. “But given the magnitude of the effect… I think we ought to find out when such huge effects are seen, and when not.”

Banner image: Bumblebees tracked during the experiment. Image courtesy of Kimmo Kaakinen.

It’s “hairy,” bright orange or red and “exceptional” at camouflaging. Meet the hairy ghost pipefish, whose recent formal description demonstrates that even well-studied marine environments like the Great Barrier Reef still hold remarkable secrets for science.

In a recent study, researchers shared the name of the ghost pipefish, Solenostomus snuffleupagus, for its “conspicuously shaggy appearance,” and long, trunk-like snout that makes it resemble the beloved Sesame Street character, Mr. Snuffleupagus.

Ghost pipefish, with their long pipe-like snouts, are distantly related to pipefishes and seahorses. But they differ in how they reproduce: while males in pipefish and seahorses brood eggs in specialized abdominal pouches; in ghost pipefish, it’s females who do the same.

Found across the tropical Indo-Pacific, ghost pipefish are also very well-camouflaged in their environments of coral reefs, seagrass meadows, and algal beds. Until recently, there were just six known species.

The discovery of a seventh species, the hairy ghost pipefish, led by marine biologists Graham Short and David Harasti, is the culmination of a two-decade search.

Harasti, a senior research scientist at the Port Stephens Fisheries Institute in Australia, told Popular Science he first spotted the animal in 2001 while diving near Papua New Guinea. “I was perplexed,” Harasti said, adding that after checking his reference books, he realized they “might be looking at something entirely new to science.”

Since 2005, local divers had also regularly reported seeing the orange-red animal on the Great Barrier Reef on Facebook groups and citizen science platforms like iNaturalist, the authors wrote.

They said the animal remained misidentified and scientifically undescribed, because it was frequently confused with the rough snout ghost pipefish (S. paegnius) that has a similar “hairy” look .

The hairy ghost pipefish also has “exceptional” camouflaging, visually mimicking drifting red macroalgae.

Short told Science News the fish have evolved to move like floating debris. “They’re just stunning underwater… It’s just amazing that they’re actually fish,” he said.

He added that Harasti and he brought back a female and a male ghost pipefish from the Great Barrier Reef in 2022 for formal identification.

Their examination revealed that S. snuffleupagus has 36 vertebrae, more than the other known ghost pipefish, and unique “star-shaped bony” structures in its skin. Genetic analysis showed it split off from its closest relative into its own lineage roughly 18 million years ago, according to the study

As for Sesame Street inspiring the new-to-science species’ name, Rosemarie Truglio, senior vice president of global education at Sesame Workshop, said in a statement to Popular Science: “Connecting science with imagination and discovery is what Sesame Street has always been about, and this charming new species is a wonderful reminder that there is still so much to explore and learn about the world.”

Banner image: Solenostomus snuffleupagus, in situ, Papua New Guinea, 2003. Photograph by David Harasti via Journal of Fish Biology (CC BY 4.0).