The Andean leaf-eared mouse thrives at extreme elevations where most other mammals wouldn’t survive. At these altitudes, oxygen levels are low; temperatures are permanently below freezing; and humans can’t survive for long without oxygen masks and insulated clothing. Yet, the mighty mouse is right at home, and scientists have now figured out the biological adaptations that allow it to live there, according to a new study.

The small, brown Andean leaf-eared mouse (Phyllotis vaccarum) occupies a wide range of altitudes. Some populations live on the summits of volcanoes in the central Andes Mountains at elevations above 6,700 meters (22,000 feet); others live at sea level along the desert coast of northern Chile.

To find out how the rodent lives in conditions uninhabitable to other vertebrates, the researchers collected 167 leaf-eared mice, from sea level to their highest elevation homes in the Andes. This allowed them to test the physiology of lowland Andean leaf-eared with their highland relatives.

In the laboratory, the researchers exposed the mice to simulated conditions of elevations up to 7,000 m (22,966 ft). They found that the highland Andean leaf-eared mice from the volcano summits were able to use oxygen more efficiently in their skeletal muscle and generate more body heat than lowland individuals.

The researchers also sequenced the genomes of the leaf-eared mice and found that the rodents have genetic adaptations for metabolizing toxins in plants.

“The discovery that the mice have evolved the ability to metabolize dietary toxins was unexpected,” study co-author Jay Storz, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, U.S., told Mongabay by email. “It underscores what a hostile environment they are living in. In the high-elevation environment, for example, not only do the mice have to cope with the lack of oxygen and freezing temperatures, but even their food plants are toxic.”

Storz and his colleagues have discovered other small mammal species in the Andes that live in extreme elevations like the Andean leaf-eared mouse. “We are currently doing a lot of comparative studies to figure out whether high-elevation species typically adapt to hypoxia in the same way, or whether evolution tends to achieve equally serviceable outcomes in different species via distinct paths and mechanisms,” Storz said.

Allie Graham, a biologist at the University of Kansas, U.S., who wasn’t involved in the study, told Science: “Surviving in extreme elevation is much more than just about oxygen, so this [paper] is refreshing.”

Banner image: Andean leaf-eared mouse, Phyllotis vaccarum. Image courtesy of Marcial Quiroga-Carmona.

There’s a thriving illegal wildlife trade in Cambodia that caters to high-ranking government officials and wealthy Chinese nationals, according to a report on a yearlong undercover investigation by the U.S.-based NGO Earth League International (ELI).

The report, titled “Sandokan,” identified five kingpins allegedly running transnational criminal networks involved in wildlife smuggling, human and drug trafficking, and sophisticated scam centers, reports Mongabay’s Spoorthy Raman.

The investigation found that products made from parts of endangered species, including tigers, rhinos and elephants, are openly sold in shops and exclusive restaurants across the country. ELI investigators documented tiger bone wine sold in ornate tiger-shaped bottles as a prestige item; tiger cub meat served as a culinary delicacy; and rooms filled with rhino horns and elephant ivory.

“The big surprise was the incredible quantity of wildlife in the hands of these people,” said Andrea Crosta, executive director of ELI.

The report highlights a convergence of environmental crime and organized syndicate activity. Wildlife products were often stored in warehouses located in special economic zones (SEZs) — designated industrial and commercial areas that offer tax incentives. The same buildings also housed illicit drugs and illegally logged timber, the investigation found.

Wildlife trafficking often coexisted with money laundering through casinos in the SEZs, a model also present in Laos for more than a decade, as exposed by the U.K.-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) in its 2015 report about Kings Romans Casino in Laos’s Golden Triangle SEZ.

One individual who said they worked in logistics told ELI investigators he could move anything, claiming he had close connections to Cambodian customs officials as well as the country’s political, military, and business elites, facilitating the movement of contraband across porous borders. Another individual claimed he raised lions, tigers and primates on his property. Some kingpins also reportedly said any wild animal, alive or dead, could be delivered to customers.

This rampant trade casts a shadow over Cambodia’s proposed plan to reintroduce wild tigers, which were declared functionally extinct in the country a decade ago.

“I would urge everyone to take a beat and really review the prospects for success in that endeavor,” said Debbie Banks, the tiger and wildlife crime campaign lead at the EIA, who wasn’t involved in the ELI investigation.

“The lack of enforcement, the reported corruption and complicity — that is not a good environment to put tigers back into the country,” she said, adding the big cats would be at “extreme risk.”

ELI’s Crosta said traditional seizures at airports are insufficient to disrupt the wildlife trafficking networks, and called for intelligence-led undercover operations.

The report urged China to take responsibility for its nationals who, according to Crosta, facilitate 90% of the wildlife trafficking in Southeast Asia.

Read the full story by Spoorthy Raman here.

Banner image: Multiple tiger skins offered for sale by alleged traffickers to undercover investigators. Image courtesy of Earth League International.

Finned octopus species alive today are all small, deep-sea animals that mostly live in pitch-black darkness thousands of meters beneath the surface of the sea. But a new discovery by a team of researchers in Japan, published in April 2026, found that the ancient octopus relatives were likely gigantic predators that roamed the late Cretaceous seas between 100 million to 72 million years ago.

Huge fossil jaws have been uncovered in Cretaceous deposits near Japan and on Vancouver Island in Canada. Though they were known to be part of the cephalopods class that includes squid, cuttlefish and octopus, not much else was known about them for years. 

“It was still unclear whether they were truly octopuses, how large they were, what they ate, and what role they played in the marine ecosystem,” study co-author Yasuhiro Iba, a paleontologist at Hokkaido University in Japan, told Mongabay by email. “[We] showed that they were Cretaceous octopuses … very large and probably powerful predators that processed hard prey.”

The largest species found among the fossils belonged to the now-extinct Nanaimoteuthis haggarti. Estimates from its jaw size suggest that the octopus may have reached 6.6 to 18.6 meters (22 to 61 feet) in length. On the higher end, that’s around two-thirds the size of an adult blue whale, the largest animal to ever exist. 

“That is an enormous size for an octopus,” Iba wrote. “It suggests that it may have been among the largest invertebrates ever known.”

The scientists also found evidence of wear, scratches, chips and rounded edges along the fossilized jaws, which suggests that these giant octopuses were consuming prey with hard bodies. That would place them among the upper tier of ocean predators during their time on Earth.

Their modern relatives, which include the dumbo octopus and others of the Cirrata suborder, feed primarily on slow-moving invertebrates.

According to Iba, the current fossil record is strongly biased toward animals with bones or shells, since these are much more likely to be preserved as fossils. Soft-bodied animals like octopuses aren’t as easily preserved for millennia, which Iba said could mean experts have been painting an inaccurate picture of the past. 

“It changes how we think about Cretaceous marine ecosystems,” Iba said. “Until now, the upper levels of the Cretaceous marine food web have mainly been imagined as being occupied by vertebrate predators such as mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, sharks, and large fishes.”

“Our study suggests that giant octopuses also belonged to this upper predator tier,” he added.

Banner image: Graphic by Andrés Alegría using images courtesy of Hokkaido University.

Australia has confirmed the country’s first mass mortality of native seabirds from the deadly strain of avian influenza, H5N1.

On Aug. 1, authorities confirmed the positive cases among 49 dead and 35 sick greater crested terns (Thalasseus bergii) at Baudin Rocks, an island roughly 5 kilometers (3 miles) off South Australia’s southeast coast near Cape Jaffa.

The H5 strain of avian influenza virus, which has killed millions of wild and domestic birds and mammals across the globe, was first detected on Australia’s shores in late June in two migratory seabirds, a brown skua (Stercorarius antarcticus) and a northern giant petrel (Macronectes halli).

As of Aug. 3, 2026, the country has recorded 78 confirmed cases of the H5 strain in seabirds across five states, with 58 of those cases in South Australia alone and 10 in Western Australia.

Apart from the greater crested terns, bird flu has also been confirmed in silver gulls (Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae), a common native Australian seabird.

Federal Agriculture Minister Julie Collins confirmed the results, noting that the mass mortality was expected as the virus takes hold in the environment.

“Sadly, we do know that once the H5 bird flu is spreading in wildlife and the natural environment, it is not possible to avoid significant losses, which is what we’re starting to see now,” Collins said in a press conference.   

According to ABC News, South Australian Chief Veterinary Officer Skye Fruean described the Baudin Rocks mass mortality as “unusual and significant.”

“We’ve known that this is going to happen at some point in time, unfortunately, it appears to be escalating quite rapidly,” Fruean said.

While national management plans have been activated with millions in funding, the spread remains difficult to control, Federal Environment Minister Murray Watt added. “The reality is you can’t stop native and wild birds flying around … and that will mean more mass mortality events like the one we have now seen,” Watt told ABC News.

“The silver gull infections are particularly concerning because they move between beaches, towns, rubbish tips, wetlands and inland waterways,” Jane Younger, senior lecturer in southern ocean vertebrate ecology at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania, writes in The Conversation.

Younger adds that five infected terns were confirmed at Seal Bay, a critical breeding site for the endangered Australian sea lion (Neophoca cinerea). “Australian sea lions and fur seals breed in dense colonies where disease could spread quickly,” she writes.

According to the Australian government, there have been no detections of the bird flu virus strain in poultry or the wider agriculture industry and there’s no evidence of any large-scale deaths.

Authorities are urging the public to avoid touching sick or dead wildlife and to report sightings to the Emergency Animal Disease Hotline.

Banner image of a greater crested Tern (Thalasseus bergii). Image by patrix1 via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Giant tropical trees in Malaysian Borneo pump water to their highest branches just as easily as to their lower-most branches, a new study says.

Researchers say this suggests tall trees are not more vulnerable to drought than shorter trees, as was previously believed.

For decades, scientists have hypothesized that as trees become taller, the effects of gravity and the longer paths that water needs to travel hinder their growth.

In this latest study, researchers examined 38 trees of five species from the Dipterocarpaceae family in Malaysia’s Kabili-Sepilok Forest Reserve in northeastern Borneo. The trees, including keruing putih (Dipterocarpus caudiferus), kapur (Dryobalanops lanceolata) and meranti pepijat (Rubroshorea johorensis), ranged from 7-71 meters (23-233 feet) tall. Dipterocarps are the tallest flowering trees in the world, and dominate Southeast Asian rainforests.

Specialist climbers scaled each tree to collect branches from different parts of the canopy. The researchers then measured several traits of the vessels inside the wood that carry water, as well as of the wood and leaves of the branches.

The analysis shows that the tall trees use two primary mechanisms to compensate for their heights: vessel widening and leaf adjustments.

As trees grow taller, they grow much wider water-carrying vessels at the base of the trunk than those found in shorter trees, which significantly reduces resistance to water flow.

Leaves at the top of the canopy also adjust their osmotic potential, or the levels of dissolved substances in their cells, which allows them to hold more water even under extremely low pressure created by gravity at those heights, the researchers say.

“The really surprising thing is that we were not expecting them to adjust to being taller,” study lead author Paulo Bittencourt, from Cardiff University in the U.K., told Mongabay in a video call. “We were expecting they would be more vulnerable as they grow taller, that they would have more issues keeping their leaves hydrated … It was exactly the opposite of what we actually expected.”

The study finds these adaptations help the tall trees remain resilient even during environmental extremes. By tracking trunk growth during the intense El Niño linked drought in 2023 and 2024, researchers found that the tallest trees suffered no greater decline in growth than smaller trees.

Bittencourt said existing models for climate-change forecasting often assume that tall trees are the first to die during droughts owing to a failure to move enough water. But the study’s findings suggest tall trees may be more robust than previously thought, he added.

The study notes that the tallest 1% of trees, while few in number, store more than half of all aboveground forest carbon.

“It really tells us that we need to go back to the field and we need to properly study tropical forests,” Bittencourt said.

Banner image: A 57-meter (187-foot) tall Dipterocarp tree with a double-rope technique rigged for canopy access. Image courtesy of Palasiah Jotan.

Following protests at a public meeting about a proposed nuclear power plant in Kenya, one person was shot and several residents were arrested.

The Kenyan government plans to build a 2,000-megawatt nuclear power plant near Bondo, a town in Siaya County near Lake Victoria. Officials, including representatives from the Nuclear Power and Energy Agency (NuPEA), were holding a public consultation meeting in the town on July 24 when the protests started.

Dickens Ochieng, a lawyer and community member who attended the meeting, told Mongabay by phone that the landowners invited to the meeting started shouting “Wadagi,” which means “we refuse” in Dholuo language, in reference to the nuclear project. “And then one of the police officers who was guarding the government agencies used his firearm and as a result one person was shot on the leg and the meeting turned chaotic instantly,” he said.

According to Ochieng, residents of Bondo began throwing stones at police officers, who responded with tear gas. In the days that followed, 17 people were arrested and detained. An official document reviewed by Mongabay shows that the arrested people are now under investigation for assault as well as Kenya’s Prevention of Terrorism Act.

Ochieng, who has taken on their legal defense, said there “is an intense government crackdown on people who are opposed to the project.”

“As a lawyer, I just keep on telling the community that they have to stand firm, because terrorism charges have nowhere to do with the incident that happened,” he said. “They are meant to intimidate and to silence you, not to convict anyone.”

So far, 15 of the 17 suspects have been released after community members raised money through crowdfunding to pay their bail, which costs between 15,000-180,000 Kenyan shillings ($116-1,391), Ochieng said.

“In the community, most people are fishermen, small-scale traders and they do small businesses,” he said. “According to the statistics, most of them live below $1 per day. The defenders coalition was able to pay the lower bail amounts, but for the others, it’s complicated.”

Mongabay contacted both the Bondo police commander and NuPEA for comment. Neither had responded by the time of publication.

In May, communities held demonstrations against the proposed nuclear plant, while a petition calling for the project to be halted has continued to circulate online.

The Strategic Environmental Assessment report for Kenya’s nuclear power program published in 2023 noted that the Lake Victoria region should be avoided since it is vulnerable to volcanic disturbances, “which may impair the safety” of a nuclear power plant.

Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest freshwater lake, is shared by Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, and millions of people across the three countries depend on it for their livelihoods, food security and drinking water.

Banner image: Fishing boats in Luanda Kotieno, in the Bondo area of Siaya County, where the Kenyan government is planning to build a nuclear power plant. Image by Victor Ochieng via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).