Some coastal wolves in Alaska, U.S., have toxic levels of mercury in their bodies after shifting from a terrestrial diet of deer and moose to a marine diet heavy with sea otters, new research finds.

Mercury is a naturally occurring heavy metal found in the Earth’s crust. However, human activities like burning coal and fossil fuels release mercury into the atmosphere, where it can travel hundreds of miles from its source. When mercury enters aquatic ecosystems, it’s converted into methylmercury, a potent neurotoxin that “moves efficiently through a food web,” Ben Barst, study co-author and assistant professor with the University of Calgary, Canada, told Mongabay in a video call.

Methylmercury “biomagnifies,” accumulating in larger amounts higher up the food chain, making it dangerous for predators like wolves and sea otters. Large sea otters (Enhydra lutris) daily eat roughly 11 kilograms (25 pounds) of invertebrates like mussels, clams and sea urchins, all known to accumulate methylmercury.

Gretchen Roffler, the study’s lead author and a research biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, first learned of mercury poisoning in wolves (Canis lupus) when she investigated the death of an emaciated collared wolf from another study. Roffler’s tests revealed “unprecedented” levels of mercury in the animal’s liver. So, she sent samples to Barst’s lab for further testing.

The mercury concentration in those samples were so high, “at first we thought the instrument was malfunctioning,” Barst said.

Once mercury levels were confirmed — on par with those observed in polar bears, an apex marine predator — the researchers wanted to know how widespread mercury poisoning is in wolves and where the mercury came from.

They examined archived tissue samples starting from the year 2000, along with samples from recently trapped wolves and hair and blood samples from collared wolves.

They looked at two different wolf packs: one on Pleasant Island in coastal Alaksa and another a mile away on mainland Gustavus Forelands. The island pack moved there in 2013 and within a few years wiped out the island deer population. Instead of swimming back to the mainland they stayed and “switched to a very marine-heavy diet dominated by sea otters; up to about 70% of their diet is sea otters,” Roffler told Mongabay in a video call.

The mainland Gustavus pack, despite having access to deer and moose, also began eating more sea otters around the same time.

Roffler said she believes both packs likely made the switch because sea otters, which are easier and safer to kill than a large moose, have recently become very abundant. Once decimated by the fur trade, sea otter populations have rebounded, thanks to conservation efforts including protection under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. They are now “super abundant wolf prey,” Roffler said.

“We expect this to be a broader geographic trend across the former range of sea otters as they recolonize,” she said.

Banner image: of a wolf, courtesy of U.S. National Park Service.

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — More than 2 million acres of federal lands would be sold to states or other entities under a budget proposal from Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee.

The draft provision in the GOP’s sweeping tax cut package comes after after a similar proposal was narrowly defeated in the House.

Montana Sen. Steve Daines said in response that he opposes public land sales.

Lee says the sales would target isolated parcels that could be used for housing or infrastructure.

Conservation groups reacted with outrage, saying it would set a precedent to fast-track the handover of cherished lands to developers.

Reporting by Matthew Brown, Associated Press

Banner image: A view of the suburbs of Las Vegas from atop the Stratosphere tower looking west down Sahara Ave., towards the Spring Mountains, Feb. 9, 2005. (AP Photo/Joe Cavaretta, File)

MANAUS, Brazil (AP) — With the first U.N. climate talks in the Amazon set for November, Brazil is fast-tracking a series of controversial decisions that undercut its green rhetoric, revealing mounting political pressure on the federal environmental agency and widening divisions within President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s cabinet. The country’s federal environmental agency approved an emergency plan for an offshore drilling bid by state-run Petrobras near the mouth of the Amazon River. It also greenlit the clearance for a rock-blasting operation along 40 kilometers of the Tocantins River to enable year-round navigation, despite criticism from local grassroots organizations. Lula has defended the actions, saying Brazil has ambitious climate goals and has a high percentage of clean energy.

Reporting by Fabiano Maisonnave, Associated Press

Banner image: A boy kicks a soccer ball near signage for the COP30 U.N. Climate Conference in Belem, Brazil, March 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Jorge Saenz, File)

At the landmark Paris climate agreement, nearly every country in the world pledged to a goal to limit warming to well below 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels by 2100, and work toward a more ambitious goal to limit warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F). The hope is that such a limit will help Earth avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

However, a recent review suggests that even the more ambitious ceiling of 1.5°C may be too warm for the planet’s polar ice sheets and trigger massive sea level rise.

Researchers looked at paleoclimate data to see what the sea level was when Earth in the past was at a temperature comparable to the present. They combined that information with modeling data and more recent observations to then assess how much ice loss can be expected with 1.5°C of warming.

The world is currently about 1.2°C (2.2°F) warmer than it was before humans began emitting massive amounts of warming fossil fuels, or pre-1900. Even at the current warming, “in the last few years, we’ve just seen some really dramatic changes in the Greenland ice sheet and the West Antarctica ice sheet in particular,” Chris Stokes, the study’s lead author, from Durham University, U.K., told Mongabay in a video call. He added researchers were surprised by the amount of melting they’ve observed already.

The hope has been that 1.5°C of warming is below the threshold for massive glacial melting. So, “we wanted to see what the impact of 1.5 degrees of warming would be on those ice sheets,” Stokes said. They found that it’s still too warm for polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

Together, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets hold enough water to raise global sea levels by tens of meters, Stokes said. And even if we do limit warming to 1.5°C, he added, we should expect “a few meters, best-case scenario, of sea level rise over the next couple of centuries.”

“These are large numbers,” Harry Zekollari, a glaciologist at the University of Brussels, Belgium, who wasn’t involved with this study, told Mongabay by email. He added the review study is “a very strong piece combining different lines of evidence.”

Zekollari recently published a related study in Science, which found that nearly twice as much glacial mass will be lost if the climate warms by 2.7°C (4.9°F) by 2100, a likely scenario, according to several climate model forecasts.

The 1.5°C goal is still important for many other Earth systems, so “the message is certainly not to give up hope or not to aim for that target,” Stokes said. “But if you’re interested in sea level rise, or you’re a country with a low-lying coastline, or with low-lying inhabitants close to the coastline, then this problem is not going to go away.”

Banner image of glacial melting in the Himalayas by Sharada Prasad via Wikimedia Common (CC BY 2.0).

The governments of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu have announced their commitment to create a massive multinational Melanesian Ocean Reserve. If implemented as envisioned, the reserve would become the world’s first Indigenous-led ocean reserve, covering an area nearly as big as the Amazon Rainforest.

Speaking at the U.N. Ocean Conference underway in Nice, France, representatives of both countries said the vision for the ocean reserve is to cover at least 6 million square kilometers (2.3 million square miles) of ocean and islands. The reserve will include the combined national waters of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, and extend to the protected waters of New Caledonia’s exclusive economic zone. All of the island countries, largely inhabited by Indigenous Melanesians, are located in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, within the region known as Melanesia.

“The Melanesian Ocean Reserve will give the governments and peoples of Melanesia the ability to do much more to protect our ancestral waters from those who extract and exploit without concern for our planet and its living beings. We hope our Indigenous stewardship of this vast reserve will create momentum for similar initiatives all over the world,” Vanuatu’s environment minister, Ralph Regenvanu, said in a joint press release.

Melanesia is one of the world’s most biodiverse regions, hosting an incredible diversity of both land and marine species, including an estimated 75% of known coral species and more than 3,000 species of reef-associated fish.

The governments of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu reportedly conceived of the Melanesia Ocean Reserve during last year’s U.N. Biodiversity Conference in Cali, Colombia. Conversations with government officials from New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea are ongoing, according to the planned ocean reserve’s website.

“We — the people of Solomon Islands and Vanuatu — have quietly protected more than 150,000 square km [58,000 mi2] of the ocean,” the website notes. “Our territorial seas … are protected. Yet illegal fishing (IUU) vessels steal from these zones daily, and we need greater partnership to fully protect the EEZs.”

The details of the reserve are yet to be worked out, but it aims to “permit only sustainable economic activities consistent with Indigenous values in these waters,” the press release noted. It’s unclear, though, how Papua New Guinea’s deep-sea mining plans, despite community opposition, fit within the vision for the reserve.

Jeremie Katidjo Monnier, New Caledonia’s environment minister, announced his country’s support for the Melanesian Ocean Reserve project at the U.N. Ocean Conference, according to a statement by the IUCN, the global conservation authority.

He added that New Caledonians have “officially voted for a moratorium on the exploitation and exploration of our seabed until 2075.”

Banner image: Off Ulawa Island, Solomon Islands, a circle of Indigenous fishermen catch scad by forming a circle, honoring the ocean’s gift. Image courtesy of Su’umoli village, Makira-Ulawa province, Solomon Islands.

Locust outbreaks, which cause considerable crop losses, affect a quarter of the world’s population today. In a recent paper, scientists predict the situation will worsen with climate change, and they suggest a way forward by integrating local communities’ knowledge.

Locusts are species of short-horned grasshoppers of the family Acrididae, which, under certain environmental conditions, can go from being solitary to members of massive, moving swarms. These swarms can travel large distances, destroying crops along the way.

For instance, the paper’s authors describe desert locusts (Schistocerca gregaria) as among “the most destructive migratory pests in the world,” with a single swarm of tens of millions moving across 1,200 square kilometers (463 square miles). The 2020 desert locust outbreak in eastern Africa threatened more than 20 million people with the risk of acute food insecurity.

Climate change is expected to make locust outbreaks worse, the authors write, citing studies that show how tropical cyclones, extreme rainfall and its resulting warm and moist soil have triggered several recent desert locust outbreaks. “Yet, it remains underprioritized in [the] climate space,” they say.

Early detection is key in responding to locust outbreaks and reducing losses. However, regions like eastern Africa face challenges in early detection due to remoteness, inaccessibility and conflict, the authors add.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has a 24/7 surveillance system on locust invasions and breeding locations that uses satellite imagery, locust, weather and ecological data from affected areas. But the authors write that verifying data through ground measurements and observations “remains a significant challenge” as locusts breed in remote areas, “many of which are becoming increasingly unsafe for ground surveys.”

To complement existing early detection measures, the researchers recognize the important role of Indigenous peoples and local communities, who have developed practices built on generations’ worth of local knowledge on ecological health of their land, weather patterns and desert locusts, including when outbreaks can happen and how swarms behave. During the 2020–21 locust outbreak in eastern Africa, for example, observations by communities in remote areas contributed to the early warning system to alert countries.

Such local communities, the authors write, are among the most vulnerable to locust crises. But they can be empowered by training them to use technology like instant messaging apps and data collection platforms such as EarthRanger and eLocust, FAO’s digital tool for locust outbreak monitoring. eLocust allows real-time transmission of field observations from remote areas without network coverage. The eLocust and other systems can also be enhanced with artificial intelligence that integrates locally collected information with satellite and weather data to predict breeding and swarm movements, they add.

To manage locust swarms, the researchers warn against the reliance on aerial spraying or blanket use of chemical insecticides. Instead, they stress scaling up eco-friendly biopesticides and environmentally safe practices to minimize harm or spillover effects.

Banner image of a desert locust by Joachim Frische via Wikimedia Commons (CCBY-SA3.0).