There are only about 350 mature leopards left in West Africa, according to the latest regional assessment by the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority.

Leopards (Panthera pardus) in West Africa are thought to be genetically isolated from those in Central Africa, with little or no interbreeding between populations. They’re found in 11 countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone.

Once widespread across West Africa, the leopard population there has declined by 50% over the past two decades, leading to their moving to a higher threat category of endangered on the IUCN Red List.

“In Africa, the leopard is not doing too badly, but in West Africa it’s a different story,” said Robin Horion, a field technician with U.S.-based NGO Panthera who was part of the team assessing the West African leopard’s conservation status for the IUCN Red List. “West Africa has far less funding, fewer researchers, and much less of a conservation culture compared to East and Southern Africa. There is also much less tourism. All of this means that species are disappearing in almost complete silence.”

Horion and other researchers from Panthera spent five years surveying leopards in West Africa’s national parks. Following their report, the IUCN reclassified the feline from vulnerable to endangered on the Red List on Oct. 9.

The IUCN assessment notes that most leopards in West Africa live in protected areas within increasingly fragmented landscapes that are under pressure from expanding agriculture, infrastructure development and other human activities. Loss of large mammals to hunting is also likely driving the decline of leopards. 

“The fact that the leopard population is shrinking shows that ecosystems are being heavily affected by human activities,” Horion said. “As a carnivore, it is at the top of the food chain, so if it disappears, it probably means its prey has also disappeared. That, and poaching.”

According to Horion, West Africa’s leopards are victims of poaching for two reasons. First, people kill them to reduce competition, since leopards hunt the same bushmeat as they do. Leopards are also hunted for their skin and other body parts because of beliefs about their purported spiritual and medicinal powers, making them valuable as grigris (talismans) in Ghana and Senegal, he added.

Although the West African leopard’s endangered status is bad news, Horion said he prefers to remain optimistic.

“Now that we’ve raised the alarm, we hope that governments will become aware of the situation. We can implement concrete solutions to stop the disappearance of the leopard,” he said.

“We need a regional strategy, to bring together the countries concerned so that we can strengthen park patrols and improve conservation,” Horion added. “Awareness campaigns are also needed to stop poaching. But above all, on the cultural side, if we want this to work, we need to find alternative grigris.”

Banner image: A young female leopard photographed at night in Niokolo Koba National Park, Senegal. Panthera/Senegal DPN.

The green turtle, found across the world’s oceans, is recovering after decades of decline, according to the latest IUCN Red List assessment. The species has been reclassified from endangered to least concern.

“I am delighted,” Brendan Godley, a turtle expert from the University of Exeter, U.K., told Mongabay. “It underlines that marine conservation can work, there is hope, and we should rightly celebrate it, sharing some ocean optimism.”

Historically, humans hunted green turtles (Chelonia mydas) for their meat and eggs, decimating their populations. Even after hunting declined, the species continued to suffer: from entanglement in fishing nets, degradation of nesting beaches and ocean habitats, pollution, diseases, and climate change.

However, the global population has increased by roughly 28% since the 1970s, following decades of conservation efforts. This is largely thanks to legal protections against international trade and direct hunting, and conservation measures including those that protect nesting beaches and the use of turtle excluder devices to keep them from getting entangled in fishing gear.

The latest assessment, however, cautions that while populations have increased as a whole worldwide, regional assessments show that several subpopulations are still threatened or declining. For example, subpopulations in the North Indian Ocean are classified as vulnerable, while those in Central South Pacific are listed as endangered. Subpopulations in the North Atlantic are listed as least concern, but are showing signs of decline.

“In the North Atlantic, although nesting numbers are still higher than when scientific monitoring and active conservation began, the overall decline is principally because the largest breeding site in Costa Rica, after decades of increase, has exhibited lowered nesting numbers in recent years — a trend that is worthy of further investigation,” Godley said.

He added that an overall listing of least concern doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned about green turtles, but that we can currently be less concerned for this species than for others at greater risk of extinction in the near future.

“Many sea turtle conservation scientists have suggested that [green turtles] might best be considered as part of a group of ‘Conservation Dependent’ species in that, if they were not subject to any conservation, they might quickly decline,” Godley said. “This is, in part, evidenced by the fact that they have not increased uniformly across the global ocean.”

The IUCN Red List assessment, too, emphasizes the need for continued conservation support.

“Sea turtles cannot survive without healthy oceans and coasts,” Roderic Mast, co-chair of the IUCN’s Marine Turtle Specialist Group, said in a statement. “Sustained conservation efforts are key to assuring that this recovery lasts.”

For now, the green turtle’s status change is seen as a major conservation victory. “To undertake a Red List Assessment of such a globally distributed species is an immense and challenging job,” Godley said. “We should applaud the teams from across the globe for their commitment to turtles and marine conservation.”

Banner image of a green turtle by Bernard DUPONT via Wikimedia Commons (CCBY-SA2.0).

Scientists recently discovered vast freshwater reservoirs beneath the Atlantic seafloor, stretching off the U.S. East Coast from the states of New Jersey to Maine.

The find was “a beautiful scientific accident,” Brandon Dugan, a professor of geophysics at the Colorado School of Mines, U.S., and co-chief scientist on the expedition, told Mongabay in a video call.

Dugan said his curiosity about freshwater beneath the ocean floor was piqued in the 1990s while doing a literature review for his Ph.D. research. “I found these interesting papers that said, ‘Hey, when we’re out looking for oil and gas, we didn’t find oil and gas, but we found water where water shouldn’t be.’”

Around the same time, other researchers found freshwater at unexpected depths on the East Coast island of Nantucket. So, Dugan and colleagues used computer models to simulate how far freshwater might extend beneath the ocean floor.

Earlier this year, Dugan joined more than 40 researchers from a dozen countries for a two-and-a-half-month expedition off the U.S. East Coast. Drilling at three distances from the shore, they found freshwater at each site. Seawater has a salinity close to 35 parts per thousand (ppt), or 35 grams per liter of water, but freshwater at the site nearest the shore at 30 kilometers (20 miles) had salinity of less than 1 ppt. Salinity increased with distance from the shore but remained much lower than that of seawater.

The team is analyzing the chemistry of the water samples to determine their origin and age, but preliminary results suggest it’s the result of a glacier from some 20,000 years ago.

At that time, massive glaciers extended from the mainland to islands including Nantucket, Dugan said. The enormous weight of the ice could have forced freshwater into the ground and then pushed it offshore beneath the ocean, where it’s been trapped ever since, he added.

However, researchers have also found freshwater off the coasts of South Africa and Florida where there’s not been relatively recent glacial activity. In such places, the local landscape and soil type likely allow freshwater to more easily move from land to seabed, Dugan said.

“There’s anecdotal evidence of fresh and groundwater existing off the coast of every continent. Some are very big, like New England. Some are small, like Florida,” he added.

However, tapping that water would be expensive and logistically challenging, Dugan said, adding the capability to do that is at least a decade away.

Dugan also cautioned that offshore freshwater is a finite resource that won’t recharge like groundwater, and that drawing it poses concerns for sensitive seafloor ecosystems and the potential to trigger small earthquakes if water is pumped out too quickly.

The question, he said, is “how can I have this backup supply of water in a time of need? Not, how do I expand in a time when water stresses are already growing?”

Banner image: Residual fluid gushes from the core drilling rig. Image by AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster.

POZA RICA, Mexico (AP) — The stench of decay spread for several miles around Poza Rica on Wednesday, one of the areas hardest hit by last week’s torrential rains that flooded central and eastern Mexico.

In the center of this oil-producing city near the Gulf of Mexico, a lingering cloud of dust hovered over the main avenue where soldiers worked nonstop. Farther east, near the Cazones River — which overflowed on Friday — several streets still lay under 3 feet (1 meter) of water and mud, topped by another 6 feet (2 meters) of piled-up trash, furniture, and debris.

“A week later, this looks horrible — worse. You can’t even cross the street,” lamented Ana Luz Saucedo, who fled with her children when the water came rushing in “like the sea.”

Now she fears infection because, in addition to the garbage and mud, there’s a corpse near her house that still hasn’t been collected, she said. “The dead body has already started to rot, and no one has come for him.”

The toll of last week’s devastating rains, floods and landslides continues to become more clear as Mexico’s government chugs along on rescue and recovery efforts.

As of Wednesday, the government recorded 66 deaths, while the number of missing people climbed to 75. Nearly 200 communities remain cut off — most of them in the central mountainous region of Hidalgo, where helicopters have struggled to reach them because of constant cloud cover.

Authorities have attributed the disaster to the convergence of several weather systems — two tropical systems along with a cold and a warm front — that hit just as a particularly intense rainy season was ending, leaving rivers saturated and hillsides weakened.

But residents like Saucedo believe the warnings came too late — at least in Poza Rica.

“Many people died because they didn’t give notice — really, they didn’t warn us,” she said. “They came only when the river was already overflowing … not before, so people could evacuate.”

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said this week that alert systems for such events don’t work the same way as those used for hurricanes. However, she acknowledged that once the emergency phase ends, officials will need to review river maintenance and emergency protocols to determine “what worked, what we need to improve and whether there are better alert mechanisms.”

Emergency deployments of soldiers, marines and civilian teams continued across the hardest-hit states, alongside aid from hundreds of volunteers.

In Poza Rica, for example, a group of women who came from the port city of Veracruz distributed clothing and 1,000 tamales they had prepared for the flood victims.

Meanwhile, authorities are working to restore access on dozens of blocked roads and to bring back electricity, while also monitoring dams — many of which are now at maximum capacity.

By Félix Márquez, Associated Press

Banner image: Locals carry pots of tamales donated by volunteers to victims of torrential rain through a flooded street in Poza Rica, Veracruz state, Mexico, Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez)

From three species of Arctic seals to more than half of all birds globally, several animals have slipped closer to extinction, according to the latest update of the IUCN Red List. However, 20 species have seen a positive change in their status: they’ve moved farther away from the threat of extinction, thanks to effective conservation measures or reduced threats.

The 20 downlisted species include 12 birds: the Rodrigues warbler (Acrocephalus rodericanus), Rodrigues fody (Foudia flavicans), olive-sided flycatcher (Contopus cooperi), rustic bunting (Emberiza rustica), Lidth’s jay (Garrulus lidthi), Guadalupe junco (Junco insularis), Okinawa robin (Larvivora namiyei), Alexandrine parakeet (Palaeornis eupatria), black-faced spoonbill (Platalea minor), blue-winged macaw (Primolius maracana), Amami woodcock (Scolopax mira) and redwing (Turdus iliacus). 

The Rodrigues warbler and fody, for example, are the last two remaining endemic bird species left on Rodrigues, a volcanic island that’s part of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. The island was once home to 12 endemic birds found nowhere else on Earth.

Most of those birds have since gone extinct, and both the Rodrigues warbler and fody were headed the same way. In 1968, scientists estimated just five to six pairs of fodies remained, and only eight to nine pairs of warblers in 1979, according to BirdLife International.

Conservation efforts by BirdLife’s local partner, the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation (MWF), helped restore the birds’ native forest habitat on the island. There are now roughly 20,000 Rodrigues fodies and around 25,000 warblers on the island. Both species are listed as least concern in the latest IUCN update.

“It’s wonderful to see the rebound of two birds that teetered on the path of extinction some 60 years ago and have bounced back to become fairly common birds in built-up areas and backyards, and almost anywhere with suitable forests, including secondary forests, on Rodrigues,” Vikash Tatayah, MWF conservation director, said in a statement.

Similarly, the once-abundant Guadalupe junco, a small bird found only on Guadalupe Island off the western coast of Baja California, Mexico, declined dramatically after feral goats, introduced in the 19^th century, grazed and razed the cypress forests the birds relied upon. In 2007, a conservation program successfully removed all feral goats, allowing both the forests and the birds to recover. The Guadalupe junco was listed as endangered in 2016; it’s now been reclassified as vulnerable.

Apart from birds, two species of sea snails, Conus felitae and Conus regonae, have moved from vulnerable to least concern in the latest assessment. A species of land snail, Idiomela subplicata, was reclassified from critically endangered to vulnerable.

Other species that also moved to a lower threat status include the Shark Bay bandicoot (Perameles bougainville), a marsupial, and fish like the roman seabream (Chrysoblephus laticeps), the seventy-four seabream (Polysteganus undulosus) and a marine ray-finned fish, Argyrozona argyrozona.

And in a major conservation win, the green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) has been reclassified from endangered to least concern.

Banner image of a Rodrigues fody by pierrickferret via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

SAN JUAN ISLAND, Wash. (AP) — Scientists from the University of Washington recently deployed a little over 1 mile of fiber-optic cable in the Salish Sea to test whether internet cables can monitor endangered orcas. The technology is called Distributed Acoustic Sensing. It transforms cables into continuous underwater microphones that can pinpoint whale locations and track their movements. If successful, the world’s 870,000 miles of existing undersea cables could become a vast ocean monitoring network. It could provide real-time data on how marine mammals respond to vessel noise, food scarcity and climate change. The breakthrough would be particularly valuable as new marine protected areas are established under the High Seas Treaty in January.

By Annika Hammerschlag, Associated Press 

Banner image: An orca swims past a whale watching boat in the San Juan Islands, Wash., Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag)