For the first time in nearly two centuries, giant tortoises are once again roaming Floreana Island in the Galápagos, a conservation milestone more than a decade in the making.

Early settlers on Floreana Island altered the landscape and hunted the Floreana giant tortoise (Chelonoidis niger niger) into extinction about 180 years ago. But while working on Wolf Volcano, roughly 180 kilometers (112 miles) away on Isabela Island, researchers with the Galápagos Conservancy noticed something unexpected.

“The tortoises seemed different,” Penny Becker, CEO of Island Conservation told Mongabay in a video call. “They looked different and they were behaving differently.”

So, the researchers took DNA samples from those tortoises and compared them with DNA from tortoise bones found in caves on Floreana. “Indeed, there were some pretty strong genetics left in the Wolf [Volcano] population from tortoises that were here on Floreana,” Becker said.

How the heavy terrestrial reptiles got to Wolf Volcano remains uncertain. They could have floated on ocean currents or been transported by whaling ships that kept tortoises for food.

In any case, scientists launched a breeding program using the Wolf Volcano tortoises to establish a new hybrid population for reintroduction to Floreana. On Feb. 20, with support from local residents and a consortium of partners, 156 endangered tortoises were released. Each of them is between 10 and 13 years old. They will reach sexual maturity at roughly 25 years old, so building a self-sustaining population will take time.

Becker is confident in the project’s long-term success. The tortoises’ health and progress toward adaptation on the island will be closely monitored. “We’re going to adaptively manage things as we go along to ensure that it’s successful.”

Tortoises are a keystone species and critical ecosystem engineers. Their impacts on the island could be transformative.

“By dispersing seeds, shaping vegetation, creating micro-habitats such as their well-known wallows, and influencing how landscapes regenerate, they help rebuild ecological processes that many other species depend on,” Rakan Zahawi, Charles Darwin Foundation executive director, said in a press release.

Their return is expected to improve seabird nesting habitats, for example.  More seabirds mean more nutrients flowing between land and sea, enhancing the so-called “circular seabird economy” that can improve fisheries productivity and coral reef health.

The tortoise reintroduction is part of a much broader restoration effort on Floreana. In 2025 following a successful rat eradication program, the Galápagos rail (Laterallus spilonota), a small ground bird, returned to the island after 190 years. The team is also working on plans to reintroduce several other extirpated species, including the vegetarian finch (Platyspiza crassirostris), one of Darwin’s finches that gave rise to his theory of evolution.

“Seeing giant tortoises return to Floreana confirms that long-term commitment and collective action can restore ecosystems that once seemed lost,” Eliécer Cruz, director of Fundación Jocotoco’s Galápagos Program, said in a press release.

Banner image: A giant tortoise. Image courtesy of Carlos Espinosa via the Charles Darwin Foundation. 

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Torrential rains set off two landslides that killed seven people and floods that displaced more than 3,000 villagers in the southeastern Philippines, officials said Friday.

A boulder-laden landslide buried a house and killed a couple and their two daughters Friday in the coastal city of Mati in Davao Oriental province, disaster-response and provincial officials said.

Rescuers used earth-moving equipment to retrieve the bodies, according to Ednar Dayanghirang, regional director of the Office of Civil Defense.

In Monkayo, a gold-mining town in Davao de Oro province near Davao Oriental, the remains of three people were dug up after their house was buried late Thursday by a landslide, Dayanghirang and other officials said.

Nearly 10,000 were affected by the downpours in recent days, including more than 3,200 people who were forced to move to emergency shelters or with relatives, Dayanghirang said.

Several outlying provinces and towns were forced to cancel classes and work, he said.

The downpours and thunderstorms occurred well ahead of the typhoon season, which usually starts in June, and were caused by cold wind interacting with warm and moist air from the Pacific, forecasters said.

About 20 typhoons and storms each year batter the Philippine archipelago, which also lies in the so-called Pacific “Ring of Fire,” where earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are common, making the Southeast Asian nation one of the world’s most disaster-prone.

By Associated Press 

Banner image: Rescuers wading along a flooded street as they try to locate trapped residents when another storm earlier this month, Tropical Storm Penha, hit Surigao city on Friday, Feb. 6, 2026. (Philippine Coast Guard via AP)

Social interactions are crucial for the survival of most animal species. Living in groups helps animals spot predators, find food and raise more successful young than they could alone. Conventional wisdom has long held that highly social animals, like lions or capuchin monkeys, are highly vulnerable when their populations decline. But new research suggests that more loosely social animals, like agoutis or tapirs, may actually face greater risk when their numbers fall.

Researchers reviewed existing models, data and case studies looking at the relationship between social interactions and survival. Michael Gil, a co-author of the study, with the University of Colorado Boulder, told Mongabay in an interview that highly social animals tend to have a stable number of social interactions, “and they’re going to maintain that; even if the population declines, they’re going to figure out a way to maintain that,” he said.

If part of an African wild dog (Lycaon pictus) pack is killed off, for example, the remaining animals will do everything they can to join a new group, their immediate survival depending on it.

Loosely social species respond differently. “As the populations decline, their social interactions also decline because they do not make up for it,” Gil said.

That means there are fewer squirrels, for instance, to keep an eye out and warn of predators. Or smaller schools of fish that can hunt together.

If those populations decrease, then their social interactions also decline, which can lead to more population declines. It becomes “a dangerous feedback loop,” Gil noted.

The findings suggest that loosely social animals may be more vulnerable than their social counterparts as climate change and habitat loss push ecosystems toward widespread population declines and mass extinctions.

The research “reframes social behavior not as a niche topic in behavioral ecology, but as something that could fundamentally alter extinction risk across a wide range of taxa,” Rob Salguero-Gómez, professor of ecology at the University of Oxford, who was not involved with the research, wrote to Mongabay in an email.

Banner image: A pack of African wild dogs in Kruger National Park, South Africa. Image courtesy of Bart Swanson via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The Chincha Islands off the coast of Peru are home to many seabird species that cover their island homes with thick layers of poop, or guano. New research now suggests that ancient Peruvians in the Chincha Valley on the Peruvian mainland hunted these seabirds, collected their guano, and used it to fertilize their maize crops, which helped expand pre-Inca societies.

The researchers analyzed ancient cobs of maize (Zea mays), some of them more than 2,200 years old, collected from archaeological sites in Peru. They found nitrogen levels in the maize that were much higher than natural soil conditions would allow. However, those nitrogen levels matched the levels found in 11 seabird species collected from the area, including the Peruvian booby (Sula variegata), Peruvian pelican (Pelecanus thagus) and guanay cormorant (Leucocarbo bougainvilliorum).

The match suggested that guano from seabirds that was used to fertilize the maize, which allowed the Chincha Kingdom to grow into a major civilization of 100,000 people. The Inca Empire farther inland took notice of the Chincha Kingdom’s crop success.

“The height of guano use was likely around AD 1250, which also represents the height of the Chincha Kingdom,” Jacob Bongers, lead author of the study with the University of Sydney in Australia, told Mongabay in an email. Bongers, a digital archaeologist, said it’s difficult to confirm details, but the Inca later controlled the Chincha Valley and “Chincha became the guano supplier for the Inca during this time.”

Jordan Dalton, an archaeologist at the State University of New York at Oswego, in the U.S., who wasn’t part of the fertilizer research, told Scientific American that there are still many mysteries about the Chincha Kingdom. “We know that they were a wealthy coastal polity — they had interactions and traded and competed with their neighbors — but we don’t really understand the nature of those social relationships and what kind of goods they were trading. There’s a lot that we need to fill in to really understand.”

The Inca Empire eventually absorbed the Chincha Kingdom and its valuable guano deposits. Bongers said they understood the importance of conserving the birds. “When the Inca gained control of the guano deposits, they forbade the killing of seabirds during their breeding seasons. The penalty was death.”

Banner image: A flock of Peruvian boobies. Photo courtesy of Alex Proimos via Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)

Pittsburgh-based Alcoa will pay the Australian government a settlement the company put at $36 million for “unlawfully” clearing tracts of endangered forest without approvals between 2019 and 2025.

The metals giant began mining bauxite — the raw ingredient for aluminum — from beneath Australia’s Northern Jarrah forest in the 1960s, but its footprint has swelled in recent years, drawing new scrutiny from regulators and the public.

Senator Murray Watt, Australia’s environment and water minister, said the payment — $55 million in Australian dollars — settles a longstanding question of whether Alcoa should enjoy exemptions from federal environmental processes.

“We are committed to responsible operations and welcome this important step in transitioning our approvals to a contemporary assessment process that provides increased certainty for our operations and our people into the future,” Alcoa President and CEO William F. Oplinger said in a statement. “We’re proud of our more than 60 years as a leading Australian aluminum producer and the role we are now playing in support of critical minerals production.”

“It’s well and truly the largest amount that’s been paid by way of an enforceable undertaking around the environment laws nationally,” Watt said in an interview with Australian broadcasters Feb. 18.

Alcoa maintains it has complied with federal law but agreed to the payments to “acknowledge historical clearing.”

The agreement includes an 18-month exemption for the company to operate while seeking those approvals.

Last year, Pittsburgh’s Public Source traveled to Australia to investigate Alcoa’s plans for the forest, environmental effects and community concerns.

Alcoa, a global metalmaker valued at $16 billion, mines about 34 million metric tons of bauxite annually to generate 9 million tons of alumina. Much of this is sourced from its vast mine sites in the Northern Jarrah Forest near Perth. The endangered forest is a recognized biodiversity hotspot and hosts threatened species including black cockatoos and a variety of marsupials.

The company runs a rehabilitation program to restore former mined sites, but a prominent botanist who once tried to aid those efforts now maintains it’s ineffective, and a growing chorus of Australian scientists join those criticisms.

Advertisements the company sponsored last summer promoting its rehabilitation program drew the attention of an ad standards watchdog, which issued a report stating “the advertisement was inaccurate and likely to mislead or deceive target consumers.”

Alcoa is still tussling with regulators in the state of Western Australia.

A proposal there to massively expand its operations drew some 60,000 public comments upon submission to the Environmental Authority last summer. Local governments encompassing the mining and refining sites and multiple First Nations representatives were among the critics. The decision is still pending, though Alcoa wrote in a statement to Public Source that the company responded to the “comments received from government entities” and remains “committed to working toward the decision by the end of 2026.”

By Jamie Wiggan, Pittsburgh’s Public Source, Associated Press

Banner image: of Australia’s Jarrah Forest. Photo courtesy of Jean and Fred Hort via Flickr. (CC BY 2.0)

A recent study in Forensic Science International suggests a link between exposure to heavy metals from mining operations and reduced cognitive performance in children in Peru. Researchers say the findings highlight the long-term impact of mining pollution on children’s neurocognitive development and demonstrate that exposure is not a one-time event.

The research focused on children living near a heavily contaminated mining district in Cerro de Pasco, in Peru’s Andes Mountains. Extensive mining for lead, zinc and silver has been ongoing there for almost 400 years, since Spanish colonial rule. Industrial mining has intensified over recent decades, exposing residents to contamination from modern mining and a host of serious health consequences, including cancer and other life-threatening diseases.

The study looked at metal concentrations in 81 exposed children and 17 unexposed children and compared their neurocognitive abilities and IQs. Exposed children had lead concentrations in their hair of 4.30 mg/kg, 43 times the recommended safe limit of 0.10 mg/kg set by the Micro Trace Laboratory in Germany. They also had elevated levels of arsenic, cadmium and manganese — all toxic heavy metals.

The researchers found cognitive performance was lower in the children who had been exposed to mining pollutants compared with those who hadn’t; the mean IQ was 12.3 points lower. Other variables, including verbal comprehension, perceptive analysis and memory, were also impaired in the children with a high body burden from mining.

“Simply put, pollution from mining increases children’s exposure to metals that are toxic to the developing brain,” Lucía Ordóñez Mayán, study co-author with the University of Santiago de Compostela’s Institute of Forensic Sciences in Spain, told Mongabay over email. “This can translate into more learning difficulties, attention and memory problems, poorer verbal comprehension, and lower school performance.”

While other factors can also influence intelligence and cognitive performance, the concern, Ordóñez Mayán explained, is that exposure to heavy metals “can affect the educational development and future opportunities of the children concerned.”

Banner image: Children in Cerro de Pasco play every day next to the giant mining pit that has taken over the town. Image courtesy of Cristina Hara.