WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency faces challenges during a government shutdown. The agency’s mission to protect health and the environment is at risk without a federal budget. Former EPA officials express concerns that polluters may exploit the situation with an agency that has already seen massive staff cuts and dramatic shifts in policy. During the shutdown, the agency plans to halt non-criminal pollution inspections, new grants, and most scientific research. Essential staff will continue to work, but many functions will cease. That could lead to increased pollution risks and halted cleanup efforts, raising concerns about public health and safety.

By Seth Borenstein, Associated Press

Banner image: The Kyger Creek Power Plant, a coal-fired power plant, operates April 14, 2025, near Cheshire, Ohio. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel, File)

The world’s largest-known population of Taita falcons has been recorded in Mozambique’s Niassa Special Reserve, where researchers estimate up to 76 breeding pairs live among its isolated island of rocky hills and woodlands, Mongabay contributor Ryan Truscott reported.

The vulnerable Taita falcon (Falco fasciinucha) is smaller than a pigeon and has been called a “stunningly cute little raptor.” With fewer than 500 breeding pairs globally, it is one of the rarest and most specialized birds of prey, but human degradation of their habitat has caused their populations to dwindle across their range in eastern Africa, from southern Ethiopia to northeastern South Africa. Most known Taita falcon sites today host fewer than 10 breeding pairs.

“Finding Niassa as a [Taita] stronghold still, where hopefully there’s still good genetic diversity, is quite encouraging,” Hanneline Smit-Robinson, co-author of the recently published study and head of conservation at BirdLife South Africa, told Truscott.

In 2021, the research team surveyed 35 potential Taita territories within a 75-kilometer (46-mile) radius of Niassa’s administrative camp to confirm the presence of the falcon, reaching some sites by foot and others by helicopter.

They found 14 breeding pairs and combined that information with remote-sensing data to model other potential nests across the 4.2-million-hectare (10.4-million-acre) reserve. They estimate between 68 and 76 breeding pairs live in the area.

With this discovery, the Niassa Special Reserve hosts the world’s biggest-known population of the Taita falcon, challenging some assumptions scientists had about the birds.

“Our [Niassa] survey has led us to rethink what we consider typical Taita falcon habitat,” another co-author, Christiaan Brink, told Truscott in 2022, shortly after the team discovered the stronghold.

Their compact, muscular bodies are built for speed in the river gorge systems near waterfalls where they usually live. But the sharp rock islands of Niassa allow them to mimic the same hunting behaviors and give them an edge in the woodland ecosystem.

Taita falcons are found in two other main breeding sites in the region, the Batoka Gorge between Zambia and Zimbabwe and South Africa’s Blyde River Canyon. However, population records show that their numbers are falling fast.

In the Blyde River Canyon, only four out of 11 Taita falcon territories are still active, and just one produced chicks, according to the last survey. In the Batoka Gorge, the species may have already gone locally extinct; the last record of an active nest is from 2006.

“Fortunately, large tracts of intact [Niassa] woodland, close to many identified and predicted Taita falcon breeding sites, remain relatively distant from human settlements. For now,” David Lloyd-Jones, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Cape Town, who was not part of the study, told Truscott.

Read the full story by Ryan Truscott here.

Banner image: A young Taita falcon in South Africa. Image courtesy of Anthony van Zyl.

GENEVA (AP) — Switzerland’s glaciers have faced “enormous” melting this year with a 3% drop in total volume — the fourth-largest annual drop on record — due to the effects of global warming, top Swiss glaciologists reported Wednesday.

The shrinkage this year means that ice mass in Switzerland — home to the most glaciers in Europe — has declined by one-quarter over the last decade, the Swiss glacier monitoring group GLAMOS and the Swiss Academy of Sciences said in their report.

“Glacial melting in Switzerland was once again enormous in 2025,” the scientists said. “A winter with low snow depth combined with heat waves in June and August led to a loss of 3% of the glacier volume.”

Switzerland is home to nearly 1,400 glaciers, the most of any country in Europe, and the ice mass and its gradual melting have implications for hydropower, tourism, farming and water resources in many European countries.

More than 1,000 small glaciers in Switzerland have already disappeared, the experts said.

The teams reported that a winter with little snow was followed by heat waves in June — the second-warmest June on record — which left the snow reserves depleted by early July. Ice masses began to melt earlier than ever, they said.

“Glaciers are clearly retreating because of anthropogenic global warming,” said Matthias Huss, the head of GLAMOS, referring to climate change caused by human activity.

“This is the main cause for the acceleration we are seeing in the last two years,” added Huss, who is also a glaciologist at Zurich’s ETHZ university.

The shrinkage is the fourth-largest after those in 2022, 2023 and back in 2003.

The retreat and loss of glaciers is also having an impact on Switzerland’s landscape, causing mountains to shift and ground to become unstable.

Swiss authorities have been on heightened alert for such changes after a huge mass of rock and ice from a glacier thundered down a mountainside that covered nearly all of the southern village of Blatten in May.

By Jamey Keaten, Associated Press

Banner image: Rhone Glacier near Goms, Switzerland, on June 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader, File)

The IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, has established a new expert group that will help shape conservation priorities for a previously overlooked but vital group of organisms: microbes.

In a recent commentary, the Microbial Conservation Specialist Group (MCSG), formed in July, announced that it will look at the status and threats to various beneficial microbes, including bacteria, fungi and viruses, that are critical for the health of humans and ecosystems.

The IUCN’s various expert groups have to date focused largely on visible animals and plants. They include the Shark Specialist Group, Pangolin Specialist Group and Orchid Specialist Group. Some fungal expert groups have been created to focus on specific fungal habitats, countries or types of fungus. However, microorganisms are generally missing from global conservation efforts, the researchers write, despite their importance to the stability of ecosystems, human health and food security.

“It’s been easy to overlook microbes because they are invisible,” Jack A. Gilbert, commentary co-author and MCSG co-lead from the University of California, San Diego, U.S., said in a statement. “Having IUCN elevate microbes in this way will ensure that critical microbes are assessed and protected from extinction.”

The MCSG, the researchers write, will work toward several goals in the coming years, including building a global network to advise on conservation priorities while “compiling and visualizing global data on microbial ecosystems that are currently threatened by habitat destruction and anthropogenic activity.” The group will also develop a microorganism-specific Red List criteria to classify microbes at high risk of extinction.

Gilbert told Mongabay by email that the MCSG is still exploring what such a list would look like, but he cited some examples of critical microbes threatened by human activities. Marine cyanobacteria (Prochlorococcus spp.), for instance, are major producers of the oxygen we breathe and they fuel open-ocean food webs, he said. However, this critical microbe group is threatened by warming seas, ocean acidification and nutrient shifts.

Actinomycetes, a group of bacteria widespread in soil and aquatic environments, are a source of several antibiotics and anticancer and immunosuppressant drugs, as well as industrial enzymes, Gilbert said. They’re also vital for healthy soils. Yet, “intensive agriculture, land degradation, pollution, and climate stress erodes actinomycete richness and function,” he said.

Similarly, algae from the Symbiodiniaceae family produce energy that shallow corals need to survive, but the algae are threatened by heat stress that drives coral bleaching and mass reef die-offs, Gilbert said.

Beneficial microbes are also vulnerable to being replaced by opportunistic pathogens in degraded ecosystems, Raquel Peixoto, commentary co-author and MCSG co-lead from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia, told Mongabay.

Gilbert said the MCSG hopes to apply their understanding of microbes to facilitate the conservation of other organisms, from trees and grasses to otters and pandas.

Banner image: Prochlorococcus marinus, a globally significant marine cyanobacterium. Image by Luke Thompson from Chisholm Lab and Nikki Watson from Whitehead, MIT, 2007, via Flickr (Public domain).

Jane Goodall, who revealed the intimate lives of chimpanzees and gave the modern world a language of hope, has died at the age of 91.

When she stepped into the forests of Gombe, Tanzania, in 1960, she carried little more than a notebook, binoculars, and an unlikely determination. She was not a scientist by training, but just a young woman from Bournemouth with a childhood fascination for Africa, encouraged by a mother who told her never to give up. Within a few years she had overturned long-held certainties. Her observations showed that chimpanzees were not mere instinctive creatures but rather societies of individuals: affectionate, ambitious, grieving, even warlike. They made and used tools, once thought the exclusive preserve of humans. Louis Leakey, the anthropologist who had sent her to Gombe, declared that her findings required humanity either to redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human.

For many, such discoveries would have been achievement enough. For Goodall, they were only a beginning. When she saw forests vanish and chimpanzee numbers fall, she shifted from science to advocacy. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute, launched sanctuaries, and created community programs that married conservation to human development. In 1991 she started Roots & Shoots, a movement that grew into tens of thousands of youth groups across more than a hundred countries. Where others lectured about despair, she insisted on nurturing hope.

She was tireless. Into her ninth decade, she circled the planet on near-constant tours, urging audiences to act and telling children that every day brings a choice of what sort of impact they will make. Her message was never sentimental. She saw clearly the destruction wrought by poverty, greed, and shortsighted politics. She recognized the violence within both chimpanzees and ourselves. Yet she spoke always of possibility. Forests could return, species could be rescued, and young people, unburdened by cynicism, could still build a more compassionate world.

Her influence extended beyond conservation. She helped dismantle the conceit that humans were alone in possessing mind and feeling, laying the groundwork for the broader recognition of animal sentience. She reminded governments and corporations alike that exploitation of the natural world was ultimately self-defeating. In 2002 she became a United Nations Messenger of Peace, though she preferred the company of schoolchildren planting trees to the applause of diplomats.

She leaves no shortage of honors: medals, prizes, foundations, even a day in Los Angeles named after her. But her truest legacy lies in those who, having once heard her soft but insistent voice, felt summoned to act.

She often pictured humanity standing at the mouth of a long, dark tunnel. At the far end shone a single star. That star was hope. It would not come closer on its own, she said. To reach it, we must roll up our sleeves and make our way forward together.

Banner: Courtesy of JGI

Biologists in Brazil have documented a jaguar swimming an estimated 2.3 kilometers, or 1.4 miles, across an artificial reservoir in the Cerrado savanna, the longest confirmed swim by the species to date. The previous scientific record, published in 1932, was of a jaguar swimming 200 m (660 ft).

“We knew that jaguars might have this ability to swim long distances. But what was missing was a confirmation through a technical record. That is the big difference here,” lead author Leandro Silveira, a biologist with the Jaguar Institute, told Mongabay by phone.

Researchers first encountered the male jaguar (Panthera onca) from a camera-trap image in May 2020 on the shore of the Serra da Mesa hydroelectric reservoir in Goiás state, central Brazil. Four years later, in August 2024, a camera on an island in the reservoir captured the same individual.

A thin outcrop is the only strip of land in the water separating the island from the mainland. This may have served as a halfway point, meaning the jaguar would have swum the first 1 km (0.6 mi) there, then completed the remaining 1.3 km (0.8 mi). The minimum distance considered is still more than six times the previous record.

For Silveira, the jaguar using the strip of land as a pitstop is technically possible and important to consider, but he said a direct swim is more likely.

“That idea of using the small islands to stop along the way and rest is a very human interpretation … He [the jaguar] doesn’t think like this,” Silveira said. “We can’t be incisive about these answers. We have the documentation, the irrefutable data that shows the event has taken place. But the rest is interpretation.”

Silveira said the jaguar appeared healthy in the 2024 footage, showing no signs of exhaustion after the swim. “The biggest surprise is that this was a natural behavior. The jaguar was not fleeing from a flood or catastrophe. He simply swam across.”

Until now, accounts of jaguars swimming long distances had largely been circumstantial or anecdotal. On Maracá Island, at least 6 km (3.7 mi) off Brazil’s northeastern Atlantic coast, a jaguar population has remained genetically healthy. Silveira said this suggests occasional crossings, backed by reports from fishermen, even though no scientific record exists.

“Evidence like this is very rare,” Fernando Tortato, conservation scientist at wildcat nonprofit Panthera, who wasn’t involved in the study, told Mongabay by phone. “We now know that a crossing may be difficult, but possible, that [the body of water] doesn’t constitute an absolute barrier. With this you can better understand how jaguars might move through a landscape.”

Banner image: Camera trap images of the jaguar before and after the crossing. Image courtesy of Silveira et al., 2025 (CC BY 4.0).