Authorities in Thailand say they have seized about 400 pieces of African elephant ivory in a shipment of timber from Zambia, and are now testing the contraband to identify the origin of the animals.
The tusks were found concealed inside logs in two containers declared as holding processed timber at Laem Chabang Port, Chonburi province, according to an Oct. 7 announcement by the Thai Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation (DNP).
Thailand’s environment minister, Suchart Chomklin, said in the statement that a team of DNP academics and forensic experts have been asked “to officially inspect and count the confiscated items and conduct DNA testing.”
The DNP added the testing will help determine the origin of the elephants from which the ivory was taken. This “will be used to coordinate with [Interpol] to identify the main perpetrators and the destination countries.”
“The fact that DNA analysis is being initiated at an early stage demonstrates considerable leadership in the fight against the illegal trafficking of ivory and should assist in determining the source country as it is unlikely that all the ivory in the consignment is from Zambia elephants,” Mary Rice, executive director of the Environmental Investigation Agency U.K., told Mongabay by email.
Rice added that another large seizure made earlier this year in Zambia hasn’t yet undergone DNA analysis. Under the regulations of CITES, the global wildlife trade treaty, ivory seizures of more than 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) should trigger collection of DNA samples for forensic analysis within 90 days.
The DNP’s announcement doesn’t specify the weight of the recent Thai seizure. Mongabay contacted the DNP for comment, but didn’t receive a response by the time this story was published.
According to the Times of Zambia, Evans Muhanga, permanent secretary for Zambia’s Ministry of Tourism, said in a statement that the reported Zambian origin had not been established. Muhanga added that government agencies are working to review the details associated with the shipment.
Rice said her organization is seeing a significant number of large ivory seizures linked to Southern Africa. “Based on all available evidence, Zambia is clearly a transit (and possibly a source) for the illegal ivory being trafficked into and out of the country by organised criminal networks,” she said. “To date there has been little information on the progress of ongoing investigations and prosecution relating to individuals linked to these networks.”
Rice added the recurring ivory seizures, and the availability of ivory products in countries like Laos, contradict the current belief that poaching and trade in elephant tusks has declined.
The ivory is either being sourced from poached elephants or existing stockpiles, Rice said: “The DNA analysis may assist in determining this.”
Either way, she added, “sustaining an ongoing illegal trade stimulates the market and increases demand … resulting in sights being set on live animals again.”
Banner image: African elephants (Loxodonta africana) in Luangwa Valley, Zambia. Image by GRID-Arendal via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
A mushroom is analogous to a flower on a plant — it’s the reproductive organ of a fungus, which protects and distributes fungal spores.
Mushrooms are critical part of our ecosystems. For humans and other animals, mushrooms are also food. And they may be part of the solution for food security and solving the plastic crisis.
On Oct. 15, World Mushroom Day, we highlight three such stories that Mongabay has covered.
Mushrooms are helping us create low-cost, sustainable housing materials and additional income for farmers, according to Gabriela D’Elia, director of the Fungal Diversity Survey.
In a Mongabay video titled “Fungi are our climate allies” published last year, D’Elia cited examples of projects that are using mushrooms to address food security and waste management. For example, a company called Evocative uses a mushroom called artist’s conk (Ganoderma applanatum) to create materials that can possibly replace leather, plastic, and other packaging materials, D’Elia said.
“Fungi are showing us new ways to live in allyship with the planet,” D’Elia added.
Golden oyster mushrooms, known for their bright yellow caps and earthy flavors, are prized edible mushrooms. They’re native to Asia, but have gained popularity throughout North America, where they’re spreading across forests and displacing native fungal species, a 2025 study found.
Aishwarya Veerabahu, lead author and a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, U.S., told Mongabay’s Shreya Dasgupta that the study was prompted by a growing number of wild golden oyster observations in North America across citizen-science biodiversity databases.
“The take home message for people who grow and cultivate mushrooms is that non-native mushrooms are often cultivated in North America but can become invasive, causing devastating effects on native fungal biodiversity,” Veerabahu said.
Researchers in Nigeria have cultivated a wild mushroom species using sawdust, an agricultural waste product. This could help develop farming of local mushrooms in Nigeria and other parts of Africa, they reported in a 2026 study.
Lentinus squarrosulus is a wild mushroom that typically grows on decaying logs in wild habitats across tropical forests, including in eastern Nigeria. This mushroom is both edible and has medicinal value, and is at risk of becoming scarce in the wild because of habitat destruction. If domesticated, however, this mushroom could be an inexpensive and reliable source of protein, mushroom researcher Chiemeziem Agbonma Onyeka told Mongabay’s David Brown.
Mushrooms can glow in the dark! For younger readers, Mongabay Kids explored how bioluminescent mushrooms light up the forest night in India.
Banner image: Bioluminescent mushrooms (Mycena chlorophos) at Hachijo Botanical Park, Japan. Image by self via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
After Donald Trump began his second term as president of the U.S. in 2025, his administration moved to dramatically cut federal funding for agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which administers grants for community-based projects that often focus on climate resilience. The nonprofit Grant Witness has created a database of those awards and found that as of Sept. 2, NOAA awarded just 229 grants this year, a 74% drop compared to an average of 891 by that date in an average year.
NOAA also terminated at least 26 existing grants including $1.2 million for the nonprofit New Orleans Community Support Foundation. The grant was intended to support climate-resilient water management, particularly for Black and Indigenous communities in New Orleans, a flood-prone city chronically facing extreme weather events and sea level rise.
The grant would have supported “planning around infrastructure to prevent flooding and other types of challenges associated with living on the coast,” Scott Delaney, a co-founder of Grant Witness, told Mongabay in a video call.
NOAA also terminated more than $2.5 million in funding for the University of Washington’s Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative. In a statement, organizers said the termination was “a major blow to climate adaptation and community-based resilience in the Northwest.”
The grant supported ongoing projects with rural and tribal communities in the region to build resilience to extreme heat, drought and sea level rise associated with climate change.
“I believe that inclusion of terms like ‘indigenous,’ ‘resilience,’ and ‘climate change’ in the grant document were called out as red flags by some AI-based algorithms used, early in this Administration to target grants for cancellation,” Rick Spinrad, former administrator of NOAA, told Mongabay in an email. “There are many other examples in this database that suffer from similar prejudice.” Spinrad was administrator of NOAA when many of the grants were awarded.
The Northwest grant was ultimately reinstated alongside three others following litigation or congressional pressure, Grant Witness said in a press release. But such funding interruptions can leave critical gaps in data, cost jobs, hurt local economies and drive experienced government scientists to other work, Delaney said.
“The damage from these cuts isn’t just to this fiscal year,” he said. “It will last for well beyond this administration and then on some level for a generation or more.”
The NOAA cuts were part of a larger push from the Trump administration to reduce “wasteful spending.”
But Delaney said, “cutting programming now to save money is actually counterproductive, because it’s going to end up costing more down the line.”
Infrastructure projects like seawalls, for example, will still be necessary but much more expensive or even impossible for some areas in the future, Delaney said.
The cuts are “stunningly short-sighted and quite disturbing,” Spinrad added.
Banner image: Volunteers plant grasses to reduce coastal erosion in Biloxi, Mississippi, U.S., in 2022. Image courtesy of Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant via NOAA.
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — The Supreme Court has declined to hear the case of a lobster fisherman who alleged the government requiring commercial fishing boats to use electronic tracking devices amounts to unreasonable search and seizure.
Maine lobster fisherman Frank Thompson sued after his state began requiring all federally permitted lobstermen to install GPS trackers on their boats to collect data that will help manage the industry. Thompson appealed to the high court after losing at the appeals court level.
The Supreme Court formally denied Thompson’s petition on Oct. 5. The decision allows the state to collect “critically important” data, said Carl Wilson, commissioner of the Maine Department of Marine Resources.
“It will inform the lobster stock assessment, enhance offshore enforcement, and support better decision-making in a range of federal management contexts,” Wilson said in a statement.
Thompson’s lawsuit raised questions about the limits of government surveillance and the ways commercial fisheries are managed. Pacific Legal Foundation, which represented Thompson, said in a Tuesday statement that “the fight over whether the government can use industry regulations to sidestep Fourth Amendment protections is far from over.”
The foundation said in a blog post that the court’s decision means some 1,200 Maine lobster fishermen who hold federal permits can be tracked. However, the legal battle over government surveillance isn’t over, the foundation said.
Environmental groups that have called for more commercial fishing surveillance cheered the decision. Some have said the industry needs to be monitored more closely to protect rare North Atlantic right whales, which are vulnerable to getting entangled in fishing gear. Others have said the declining lobster population needs to be more closely monitored.
“New England’s lobster population has declined dangerously,” said Conservation Law Foundation associate attorney Sarah Shahabi. “Tracking lobster boats provides the timely and accurate data that regulators need. This decision is a valuable step toward appropriately managing this iconic species.”
Most of the U.S. lobster catch comes to the docks in Maine, where lobster fishing is a key piece of the state’s history and culture. Catch at the docks is often worth more than $500 million annually.
The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear Thompson’s case was one of two federal court rulings against lobster fishermen this month. The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled against a group of fishing industry businesses and trade organizations that sued the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. The plaintiffs sued the aquarium for defamation after its Seafood Watch program placed American and Canadian lobster on its do-no-eat “red list.”
By Patrick Whittle, Associated Press
Banner image: Lobster boats sit at their moorings in Jonesport, Maine, April 28, 2023. Image courtesy of Robert F. Bukaty via Associated Press
Fishers have caught at least 440 invasive lionfish off the coast of Porto Seguro in northeastern Brazil in recent weeks. The local government paid fishers to harvest the fish in an attempt to curb the rapid spread of a species that can decimate native fish stocks, Mariana Martins writes for Mongabay Brasil.
Lionfish (Pterois volitans), which are native to the Indo-Pacific and Red Sea, have no natural predators along Brazil’s coastline and are preying upon the young of local species. The fish have already damaged coral reef ecosystems in the North Atlantic, including the Caribbean. Now they have also reportedly reached the Abrolhos reefs, the largest and richest reef system in the South Atlantic.
“By preying on juveniles of commercially exploited species, there is a depletion of fish populations,” Carlos Hackradt, biologist and coordinator of the Marine Ecology and Conservation Laboratory at the Federal University of Southern Bahia, told Martins. “This brings serious consequences for the ecosystem, affects the fishing economy and harms tourism on degraded reefs.”
Abrolhos is home to mushroom-shaped coral structures, locally known as chapeirões, and supports at least 90 coral and 266 fish species, including the goliath grouper (Epinephelus itajara) and blue parrotfish (Scarus coeruleus), which are nationally listed as critically endangered and endangered, respectively. Abrolhos is also the main breeding and nursing ground for humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) in the Western South Atlantic.
While the presence of lionfish there has been confirmed, their extent has not yet been measured.
“It has only just happened,” Hackradt said. “We are gathering the first information in the far south [where the reef system is located] to understand the severity and indicate to the authorities which measures are feasible.”
Lionfish reproduce very quickly, and the species may still move further south down Brazil’s coast and into the waters of other Brazilian states, he said.
The lionfish invasion was first detected near Porto Seguro in June 2026. The environment department of the municipality quickly joined forces with the local fishing association, Colônia Z-22, to fight it.
Since August 2026, the city government has been paying 10 Brazilian reais ($1.90) for every lionfish caught and delivered to Colônia Z-22. Researchers at the Federal University of Southern Bahia have analyzed the stomach contents of 430 of them to understand their impact on local marine life.
Researchers are also studying how viable the lionfish are for human consumption. They are considered a delicacy in some regions, but the species stores a venomous substance in its glands, connected to the 18 spines along its back. The venom doesn’t reach the animal’s flesh but it requires careful preparation to be safe to eat.
Banner image: Lionfish captured off the coast of Porto Seguro in Bahia state, northeastern Brazil. Image courtesy of Lecomar/UFSB.
Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
The jaguarundi was recently recategorized from least concern to near threatened on the IUCN Red List, reports contributor Sean Mowbray for Mongabay.
The small cat, which ranges from Mexico to southern Brazil and Argentina and lives in a variety of habitats, is in decline due to human-wildlife conflict, dangerous roadways, attacks by dogs, and infectious disease, according to researchers.
The reclassification of the jaguarundi (Herpailurus yagouaroundi) to a higher threat category may be surprising because it’s one of the most frequently seen small cats in the Americas, as it’s active during the daytime and often lives in open areas.
“It’s easier to be seen and because of that, people perceived it as common,” said Tadeu de Oliveira, who led the assessment as co-chair of the Cat Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority. “But when you quantify it data-wise, it shows to be otherwise.”
Conservationists say they hope the reclassification will give the jaguarundi more attention. Its otter-like appearance, color variants, and wide range of vocalizations make it an especially charismatic species.
Read the full story by Sean Mowbray here.
Banner image: Jaguarundis are sometimes known as the “otter cat” due to their distinctive, uncat-like appearance. They’re unique for their wide range of vocalizations, including “chirping” like a bird. Image by Wild Cats Brazil-Americas Conservation Program/Gatos do Mato.
Seven of Brazil’s nine Amazonian states are set to be governed by politicians aligned with far-right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, Karla Mendes and Lucas Berti reported for Mongabay Brasil.
On Oct. 25, Brazil will have an electoral face-off between the top two candidates for several races that were not able to secure more than 50% of the vote in the first round of the elections.
The second round election includes the decision for president, where incumbent leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is up against Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro who is barred from public office after being convicted of planning a coup d’état in 2022. The second vote will also define many of the state governments in the Brazilian Amazon.
In the first round on Oct. 4, five candidates won a clear majority and have already been elected. Mato Grosso, an agricultural state in the southwest of the Brazilian Amazon, elected agribusinessman Otaviano Pivetta, aligned with the right-wing party Republicanos.
Pará elected Daniel Santos, known as Dr. Daniel, with the Podemos party. He has promised to designate Vinícius Borba to lead the environment department. Borba is a lawyer who gained notoriety for representing farmers illegally raising cattle on Indigenous land.
In Roraima, Brazil’s northernmost state that borders Venezuela and Guyana, nearly 70% of voters elected Arthur Henrique, affiliated with Flávio Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party. He previously served as the popular mayor of the state’s capital city, Boa Vista. He supports legalizing mining in Indigenous territories.
The state of Rondônia, which borders Bolivia in the western Brazilian Amazon, also elected a Liberal Party candidate, Marcos Rogério.
The only exception so far to the pro-Bolsonaro dominance among Amazonian governors is the state of Maranhão, where the elected governor Eduardo Braide has chosen to remain neutral regarding presidential support.
In Amapá state, in the eastern Amazon, the elected governor Antônio Paulo de Oliveira Furlan has not publicly declared support for either presidential candidate, but his campaign is supported by the Liberal Party.
Three states, Amazonas, Acre and Tocantins, will have their state governors decided by the second round of voting. In Acre and Tocantins states, both candidates still in the running support Flávio Bolsonaro.
Amazonas state may be the second of all nine Amazonian states to elect a Lula-allied governor, as candidate Omar Aziz led the popular vote.
Adriana Ramos, executive director of the environmental nonprofit Instituto Socioambiental, told Mongabay Brasil that changes in the political landscape may bring back “the expansion of illegal activities, the presence of organized crime and the lack of control over the exploitation of natural resources” that marked Jair Bolsonaro’s government from 2019-2022.
“We are concerned because we know that Indigenous, quilombola and riverside communities will be the first to be impacted,” the current Minister of Indigenous Peoples Eloy Terena told Mongabay Brasil.
Banner image: Far-right presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro. Image courtesy of Edilson Rodrigues/Agência Senado.
The Iranian spider-tailed horned viper, a rare snake endemic to western Iran, hunts by holding its body completely still while twitching its tail. Its body camouflages among the rocks of its semi-arid Zagros Mountains habitat, but its bulbous tail with accompanying leg-like scales looks remarkably like a large chunky spider.
The snake, Pseudocerastes urarachnoides, uses its spider tail to lure unsuspecting mammals and birds to their last meal. Scans of a specimen collected in 1968 and kept in the Field Museum of Natural History in Illinois, United States, now reveal what the lure is made of.
“The tip actually consists of enlarged, elongated and modified scales, which are unique among all living reptiles,” lead author Georgios Georgalis, an associate professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals in Kraków, Poland, told Mongabay by email.
Vipers have attracted the interest of researchers for centuries, Georgalis said, but knowledge of the group’s morphology is still limited. Scientists described P. urarachnoides for science in 2006, but only this year did they publish a high-resolution 3D scan to see the mechanism inside the snake’s tail as part of a scientific study.
The tail filaments, the authors said, loosely resemble those found on some ornithodiran archosaurs and other forms from the Triassic and Jurassic periods. This doesn’t mean that they are related, it’s more likely a case of convergent evolution: similar environmental demands pushing the evolutionary development of similar characteristics.
The findings suggest that reptile skin and scales have a “very high” evolutionary potential to develop complex appendage-like structures, according to Hossein Nabizadeh, a herpetologist at Razi University in Iran not involved in the study.
Nabizadeh, who is also a member of the IUCN SSC Snake Specialist Group, told Mongabay by email that scientists have observed less elaborate, “intermediate,” tail modifications in related vipers in the wild, offering clues to how the spider-tailed viper’s complex lure evolved.
The recent finding, Nabizadeh said, reinforces the hypothesis that snake tails gradually evolved this luring behavior. “First a change in color or simple tail movement, then the appearance of a few filamentous scales.”
Researchers have not yet studied the skeletons of the genus’ two other species, the Iranian horned viper (P. persicus), and Field’s horned viper (P. fieldi), in similar detail.
But field observations suggest the Iranian horned viper, one of the spider-tailed horned viper’s closest relatives, has a slightly modified tail too, albeit much less developed and complex, Nabizadeh said.
“Caudal luring behavior is also observed in other vipers, but in P. urarachnoides it has reached the peak of morphological complexity.”
Banner image: The spider-tail horned viper (Pseudocerastes urarachnoides) in western Iran. Image courtesy of Hossein Nabizadeh.
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