‘Lost’ parrot rediscovered on remote Indonesian peak (June 16, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/06/lost-parrot-rediscovered-on-remote-indonesian-peak/
Following a grueling 14-day trek, a team of mountaineers and conservationists has photographed the elusive blue-fronted lorikeet in the highlands of eastern Indonesia’s Buru Island. This is only the second photographed record of the parrot in more than 100 years, according to bird conservation groups. The blue-fronted lorikeet (Charmosynopsis toxopei) is a small species found […]
Himalayan rivers shifting course as climate warming thaws the ‘Water Tower of Asia’ (June 16, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/06/himalayan-rivers-shifting-course-as-climate-warming-thaws-the-water-tower-of-asia/
Rivers are known to naturally meander, change courses, braid and branch. But as rising temperatures melt glaciers and thaw frozen ground, the courses of Himalayan rivers are shifting and changing shape much more rapidly than before, according to a new study published in the journal Science. The rising instability of the rivers could pose a […]
In Bangladesh, scientists learn what happens after rescued pangolins return to the wild (June 16, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/2026/06/in-bangladesh-scientists-learn-what-happens-after-rescued-pangolins-return-to-the-wild/
- Chinese pangolins are one of the most trafficked mammals on Earth.
- In Bangladesh, scientists are tracking rescued and released individuals to learn about their ecology, behavior and habitat requirements.
- Using radio trackers, camera traps and burrow surveys, researchers found these elusive animals stay surprisingly close to home, and readily integrate with wild populations, even sharing burrows with other species.
- With very little known about the species, every new insight could help conservation teams better protect them across their range in Asia.
Peter Klopfer, the scientist whose civil-rights case helped bring lemurs to Duke (June 16, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/2026/06/peter-klopfer-the-scientist-whose-civil-rights-case-helped-bring-lemurs-to-duke/
- Peter Klopfer, a Duke zoologist and co-founder of the Duke Lemur Center, died on June 5th at 95.
- A Quaker pacifist and civil-rights activist, he refused the Korean War draft, supported student protesters in North Carolina, and was arrested during a 1963 integration protest.
- His Supreme Court case, Klopfer v. North Carolina, extended the Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial to state courts.
- The legal-defense fund created after his arrest helped connect him with John Buettner-Janusch, leading to the arrival of lemurs at Duke and the creation of what became the Duke Lemur Center.
Global map of Earth’s mycorrhizal fungal networks could help protect them (June 15, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/06/global-map-of-earths-mycorrhizal-fungal-networks-could-help-protect-them/
Fungi are living below your feet. Roughly 110 quadrillion kilometers of living fungal threads are woven through the world’s soils. Stretched end-to-end they would cover a distance nearly a billion times that from Earth to the sun. Now, scientists have mapped where those networks are, how dense they are, and what threatens them. Last year, […]
Australian authorities seize 100,000 live cockroaches in crackdown on exotic insect trade (June 15, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/2026/06/australian-authorities-seize-100000-live-cockroaches-in-crackdown-on-exotic-insect-trade/
- Australian authorities seized more than 100,000 exotic cockroaches from a breeder in New South Wales.
- The confiscated insects include Madagascar hissing cockroaches, endemic to the island country of Madagascar, and dubia roaches, which are popular both as reptile food and collected as pets.
- Importing exotic insects is illegal in Australia, as they can become invasive or carry disease, and they cannot be legally kept, bred or sold.
- The seizure highlights the unregulated but growing trade in invertebrates across the world, especially as food for increasingly popular reptile pets.
Lawmakers fight to stop the Trump administration’s dismantling of a $386M ocean observatory project (June 15, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/06/lawmakers-fight-to-stop-the-trump-administrations-dismantling-of-a-386m-ocean-observatory-project/
SEATTLE (AP) — Lawmakers are demanding the National Science Foundation stop dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a $386 million ocean monitoring network being wound down under President Donald Trump’s administration. House Democrats on two committees call the action illegal. Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley says he’s drafting legislation to freeze the removal of instruments until a […]
We must prevent the next pandemic, not build perfect conditions for it (commentary) (June 15, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/2026/06/we-must-prevent-the-next-pandemic-not-build-perfect-conditions-for-it-commentary/
- How the world reacted to the recent disease outbreaks tells us more about inequity than about epidemiology, a new op-ed argues.
- Beside the lopsided coverage of affected populations, both outbreaks point to the fact that these events are not isolated biological accidents, but predictable consequences of the ecological, economic, and political systems we have built.
- “The first signal of the next outbreak will not come from a high-tech laboratory or a global summit. It will most likely come from a ranger deep in a protected forest, a community health worker in a remote village, or a hunter reporting a dead chimpanzee along a forest trail. The question is whether the world is willing to invest in listening before the crisis reaches everyone else,” the author writes.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.
Growing appetite for açaí is damaging bird diversity in the Amazon (June 15, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/2026/06/growing-appetite-for-acai-is-damaging-bird-diversity-in-the-amazon/
- A newly published study has found a 28% decline in bird species richness in Amazonian areas with high densities of açaí palms.
- Farmers are clearing away native trees and understory vegetation to plant more açaí palms as demand soars, in the process destroying vital habitats for both fruit- and insect-eating birds.
- While açaí is marketed as a sustainable “superfood,” exports from Brazil’s Pará state have surged by 885% in a decade, raising concerns about predatory monoculture.
Plastic food packaging blankets the world’s coastlines, study finds (June 15, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/2026/06/plastic-food-packaging-blankets-the-worlds-coastlines-study-finds/
- A new study analyzed thousands of shoreline litter surveys and other data from more than 100 countries to produce the first global index of macroplastic pollution by type.
- The study found food and beverage plastics were the most common litter type for 93% of countries surveyed, followed by plastic bags and cigarettes; the pattern was consistent across countries, regardless of waste management infrastructure.
- Plastic pollution harms marine life and disrupts ecological services provided by coastal ecosystems like mangroves, coral reefs and seagrass.
- Researchers call for reducing production, warning that waste management alone will not solve the global plastic pollution problem.
The Future of Suriname’s Rainforests (June 15, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/specials/2026/06/the-future-of-surinames-rainforests/
Suriname remains an outlier in the Amazon Basin: more than 90% of the country is still covered by rainforest, making it one of the few nations in the world that remains a net carbon sink. But a wave of development proposals — from large-scale agriculture and Mennonite farming settlements, to mining projects and new carbon […]
How courtrooms are deciding the fate of whales (June 15, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/06/how-courtrooms-are-deciding-the-fate-of-whales/
Legal courtrooms are becoming a new battleground in the fight to save whales. In New Zealand, the proposed Tohorā Oranga Bill could recognize whales as legal persons — building on Pacific Indigenous efforts like He Whakaputanga Moana. This push to obtain legal rights for whales is part of the fast-growing ‘Rights of Nature’ movement. But […]
Australia establishes the first Sea Country Indigenous Protected Area (June 15, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/06/australia-establishes-the-first-sea-country-indigenous-protected-area/
Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. For the Karajarri people of Kimberley in northwestern Australia, the coastline, reefs, wetlands, beaches and desert-edge country form one estate, held through law, memory, work and obligation. That relationship now has new recognition, reports Mongabay’s John Cannon. In […]
The quest to reconnect imperiled rainforest in West Africa (June 15, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/2026/06/the-quest-to-reconnect-imperiled-rainforest-in-west-africa/
- Conservationists working with the official national parks agency in Côte d’Ivoire are planning to create an ecological corridor linking Taï National Park with Grebo National Park in neighboring Liberia.
- The corridor has support from the Ivorian village of Nigré, where residents will grow native trees alongside their crops to facilitate animal movements.
- Animals that will likely benefit include the bongo; like other antelopes in Taï, they are believed to play a key role in helping to disperse seeds to ensure forest regeneration.
- Stitching together the surviving parts of West Africa’s Upper Guinean rainforest could help ensure this ecosystem and its inhabitants thrive.
The bats that pollinate for tequila: Photo of the week (June 15, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/06/the-bats-that-pollinate-for-tequila-photo-of-the-week/
A Mexican long-tongued bat, featured above, flies into the blooms of an agave plant, a feeding and pollination technique used to reach nectar. The bats (Choeronycteris mexicana) have unusually long tongues to access nectar while their impact spreads pollen grains everywhere to pollinate nearby agave. Peter Hudson, a professor of biology at Penn State University, […]
Destructive ‘wrong stories’ drive environmental exploitation, Indigenous scholar says (June 15, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/06/destructive-wrong-stories-drive-environmental-exploitation-indigenous-scholar-says/
A new book from Indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta of Australia explores how human narratives dictate how modern society governs itself and, crucially, how it exploits or protects the natural world. “It’s a terrible thing to … misrepresent things, make false claims, bear false witness in a way that is bending story, the story that everybody […]
In Thailand, EUDR pressure on small-scale rubber farmers prompts private-sector assistance (June 15, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/2026/06/in-thailand-eudr-pressure-on-small-scale-rubber-farmers-prompts-private-sector-assistance/
- Small-scale farmers who underpin Thailand’s lucrative natural rubber industry are under pressure to prepare for the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), due to take effect at the end of the year.
- From geolocation data to legal documentation, smallholders will have to provide evidence their products are deforestation-free if they want to continue supplying European markets.
- With the industry dependent on smallholder production, private intermediary firms are stepping in to help farmers comply through bespoke tech-based traceability platforms.
- Experts say while the EUDR’s focus on reducing deforestation risks is significant, effective implementation will depend on collaboration across the supply chain and meaningful investment in small-scale producers.
Tony Parkes, the banker who replanted a rainforest (June 14, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/2026/06/tony-parkes-the-banker-who-replanted-a-rainforest/
- Tony Parkes left a successful career in investment banking and devoted three decades to restoring the Big Scrub, the once-vast subtropical rainforest of northern New South Wales.
- After moving to the Northern Rivers, he and his wife Rowena planted tens of thousands of trees on their own land, turning private restoration into a public cause.
- As co-founder and longtime president of Big Scrub Rainforest Conservancy, he helped unite landholders, scientists, bush regenerators, donors and volunteers around a disciplined model of rainforest recovery.
- His work helped protect remnants, plant millions of trees, strengthen restoration science and make the recovery of the Big Scrub part of the region’s civic life.
Amazon deforestation alerts fall to lowest 12-month level since 2014, show Brazilian data (June 14, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/2026/06/amazon-deforestation-alerts-fall-to-lowest-12-month-level-since-2014-show-brazilian-data/
- INPE’s DETER alert system detected 370 square kilometers of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon in May, down from 960 square kilometers in May 2025.
- Over the past 12 months, DETER registered 3,182 square kilometers of deforestation, the lowest total for any 12-month period in the system’s record dating back to July 2014.
- Independent monitoring by Imazon shows a similar downward trend, reinforcing evidence that forest clearing has continued to decline.
- Scientists warn that a likely strong El Niño could still increase drought, fire and forest degradation risks, even if clear-cutting remains low.
Robert Ricklefs, ecologist who helped generations understand nature, has died at 83 (June 13, 2026)
https://news.mongabay.com/2026/06/robert-ricklefs-ecologist-who-helped-generations-understand-nature-has-died-at-83/
- Robert “Bob” Ricklefs, who died on June 7th, a day after his 83rd birthday, helped shape modern ecology through his work on birds, island biogeography, life histories, and biodiversity.
- His textbooks, Ecology and The Economy of Nature, introduced generations of students to the field with uncommon clarity and breadth.
- He believed that careful observation and field experience remained essential to science, even as ecology became more model-driven and publication-focused.
- Colleagues and students remembered him as exacting, generous, independent-minded, and gentle in manner while firm in judgment.