A small population of dolphins in Shark Bay in Western Australia have a documented history of using an unusual tool to help them catch fish: Large, empty snail shells. For the first time, scientists have now observed the same behavior in a different dolphin population on Australia’s east coast.

Researchers even filmed a baby dolphin and its mother using a shell to capture fish, suggesting the baby may have learned the skill from its mother — this hadn’t been observed before now, they write in a recent study.

“The second I saw it [on the east coast], I was like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, this is huge,” study lead author Alexis Levengood, a lecturer of animal ecology at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia, told Mongabay in a video call.

In a behavior called “shelling,” bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) can chase fish into large empty sea snail shells, stick their beak inside to trap the fish, and then raise the shell to the water’s surface where the fish slides out into the dolphin’s mouth.

“It essentially gives them a competitive edge over other dolphins that aren’t using this type of tool use because it makes it easier for them to catch harder-to-catch fish,” Levengood said.

The behavior was first described in 2011 when researchers found roughly 2% of dolphins in Shark Bay demonstrated the skill. It was believed to be a localized behavior until Levengood confirmed three dolphins in Great Sandy Marine Park, Queensland, using the same technique in 2025. The researchers note that photographers aboard a tour boat took photos of dolphins shelling in the same area in 2013 and 2019.

The two dolphin populations on opposite sides of Australia don’t migrate, so the Queensland dolphins couldn’t have directly learned the skill from the Shark Bay population, Levengood said.

She added that while it’s possible the behavior is common, but not observed by trained scientists, their “leading theory is that it’s independently innovated.”

Both dolphin populations live in bays with shallow water and large gastropod shells — the right environments to innovate “shelling,” Levengood said.

In Shark Bay, scientists believe dolphins learned the behavior from peers. In Great Sandy Marine Park, Levengood’s team observed a dolphin calf repeat the behavior immediately after its mother.

“It’s pretty exciting because it gives us a different insight into how this is learned,” Levengood said.

Some dolphins are also known to put sea sponges on their beaks to protect delicate skin while foraging on the rocky seafloor. “Sponging” is a challenging skill, Levengood said, and one that dolphins can only learn from their mothers as babies. “Shelling” is easier to master and can be learned as a baby from mom or from peers later in life.

Levengood said such behavioral flexibility “shows how incredibly intelligent the dolphins are.”

Banner image: An adult dolphin “shelling.”  Image courtesy of the University of the Sunshine Coast Australia.

Aug. 19 is World Orangutan Day, a day to honor the three species of Southeast Asian great apes, all of which are classified as critically endangered by the IUCN, the global conservation authority.

Orangutans were classified into two species: The Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) found in northern Sumatra, Indonesia, and the Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), endemic to its namesake island. But in 2017, scientists described the Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis) as a third, distinct species, also found in northern Sumatra.

Here are the major orangutan developments over the past year:

Whirlwind year for Tapanuli orangutans

In September 2025, researchers confirmed a previously unknown Tapanuli population in a peat swamp forest in the Lumut Maju village forest in North Sumatra.

Scientists previously believed the species, estimated at 716 wild individuals, lived only in Batang Toru, about 32 kilometers (20 miles) east of the new population.

Two months later, Cyclone Senyar triggered tens of thousands of landslides in Batang Toru and killed an estimated 58 Tapanuli orangutans.

Habitat destruction for small-scale agriculture and logging accounts for around 70% of direct forest loss. Large-scale industrial projects, including the Batang Toru hydropower plant and the Martabe gold mine, are also encroaching into the orangutans’ range.

Newborn Sumatran orangutan’s mother saved from trafficking

In July 2026, a formerly trafficked Sumatran orangutan named Bulan gave birth in the wild seven years after being reintroduced. Her infant was the 10th confirmed birth from reintroduced orangutans at the Jantho reservation in Aceh, Indonesia’s westernmost province.

“This birth demonstrates how orangutans, once victims of the wildlife trade, can be given a second chance to live and reproduce in the wild,” Ujang Wisnu Barata, head of the Aceh provincial conservation agency, told Mongabay contributor Ayat S. Karokaro. “Successes like this can only continue if their habitat remains protected.”

Female orangutans breed only once every seven or eight years, the longest interval between births of any mammal.

Despite conservation successes, a 2026 orangutan population assessment estimated the Sumatran population fell 19.5% between 2011 and 2023.

Bornean orangutans face pressure from palm oil and fire

Bornean orangutan habitats faced significant losses from palm oil expansion and fires over the last year.

A palm oil company cleared more than 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) of forest in a UNESCO biosphere reserve, Mongabay reported in March.

In May, fires consumed more than half of a 300-hectare (740-acre) orangutan habitat restoration effort in Indonesia’s West Kalimantan province.

Another fire hit the edge of an orangutan rehabilitation center in August, which raises concerns about further fires in the coming months as El Niño is expected to exacerbate drought in the region.

Banner image: Sumatran orangutan. Image © naturalistnatasha via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Agents of Brazil’s Indigenous agency, FUNAI, spent 60 days in June and July 2026 physically marking the borders of the Rio Pardo Kawahiva Indigenous Territory. The 411,000-hectare (1 million-acre) area in the Amazon biome of Mato Grosso state is home to the Kawahiva, an isolated Indigenous group.

The government agency confirmed the presence of the Indigenous group in 1999 and began demarcating its territory in 2001.

“The uncontacted Kawahiva have been under threat in their own forest home for decades, while simply trying to exercise their right to live as they choose without contact,” Caroline Pearce, director of the UK-based NGO Survival International, said in a statement.

The territory has been invaded by land-grabbers and loggers, causing deforestation. Historically, the Kawahiva territory was intermittently protected via temporary land protection orders, which faced opposition from logging companies.

To officially demarcate the territory, FUNAI agents opened a path around the land and installed roughly 140 signs at strategic locations, FUNAI agents told Mongabay. 

“Here in our region, all owners of plots of land do this,” Jair Candor, coordinator of the FUNAI unit that safeguards the Kawahiva, told Mongabay in an audio message. “The limits of land are marked by opening a path around that territory, whether it belongs to the white man or to an Indigenous person.”  

The last known invasion of the territory was in 2023 when a farmer cleared 4-5 hectares (10-12 acres) of Kawahiva land, Candor said. When confronted, the farmer noted that there were no physical markers identifying the Indigenous land.

“The physical demarcation is for this purpose,” Candor said. “So that people can identify that there is an Indigenous land there and a people who inhabits it and needs that territory.”

Physically marking the territory is the penultimate step to full legal recognition. The only thing remaining is for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to sign a decree formally creating the Indigenous territory.

The president’s office told Mongabay by email that the administration is awaiting Supreme Court decisions concerning the marco temporal, a controversial cutoff date for Indigenous land claims, before proceeding with further land recognition to ensure legal certainty.

“If we can keep it the way it is there, without invasions, they will be OK,” Candor said, adding that monitoring expeditions indicate the forest still provides sufficient game, fish, honey and other food sources for the Kawahiva to survive on the land. “They are also human and just need a place where they can live in peace, like everyone else.”

Banner image: The first sign demarcating the Rio Pardo Kawahiva Indigenous Territory. Image courtesy of FUNAI.

New research suggests a “massive and untapped” opportunity for conservation within commercial concessions in Southeast Asia, reports Mongabay’s Carolyn Cowan.

Using satellite data, researchers identified roughly 42 million hectares (104 million acres) of intact forest still standing inside logging, timber, rubber and oil palm concessions across Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Myanmar. The study suggests that clearing these forests — an area larger than the whole of Malaysia — could release 1.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions over the next 30 years.

Incentivizing concession holders to protect these forests instead of converting them for commodity production presents a big opportunity for conservation, the study says.

“A substantial portion of Southeast Asia’s remaining forest lies within concession landscapes,” study lead author Annabel Lim, a Ph.D. student at the National University of Singapore, said in an interview with Mongabay. “Meeting climate and biodiversity goals will, therefore, require engaging the concession owners as potential conservation partners”.

However, the study notes that relying strictly on carbon markets to incentivize concession holders to choose conservation is economically unviable at current carbon prices.

Currently, carbon credits issued for avoided deforestation in Southeast Asia, trade at just $5 to $12 per metric ton, according to the World Bank’s 2026 State and Trends of Carbon Pricing report. To make conservation financially competitive with agricultural or logging, the researchers calculated that carbon prices would need to reach between $33 and $1,677 per metric ton of carbon dioxide.

Yiwen Zeng, a conservation scientist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and senior author of the study, said in an email to Mongabay that while carbon finance has an important role to play, “it will not be sufficient on its own to protect all remaining forests in concessions”.

Instead, the study highlights the need for a broader mix of green finance, including blended finance, green bonds, payments for ecosystems services and biodiversity credits.

Matthew Struebig, a conservation scientist at the University of Kent in the U.K., who was not involved in the research, said several regulatory barriers must be overcome to achieve conservation. Many regional governments in Southeast Asia require concession holders to develop land to retain their licenses and they might hesitate to protect forests if it could trigger land forfeiture.

“Without regulatory reform that allows companies to re-categorise their land, even the highest carbon price in the world won’t convince a company to risk their underlying land tenure,” Struebig told Mongabay. 

For conservation to succeed, the authors said that governments, banks and corporations must reform concession policies and redirect harmful financial flows, such as agricultural subsidies and industrial logging loans, toward forest preservation.

Read the full story by Carolyn Cowan here.

Banner image: Oil palm and rubber plantations dominate landscapes across many parts of Southeast Asia as photographed here in Thailand. Image by Carolyn Cowan/Mongabay.

KANDERSTEG, Switzerland (AP) — An unstable mountain rock formation looming above the Swiss village of Kandersteg threatens a landslide that could rival the disaster that destroyed nearby Blatten last year, a collapse scientists linked to thawing permafrost and glacier dynamics.

The 1,300 residents of Kandersteg, in Switzerland’s Bern canton, live amid a quintessential Alpine landscape of sharp peaks, white glaciers, steep green valleys and the distant sound of cowbells.

But a catastrophe looms over the quiet village: a mountainside rock formation called Spitze Stei, part of a mountain landscape increasingly affected by thawing permafrost, threatens to collapse into the valley in a massive landslide.

“You are aware that it’s happening, but not afraid,” said Brigitte Jüni, an inhabitant of Kandersteg. She said authorities took all the precautions they could.

“But then it’s nature. It’s nature and you never know,” Jüni added.

As glaciers and permafrost — the frozen soil sediment and rock that acts like a glue holding mountains together — melt due to higher temperatures caused by climate change, the threat of landslides is rising in the Swiss Alps.

In May 2025, a huge mass of rock and ice from a glacier thundered down the mountainside in the nearby Loetschental valley, sending plumes of dust skyward and coating with mud nearly all of Blatten, which had been evacuated earlier as a precaution.

Markus Stoffel, professor for climate change and natural risks at the University of Geneva, said climate change leads to the melting of both glaciers and permafrost.

“In the mountains and in the unconsolidated debris, there is lots of ice,” Stoffel said. “Once this ice is melting, it acts like a cement. These mountain slopes will become increasingly unstable.”

Locals in Kandersteg say their situation is different from Blatten and that preparations made already allow them to live calmly.

“This isn’t the same case as in Blatten. It’s a different situation,” said local resident Rudolf Isler. “We are not afraid of the Spitze Stei rock. It’s been many years seeing stones falling from up there. The problem here is about global warming and rising temperatures.”

If the entire unstable section of the Spitze Stei — estimated at roughly 15–20 million cubic meters — were to collapse, it would trigger a massive natural disaster. But the rock is under constant monitoring, evacuation plans are prepared and experts say the rock is more likely to break down gradually than in one huge chunk.

Nathan Solothurnmann, a climate and energy expert for Greenpeace Switzerland, says that climate change means landslides or avalanches will become more common.

“Maybe even one day we will have to abandon certain valleys or certain villages because it’s becoming impossible to live there,” Solothurnmann said. “Or the measure you will need to take to protect infrastructure is so expensive, the efforts are so big, that it’s not worthwhile anymore living there.”

By Hernán Muñoz, Associated Press

Banner image: Areal view of the village center of Kandersteg, Switzerland, Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2026. Image courtesy of Hernán Muñoz, Associated Press.

Until 2020, 99% of Liberia’s Grand Gedeh county was covered by natural forests. Since then, cacao farms have rapidly encroached on those forests, reports Mongabay’s Ashoka Mukpo.

Grand Gedeh in southeastern Liberia borders Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest exporter of cacao beans. Much of Côte d’Ivoire’s forests have been cleared for cacao and many of its cacao plantations are now ageing and nutrient poor. That’s prompted cacao workers from Côte d’Ivoire to turn their attention to Liberia, where landowners have offered them their land in exchange for a share in cocoa earnings.

Data from Global Forest Watch show that in 2025, Grand Gedeh lost more forest than any other Liberian county in a single year since 2002.

“In Côte d’Ivoire there are no forests, that’s why I came to Liberia,” said Mohammed, a cacao farm worker near the town of Zleh in Grand Gedeh’s Gbarzon district.

Around Zleh, roughly 82% of the community’s 6,900 hectares (17,000 acres) of customary forest land have been given over to cacao, Zleh’s town chief said.

Yei Neagor, in charge of the regional headquarters of Liberia’s Forestry Development Authority (FDA) in Zwedru, Grand Gedeh’s capital, told Mongabay that Gbarzon has seen the worst forest loss in the county. “I will be honest to tell you that about 70% of the forest there is gone,” she said.

Forests in southeastern Liberia are communally owned, and laws regulate how private individuals can lease them for commercial agriculture. In practice, those laws aren’t being followed, said Ashai Wulu Gaye, chair of a community forest in Grand Gedeh.

Commercial cacao farming is also currently banned inside most FDA-registered community forests.

Still, residents of Boundary, a town inside a 48,600-hectare (120,000-acre) FDA-registered community forest in Konobo, a district neighboring Gbarzon, told Mongabay they recruited migrant workers to cultivate cacao after they saw it transforming lives in other communities. Boundary residents have used the income to fix the roofs of their homes and send their children to school abroad.

“It is not legal, I agree. But I live on the land,” said Prince Tarley, a youth leader in Boundary. “If you say I shouldn’t do cocoa, what do you expect me to do? I need something to live.”

In 2025, an investigation by the Liberian environmental news outlet The Daylight found government officials in Grand Gedeh had been involved in an illegal land transaction with a cocoa entrepreneur from Côte d’Ivoire.

“My experience with these situations is that there is always a line from that local guy who’s making the case about his livelihood being in jeopardy that comes up to some big shot somewhere up the chain,” Silas Siakor, a long-time environmentalist and community rights advocate, told Mongabay.

Read the full story by Ashoka Mukpo here.

Banner image: A migrant worker in a cacao farm in Grand Gedeh, Liberia. Image by Ashoka Mukpo/Mongabay.