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It’s the world’s rarest ape. Now a billion-dollar dig for gold threatens its future

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Tuesday, December 9, 2025

A small brown line snakes its way through the rainforest in northern Sumatra, carving 300 metres through dense patches of meranti trees, oak and mahua. Picked up by satellites, the access road – though modest now – will soon extend 2km to connect with the Tor Ulu Ala pit, an expansion site of Indonesia’s Martabe mine. The road will help to unlock valuable deposits of gold, worth billions of dollars in today’s booming market. But such wealth could come at a steep cost to wildlife and biodiversity: the extinction of the world’s rarest ape, the Tapanuli orangutan.This is absolutely the wrong place to be digging for goldAmanda Hurowitz, Mighty EarthThe network of access roads planned for this swath of tropical rainforest will cut through habitat critical to the survival of the orangutans, scientists say. The Tapanuli (Pongo tapanuliensis), unique to Indonesia, was only discovered by scientists to be a separate species in 2017 – distinct from the Sumatran and Bornean apes. Today, there are fewer than 800 Tapanulis left in an area that covers as little as 2.5% of their historical range. All are found in Sumatra’s fragile Batang Toru ecosystem, bordered on its south-west flank by the Martabe mine, which began operations in 2012.“This is absolutely the wrong place to be digging for gold,” says Amanda Hurowitz, who coordinates the forest commodities team at Mighty Earth, a conservation nonprofit monitoring developments at the open-pit mine. “And for what? So mountains of gold bullion bars can sit in the vaults of the world’s richest countries.”Martabe goldmine in the Batang Toru rainforest, the only known habitat of the Tapanuli orangutan, on Sumatra island. Photograph: Nanang Sujana/AFP/Getty ImagesDozens of orangutan nests lie in the vicinity of the mine’s planned expansion, according to Mighty Earth. In late September, construction began on new access roads through the forest around Martabe mine, according to PT Agincourt Resources, a subsidiary of the British multinational Jardine Matheson, which operates the mine. One of the new roads running through secondary forest has already come within 70 metres of a cluster of orangutan nests, Mighty Earth says.For Jardine Matheson, which acquired the mine in 2018, expansion is critical to their bottom line. In 2020, the company said it would open up a new pit and build the supporting infrastructure to reach at least 460,000 additional ounces of gold hidden within Tor Ulu Ala. Gold mining is intensifying across the world as companies race to capitalise on near-record prices. At today’s rate of more than $4,000 (£3,000) an ounce, Tor Ulu Ala could generate nearly $2bn.“While we understand the concerns of some critics, without the mine, which is now the income for approximately 3,500 employees – 70% of which are locals that rely on the mine operation – the alternative will be worse,” says Ruli Tanio, the vice-president director of PT Agincourt. “Being responsible miners, we can provide some opportunity for the orangutan in terms of funding.”But many scientists disagree, saying the expansion of the mine could push the critically endangered Tapanuli orangutans to extinction in a few generations. Even removing just 1% of the population a year would ultimately end in extinction, they say, as orangutans only reproduce every six to nine years.“It doesn’t take much – especially if you start killing orangutan females – for the population to go extinct,” says the biological anthropologist Erik Meijaard, director of the scientific consultancy Borneo Futures and one of the first experts to describe the species.A dominant male Tapanuli orangutan in Batang Toru forest. The animals only reproduce every six to nine years. Photograph: Maxime Aliaga/NPLConcerns about Jardine Matheson’s decision to move ahead with expanding the mine – without an agreed plan in place to reduce impacts to the Tapanulis – have spread beyond the scientific community. Last year, Norway’s $1.6tn sovereign wealth fund sold its holdings in three Jardines firms, citing concerns about the company being responsible for “severe environmental damage”.Tapanulis, with their frizzy, cinnamon hair and wide faces, are not only the rarest orangutan, but represent the oldest lineage of all orangutan species – descendants of the first ancestral orangutans that arrived in Sumatra from mainland Asia more than 3m years ago.In Batang Toru, the final holdouts of the species dwell in just three populations – the west block, east block and Sibual-buali reserve – spread across a patch of mountainous forest roughly the size of Rio de Janeiro. (Earlier this year, scientists confirmed they had found a small, isolated cluster of Tapanulis living in a peat swamp about 32km (20 miles) outside Batang Toru.)“We assume [the Tapanuli] was really widespread a couple of hundred years ago,” says Meijaard. But unsustainable hunting and fragmenting of the forest drove the last of the species to seek refuge in the higher elevations of Batang Toru.Even before the proposed mine expansion, the Tapanuli was threatened by development. A Chinese-owned hydroelectric project is being built on the Batang Toru River, which flows north-south along the eastern side of the ecosystem. The dam would affect an area that contains the highest density of Tapanuli orangutans – about 42 individuals – according to one 2019 assessment in the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology.Land cleared ahead of the building of a hydroelectric dam in the Batang Toru rainforest, August 2018. Photograph: Nanang Sujana/AFP/Getty ImagesThe expansion of the Martabe mine represents another blow, squeezing the apes from another side. “The Tapanuli orangutan really cannot afford any losses,” Meijaard says.The Martabe mine was established in 2008, near the western block of Batang Toru where an estimated 533 Tapanulis are thought to live. The mine’s footprint spans about 650 hectares (1,600 acres), with 2 hectares falling within the Batang Toru ecosystem’s “key biodiversity area”, as designated by conservation NGOs in the Alliance for Zero Extinction.The notion the mine can kill an orangutan directly has proven to be quite falsePT Agincourt says it will expand the mine by about 250 hectares (617 acres) by the end of Martabe’s operational lifespan in 2034, building not only the new pit and access roads, but a large tailings-management facility. This growth includes clearing another 48 hectares of mostly primary forest in the key biodiversity area. But the company says it is also setting aside a 2,000-hectare conservation zone within its concession, as well as creating another “offset” protected area about 40km from the mine site.“Without the [mining] revenue from this small area, it will be very hard to carry out the conservation work and the restoration work that is planned,” says Christopher Broadbent, a UK-based sustainability consultant to PT Agincourt. “If the mine were to walk away, the unintended consequences would be almost certainly disastrous for the orangutan.”PT Agincourt estimates its mine’s expansion will directly or indirectly affect between six and 12 orangutans. Tanio says: “Throughout our 13 years of operation, there have been no cases of fatality of orangutan directly from the mining activities.“The notion the mine can kill an orangutan directly has proven to be quite false.”But studies show that even indirect effects can take a toll. Female orangutans are particularly sensitive to habitat loss, as they tend not to move when they lose parts of their home range, leaving them at risk of starvation. PT Agincourt says land clearing will proceed slowly, allowing time for the orangutans to move out of the way.The mine expansion will involve clearing an additional 48 hectares of mostly primary forest in the key biodiversity area by 2034. Photograph: SOCP/Andrew Walmsley/EPA“We don’t know enough to be able to say that every orangutan that moves will find some new forest to call home,” says Phil Aikman, a campaign director at Mighty Earth. Some studies suggest that pushing orangutan groups closer together will lead to social tensions and conflicts. “The big concern here is that mitigation may or may not work.”For the past five years, environmental advocates as well as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), have pushed to delay new construction until a mutually agreed plan is in place to protect the Tapanuli. For a time, Jardine Matheson voluntarily agreed to a moratorium on construction, engaging with the IUCN’s Avoid, Reduce, Restore and Conserve (ARRC) taskforce, which advises companies on how to avoid ape habitats and reduce impacts. But that agreement expired in December 2022.You can plant 10,000 hectares of forest … You can push them fast or push them slow. But you’re still pushing them into competition with other orangutansThe primatologist Genevieve Campbell, who leads the taskforce, says Jardine Matheson had made it impossible to proceed as they were unable to share raw data, including orangutan survey data within the mining permit. Jardines says the Indonesian government prevented the company from sharing that information.But that relationship has improved in recent weeks. In November, PT Agincourt Resources signed a new conditional memorandum of understanding with the ARRC taskforce, allowing their scientists to provide independent input on the mine’s development plans and mitigation strategy.PT Agincourt told the Guardian it would temporarily pause road construction for three weeks to allow the IUCN to complete its review. The planned protection zones, as well as a new orangutan research centre funded by the mine mean the “Tapanuli will be better off with the mine”, Tanio says.A female Tapanuli orangutan with twins in Batang Toru forest. Females are particularly sensitive to habitat loss. Photograph: Courtesy of SOCPCampbell disagrees that the mine’s overall impact will be positive for the Tapanuli. “You cannot say that any great ape species is better with mining than without.”For Meijaard, little can truly compensate for the mine’s effects on the orangutans.“You can plant 10,000 hectares of forest with lots of fruiting trees … so the orangutans potentially have somewhere to go. You can push them fast or you can push them slow. But you’re still pushing them into competition with other orangutans in an area that is, ecologically, quite restrained for the species.”“If we really want to protect the species, we have to aim for zero losses,” he says.Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian app for more nature coverage

Tapanuli orangutans survive only in Indonesia’s Sumatran rainforest where a mine expansion will cut through their home. Yet the mining company says the alternative will be worseA small brown line snakes its way through the rainforest in northern Sumatra, carving 300 metres through dense patches of meranti trees, oak and mahua. Picked up by satellites, the access road – though modest now – will soon extend 2km to connect with the Tor Ulu Ala pit, an expansion site of Indonesia’s Martabe mine. The road will help to unlock valuable deposits of gold, worth billions of dollars in today’s booming market. But such wealth could come at a steep cost to wildlife and biodiversity: the extinction of the world’s rarest ape, the Tapanuli orangutan.The network of access roads planned for this swath of tropical rainforest will cut through habitat critical to the survival of the orangutans, scientists say. The Tapanuli (Pongo tapanuliensis), unique to Indonesia, was only discovered by scientists to be a separate species in 2017 – distinct from the Sumatran and Bornean apes. Today, there are fewer than 800 Tapanulis left in an area that covers as little as 2.5% of their historical range. All are found in Sumatra’s fragile Batang Toru ecosystem, bordered on its south-west flank by the Martabe mine, which began operations in 2012. Continue reading...

A small brown line snakes its way through the rainforest in northern Sumatra, carving 300 metres through dense patches of meranti trees, oak and mahua. Picked up by satellites, the access road – though modest now – will soon extend 2km to connect with the Tor Ulu Ala pit, an expansion site of Indonesia’s Martabe mine. The road will help to unlock valuable deposits of gold, worth billions of dollars in today’s booming market. But such wealth could come at a steep cost to wildlife and biodiversity: the extinction of the world’s rarest ape, the Tapanuli orangutan.

The network of access roads planned for this swath of tropical rainforest will cut through habitat critical to the survival of the orangutans, scientists say. The Tapanuli (Pongo tapanuliensis), unique to Indonesia, was only discovered by scientists to be a separate species in 2017 – distinct from the Sumatran and Bornean apes. Today, there are fewer than 800 Tapanulis left in an area that covers as little as 2.5% of their historical range. All are found in Sumatra’s fragile Batang Toru ecosystem, bordered on its south-west flank by the Martabe mine, which began operations in 2012.

“This is absolutely the wrong place to be digging for gold,” says Amanda Hurowitz, who coordinates the forest commodities team at Mighty Earth, a conservation nonprofit monitoring developments at the open-pit mine. “And for what? So mountains of gold bullion bars can sit in the vaults of the world’s richest countries.”

Martabe goldmine in the Batang Toru rainforest, the only known habitat of the Tapanuli orangutan, on Sumatra island. Photograph: Nanang Sujana/AFP/Getty Images

Dozens of orangutan nests lie in the vicinity of the mine’s planned expansion, according to Mighty Earth. In late September, construction began on new access roads through the forest around Martabe mine, according to PT Agincourt Resources, a subsidiary of the British multinational Jardine Matheson, which operates the mine. One of the new roads running through secondary forest has already come within 70 metres of a cluster of orangutan nests, Mighty Earth says.

For Jardine Matheson, which acquired the mine in 2018, expansion is critical to their bottom line. In 2020, the company said it would open up a new pit and build the supporting infrastructure to reach at least 460,000 additional ounces of gold hidden within Tor Ulu Ala. Gold mining is intensifying across the world as companies race to capitalise on near-record prices. At today’s rate of more than $4,000 (£3,000) an ounce, Tor Ulu Ala could generate nearly $2bn.

“While we understand the concerns of some critics, without the mine, which is now the income for approximately 3,500 employees – 70% of which are locals that rely on the mine operation – the alternative will be worse,” says Ruli Tanio, the vice-president director of PT Agincourt. “Being responsible miners, we can provide some opportunity for the orangutan in terms of funding.”

But many scientists disagree, saying the expansion of the mine could push the critically endangered Tapanuli orangutans to extinction in a few generations. Even removing just 1% of the population a year would ultimately end in extinction, they say, as orangutans only reproduce every six to nine years.

“It doesn’t take much – especially if you start killing orangutan females – for the population to go extinct,” says the biological anthropologist Erik Meijaard, director of the scientific consultancy Borneo Futures and one of the first experts to describe the species.

A dominant male Tapanuli orangutan in Batang Toru forest. The animals only reproduce every six to nine years. Photograph: Maxime Aliaga/NPL

Concerns about Jardine Matheson’s decision to move ahead with expanding the mine – without an agreed plan in place to reduce impacts to the Tapanulis – have spread beyond the scientific community. Last year, Norway’s $1.6tn sovereign wealth fund sold its holdings in three Jardines firms, citing concerns about the company being responsible for “severe environmental damage”.

Tapanulis, with their frizzy, cinnamon hair and wide faces, are not only the rarest orangutan, but represent the oldest lineage of all orangutan species – descendants of the first ancestral orangutans that arrived in Sumatra from mainland Asia more than 3m years ago.

In Batang Toru, the final holdouts of the species dwell in just three populations – the west block, east block and Sibual-buali reserve – spread across a patch of mountainous forest roughly the size of Rio de Janeiro. (Earlier this year, scientists confirmed they had found a small, isolated cluster of Tapanulis living in a peat swamp about 32km (20 miles) outside Batang Toru.)

“We assume [the Tapanuli] was really widespread a couple of hundred years ago,” says Meijaard. But unsustainable hunting and fragmenting of the forest drove the last of the species to seek refuge in the higher elevations of Batang Toru.

Even before the proposed mine expansion, the Tapanuli was threatened by development. A Chinese-owned hydroelectric project is being built on the Batang Toru River, which flows north-south along the eastern side of the ecosystem. The dam would affect an area that contains the highest density of Tapanuli orangutans – about 42 individuals – according to one 2019 assessment in the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology.

Land cleared ahead of the building of a hydroelectric dam in the Batang Toru rainforest, August 2018. Photograph: Nanang Sujana/AFP/Getty Images

The expansion of the Martabe mine represents another blow, squeezing the apes from another side. “The Tapanuli orangutan really cannot afford any losses,” Meijaard says.

The Martabe mine was established in 2008, near the western block of Batang Toru where an estimated 533 Tapanulis are thought to live. The mine’s footprint spans about 650 hectares (1,600 acres), with 2 hectares falling within the Batang Toru ecosystem’s “key biodiversity area”, as designated by conservation NGOs in the Alliance for Zero Extinction.

PT Agincourt says it will expand the mine by about 250 hectares (617 acres) by the end of Martabe’s operational lifespan in 2034, building not only the new pit and access roads, but a large tailings-management facility. This growth includes clearing another 48 hectares of mostly primary forest in the key biodiversity area. But the company says it is also setting aside a 2,000-hectare conservation zone within its concession, as well as creating another “offset” protected area about 40km from the mine site.

“Without the [mining] revenue from this small area, it will be very hard to carry out the conservation work and the restoration work that is planned,” says Christopher Broadbent, a UK-based sustainability consultant to PT Agincourt. “If the mine were to walk away, the unintended consequences would be almost certainly disastrous for the orangutan.”

PT Agincourt estimates its mine’s expansion will directly or indirectly affect between six and 12 orangutans. Tanio says: “Throughout our 13 years of operation, there have been no cases of fatality of orangutan directly from the mining activities.

“The notion the mine can kill an orangutan directly has proven to be quite false.”

But studies show that even indirect effects can take a toll. Female orangutans are particularly sensitive to habitat loss, as they tend not to move when they lose parts of their home range, leaving them at risk of starvation. PT Agincourt says land clearing will proceed slowly, allowing time for the orangutans to move out of the way.

The mine expansion will involve clearing an additional 48 hectares of mostly primary forest in the key biodiversity area by 2034. Photograph: SOCP/Andrew Walmsley/EPA

“We don’t know enough to be able to say that every orangutan that moves will find some new forest to call home,” says Phil Aikman, a campaign director at Mighty Earth. Some studies suggest that pushing orangutan groups closer together will lead to social tensions and conflicts. “The big concern here is that mitigation may or may not work.”

For the past five years, environmental advocates as well as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), have pushed to delay new construction until a mutually agreed plan is in place to protect the Tapanuli. For a time, Jardine Matheson voluntarily agreed to a moratorium on construction, engaging with the IUCN’s Avoid, Reduce, Restore and Conserve (ARRC) taskforce, which advises companies on how to avoid ape habitats and reduce impacts. But that agreement expired in December 2022.

The primatologist Genevieve Campbell, who leads the taskforce, says Jardine Matheson had made it impossible to proceed as they were unable to share raw data, including orangutan survey data within the mining permit. Jardines says the Indonesian government prevented the company from sharing that information.

But that relationship has improved in recent weeks. In November, PT Agincourt Resources signed a new conditional memorandum of understanding with the ARRC taskforce, allowing their scientists to provide independent input on the mine’s development plans and mitigation strategy.

PT Agincourt told the Guardian it would temporarily pause road construction for three weeks to allow the IUCN to complete its review. The planned protection zones, as well as a new orangutan research centre funded by the mine mean the “Tapanuli will be better off with the mine”, Tanio says.

A female Tapanuli orangutan with twins in Batang Toru forest. Females are particularly sensitive to habitat loss. Photograph: Courtesy of SOCP

Campbell disagrees that the mine’s overall impact will be positive for the Tapanuli. “You cannot say that any great ape species is better with mining than without.”

For Meijaard, little can truly compensate for the mine’s effects on the orangutans.

“You can plant 10,000 hectares of forest with lots of fruiting trees … so the orangutans potentially have somewhere to go. You can push them fast or you can push them slow. But you’re still pushing them into competition with other orangutans in an area that is, ecologically, quite restrained for the species.”

“If we really want to protect the species, we have to aim for zero losses,” he says.

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian app for more nature coverage

Read the full story here.
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‘They’re a lot like us’: saving the tiny punk monkeys facing extinction

In the tropical dry forests of northern Colombia, a small team is gradually restoring the degraded habitat of the rare cotton-top tamarinLuis Enrique Centena spent decades silencing the forest. Now, he listens. Making a whistle, the former logger points up to a flash of white and reddish fur in the canopy. Inquisitive eyes peer back – a cotton-top tamarin, one of the world’s rarest primates.“I used to cut trees and never took the titís into account,” says Centena, calling the cotton-tops by their local name. “I ignored them. I didn’t know that they were in danger of extinction, I only knew I had to feed my family. But now we have become friends.” Continue reading...

Luis Enrique Centena spent decades silencing the forest. Now, he listens. Making a whistle, the former logger points up to a flash of white and reddish fur in the canopy. Inquisitive eyes peer back – a cotton-top tamarin, one of the world’s rarest primates.“I used to cut trees and never took the titís into account,” says Centena, calling the cotton-tops by their local name. “I ignored them. I didn’t know that they were in danger of extinction, I only knew I had to feed my family. But now we have become friends.”Weighing barely a pound (half a kilogram), the tiny monkeys are among the most threatened primates in the world, driven to the brink by medical experiments, rampant deforestation and the illegal pet trade. Today, they are critically endangered, with fewer than 7,500 remaining in the wild.Luis Enrique Centena uses radio telemetry to track the tamarinsThey are found only in the tropical dry forests of northern Colombia, an ecosystem that has been reduced to 8% of its original size, largely by cattle ranching and logging; their survival depends on the restoration of this landscape, which has been stripped bare.In the hills outside San Juan Nepomuceno, a team of former loggers, farmers, environmentalists and biologists are working to bring the forest back, and with it the monkeys that have become famed for their punk-like manes.“Nobody knew anything about the cotton-tops, they were not on anyone’s agenda,” says Rosamira Guillen, who leads Fundación Proyecto Tití, a conservation initiative that has spent decades protecting the species and rebuilding its forest home. “But they exist only here and are at great risk – we must protect them.”The cotton-tops are strikingly human-like, Guillen and Centena say. They live in tight family groups, normally of between five and seven individuals, communicate in a complex system of calls, and fiercely defend their territory. They also play a vital role in the ecosystem: dispersing seeds, pollinating flowers and keeping insect populations in check.“Titís are a lot like us,” says Centena, who is a member of the foundation’s forest restoration and research team. “They teach you things. They look after their young. The only thing missing is that they don’t speak Spanish.”The illegal pet trade continues to take its toll with the monkeys being sold as exotic petsThe monkeys’ numbers first plummeted in the 1960s and 70s, when tens of thousands were exported to the US for medical research. Later, their habitat was stripped back to only 720,000 hectares (1.8m acres) by clearance for traditional cattle ranching and agriculture. The illegal pet trade continues to take its toll, with poachers capturing and selling the tiny monkeys as exotic pets.Franklin Castro, an environmental guard, has spent the past decade trying to stop the capture of titís for the illicit market. “I started the task 10 years ago,” he says, sharing photos of the rescued animals. “More than 200 have passed through my hands. Traffickers pay people to catch them – 60,000, 70,000, sometimes 100,000 pesos [between £12 and £20]. We find the titís trembling and dehydrated. It’s a terrible sight.”Fundación Proyecto Tití began with a handful of biologists and field assistants monitoring the monkeys, but after receiving a grant nearly a decade ago, the NGO was able to buy a patch of degraded land to begin restoring the remaining fragmented forest.Biologists Aura Suárez Herrera and Marcelo Ortega check trays of seedlings being grown as part of the foundation’s forest restoration workMarcelo Ortega, who leads the foundation’s tree restoration work, says the first plot of land was barren. “There was nothing left,” he says.The cotton-tops are starting to come into the new forest to forage. It’s amazing to seeToday, Fundación Proyecto Tití manages more than 13 plots across nearly 1,000 hectares and works with more than 100 farmers, providing them with plants to restore strips of their land. About 120,000 trees and shrubs have been planted to date, with 60,000 more planned next year.The team plans its plot purchases to stitch isolated patches of forest back together, planting dense mixes of native species to form wildlife corridors. “Our goal is to restore what once existed,” says Ortega.They are already seeing the results. “The cotton-tops are starting to come into the new forest to forage,” says Guillen. “It’s amazing to see.”They monitor the monkey populations by fitting a small transmitter – “a little backpack” – to the dominant male of each family group. It sends a signal to an antenna carried by field researchers as they follow them through the forest.An aerial view of the foundation’s work in the forests of northern ColombiaCentena is one of them. “I’m not a biologist, I’m not a scholar, but I’ve learned so much,” he says. “I was cutting trees down for 25 years. I’ve been here since 2018, so I have about 10 more years to make up for the mistakes I made.”The next census is soon to be released, with the team estimating that the cotton-top population has remained stable – or grown – since the last count in 2012-13, when fewer than 7,500 were estimated.The regrowth is important for other creatures too – rare turtles, black spider monkeys, toucans and tamanduas all call this land their home, and recently a puma was caught on camera for the first time in years. “When you protect the forest for cotton-tops,” Guillen says, “you protect it for everything else that lives there.”Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian app for more nature coverage

Extinction
Forests
Animals

Humans killed millions of vultures. Now people are paying the price.

The near-extinction of vultures in India has had severe consequences.

Humans killed millions of vultures. Now people are paying the price.As vultures vanished, dogs multiplied, and rabies spread. Humans are living with the consequences.Johnson traveled to Bikaner, Hyderabad and Bangalore to report this story. This reporting was supported by the Pulitzer Center....moreJohnson traveled to Bikaner, Hyderabad and Bangalore to report this story. This reporting was supported by the Pulitzer Center....moreNovember 29, 2025 at 5:00 a.m. EST8 minutes agoBIKANER, India — Dogs roam a field of cattle carcasses at the Jorbeer dump in northern India, passing hollowed-out rib cages and tugging at pink flesh decaying in the sun. Nearby, workers skin hides for leather from the 40 carcasses that arrive daily, fighting heat and a suffocating stench.Competing with the dogs for carrion and circling the hazy skies above are vultures, remnants of a population almost completely wiped out by humans. Between 1992 and 2007, the populations of three species — the long-billed vulture, slender-billed vulture and white-rumped vulture — plummeted more than 100-fold from roughly 4 million to 32,000. The speed of the birds’ decline, scientists say, rivals the passenger pigeon’s plunge from 3 billion or more in the early 1800s to extinction in 1914.Some 800 miles south of the dump, in the city of Hyderabad, a slender boy named Maniteja, 7, lies beneath a pink blanket, unresponsive, breathing through a ventilator. His dark eyes drift. For nine months, no words have come from his lips, only small cries. The family leaves a window open, hoping the sounds of friends playing outside will pierce the fog and restore him to consciousness.A woman with other patients who have been bitten by a dog at Government Fever Hospital in Hyderabad, India. Syringes for treatment of dog bites at the only hospital in India dedicated to treating patients with infectious diseases, communicable diseases and dog bites. Last December, one of India’s estimated 62 million free-ranging dogs ― a population that surged as the vultures declined ― lunged at Maniteja and sank its teeth into his left shoulder. Although his parents got him vaccinated against rabies within an hour, a few weeks later the boy became feverish. On Jan. 18, a doctor asked if he knew the man beside him. “My papa,” Maniteja said, his last words before losing the ability to speak.The decimated vultures competing for dead cattle, the dogs that have become their rivals and the boy fighting for his life all form links in an ecological chain reaction, according to scientists. The sequence, triggered by human action that took a decade to identify, carries a warning as we drive Earth deeper into what many scientists consider to be a sixth mass extinction.When we endanger other species, we endanger ourselves.Dogs fight to claim their stake at carcasses, surrounded by vultures and other birds at the Jorbeer dump in northern India. Dogs, vultures and other birds descend upon carcasses of dead animals left at the Jorbeer dump site. A 2008 paper in the journal Ecological Economics found that between 1992 and 2007 the loss of vultures in India led to an estimated increase of about 5.5 million dogs, 38 million additional dog bites and more than 47,000 extra deaths from rabies.A paper published a year ago in the American Economic Review concluded that in certain districts, “the functional extinction of vultures — efficient scavengers who removed carcasses from the environment — increased human mortality by over 4% because of a large negative shock to sanitation.”That analysis considered not just rabies, but all human deaths related to the loss of vultures — including those from water contaminated by cattle carcasses. Researchers estimated that India suffered, on average, 104,386 additional deaths, and almost $70 billion in extra costs, each year.50 Species that Save UsThis series highlights emerging research on how plants and animals protect human health – and how their disappearance is already sickening thousands of people around the world.India has fought back, banning veterinary use of some chemicals harmful to vultures, establishing programs to protect the birds and launching campaigns to immunize free-ranging dogs against rabies. Conservationists even set up a few “vulture restaurants,” serving cow carcasses known to be safe for consumption.But the damage is hard to reverse.Vultures still face some toxic exposure, though at a lower level, and India’s push to modernize has added new threats: power lines and wind turbines. Captive-breeding programs are slow; vultures breed once a year, usually producing a single egg.“If you take 100 people from any city, it is very unlikely you will get anyone who will say they have seen a vulture,” said Chetan Misher, a wildlife researcher and ecologist who has been working in western India for the past decade.“If it remains like this for a long time, people will think they are imaginary birds.”The loss of vultures is all the more surprising given India’s reverence for animals.It is a country “that believes humans and animals coexist,” explained Kedar Girish Gore, director of the nonprofit Corbett Foundation in Mumbai, which is dedicated to wildlife conservation and environmental awareness.Signs of coexistence are everywhere. In the northwestern state of Rajasthan and in cities like Hyderabad in the south, cars, trucks and motorcycles share crowded roadways with free-ranging dogs and cattle, goats, schoolchildren and other pedestrians.Cows are revered: It is illegal in many states to kill them, even if they’re old or injured. Instead, people bring them to retirement homes called gaushalas where the cattle are fed and cared for by workers who consider it a sacred duty.“The main slogan in India is, ‘A cow is our mother,’” said Shree Gopalacharya, who manages a gaushala in Rajasthan where 70 workers care for about 1,800 bulls.In cities like Delhi, people put out chapati and milk for street dogs. Some even cook and distribute large amounts of chicken biryani, enough to feed up to 200 dogs, said Nishant Kumar, a DBT/Wellcome Trust fellow at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore.Rahul Malik, 27, administers anti-rabies vaccination to stray dogs in Noida, India. Stray dogs loiter in the neighborhood of Nizamuddin East in Delhi. Even vultures, a bird many in the West consider ugly and use as a metaphor for people who prey on others, enjoy widespread respect in India.Followers of Zoroastrianism, an ancient Persian faith, place their dead atop Towers of Silence for vultures to consume, thus freeing the soul without polluting the sacred elements: earth, fire and water.A vulture is even one of the heroes of Hindu mythology: Jatayu, the vulture demigod, sacrificed his life to save the goddess Sita.“The lesson we learn here is that every species, vultures included, no matter how ugly we think they are, they have sacrificed something that we as humans must decipher,” said Munir Virani, chief executive of the Mohamed Bin Zayed Raptor Conservation Fund in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. “They are giving us a warning.”For centuries, vultures provided a highly efficient sanitation system, cleaning the carcasses of millions of dead cattle.“You could argue that the way of life of Indian livestock farming kind of developed hand-in-hand with vultures,” said John Mallord, who works for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in Britain. “Without the vultures to clean up the environment, people wouldn’t have been able to just leave the cows where they [died] because it would have proved to be a disease threat.”Although other animals scavenge dead cattle, none do so as effectively as vultures. The birds will pick clean a bull carcass in 30 to 40 minutes.Vultures and humans have long collaborated on disposal of dead cattle. Workers removed the hides for leather, leaving the meat more accessible to birds. Vultures then cleaned the carcasses, leaving bones to be harvested by a second group of workers. Collectors sold the bones for use in fertilizer and animal feed.Biologists once counted India’s vultures among the world’s most common birds of prey. The birds often nested in gardens with large trees, including some foreign embassies, said Rhys Green, an honorary professor of conservation science at the University of Cambridge.Large numbers of vultures in India, seen in a 1967 photo. (Paolo Koch/Getty Images)A herd of cattle wait outside a cattle shed in Surdhana, India. Virani remembers being on a cricket tour in the late 1980s and walking along Malabar Hill in what was then Bombay, staring into a vulture-filled sky.“There could have been thousands,” he said.But in the mid-1990s letters began appearing in the Times of India noting the vultures’ disappearance. When people did see the birds, something seemed off.“They wouldn’t be flying around as they normally do. They would just sit there,” Green said. “The head and neck were pointing downwards, which is a thing vultures do when they’re sick.”The scale of the loss was staggering. If vultures were unable to breed in a given year, the overall population would decline about 5 percent, Green said. But road surveys showed that the three vulture species were declining far more rapidly, at rates of between 2o percent and 50 percent each year for many successive years. Between 1992 and 2007, the population of 2.9 million white-rumped vultures in India declined by 99.9 percent.Similar losses were occurring in Pakistan and Nepal.Vibhu Prakash, who worked for the Bombay Natural History Society and had been conducting vulture counts in a national park, sounded the alarm. His papers in biological journals in 1999 and 2003 raised a question no one could answer: What was killing the birds?To solve the mystery, a team of researchers led by American veterinary pathologist J. Lindsay Oaks performed meticulous postmortems on dead white-rumped vultures in Pakistan. They found that 85 percent had visceral gout, which can occur when birds’ kidneys fail.Oaks, who would die in 2011, knew that painkillers called nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories caused kidney failure in certain birds of prey. When members of Oaks’s team surveyed dozens of veterinarians and drug retailers, they learned of a livestock medicine that was toxic to kidneys: diclofenac. The painkiller, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory also given to humans, was widely used to treat sick and dying cattle for pain, fever and inflammation.Laborers skin the carcasses of dead animals even as dogs feed on them at the Jorbeer dump yard in northern India. Scientists tested a subset of the dead vultures, comparing those that had visceral gout with those that did not. Tests revealed diclofenac residue in every bird with kidney failure. Every dead bird that contained no diclofenac showed no signs of kidney failure. When they fed 20 vultures meat from animals treated with various doses of diclofenac, 13 died of renal failure.The timing made sense. The drug’s main international patent had expired in 1993, leading to the approval of cheaper generic versions in India.Vultures diagramAfter the journal Nature published Oaks’s results, other researchers confirmed his findings, and conservationists held conferences on the fate of the vultures. In 2006, Green and the Indian Veterinary Research Institute identified meloxicam as a painkiller safe for vultures.The Indian government enacted a ban on veterinary use of diclofenac that took effect in May 2006, a little more than two years after the drug was found to be lethal to the birds. Pakistan and Nepal issued bans of their own in 2006.“That is actually very quick for how these things work,” Green said. The United States took a decade to ban DDT after the book “Silent Spring” showed the harm pesticides were doing to birds and other wildlife.Even after the diclofenac ban, the number of vultures continued to decline, reaching 19,000 in 2015. Subsequently, three more painkillers given to cows were found to be toxic to vultures and were banned in India.Rabies and the rise of the dogsAs scientists sought an explanation for the vulture decline, the ecosystem changed dramatically.“Dogs have replaced vultures as the main scavenger at carcass dumps monitored,” according to the 2008 paper in Ecological Economics. “It is thus reasonable to assume that the increase in dogs has partially resulted from the decline in vultures.”Estimates of the nation’s dog population vary widely ― anywhere from 15 million in India’s 2019 Livestock Census to as high as 80 million in some news reports. The most common figure is about 62 million.More dogs, researchers found, translated into more dog bites and more deaths from rabies in a country that accounts for 36 percent of worldwide deaths from the disease.Before 1960, rabies killed several hundred people a year in the U.S. Widespread vaccination of pets, however, reduced human deaths to a rarity; in 2024, there were only four deaths in the U.S., none caused by dog bites.A woman waits for her turn to receive treatment for a dog bite in the emergency room at Government Fever Hospital in Hyderabad. The hospital has received 32 cases of rabies this year through mid-November. A man who was bitten by a dog receives treatment at the hospital. In India, someone is bitten by a dog every two seconds, and 18,000 to 20,000 people die each year of rabies, according to the World Health Organization (though the Indian government reported just 54 deaths from rabies in 2024). The government introduced an ambitious rabies plan in 2021 that set a goal of eliminating human deaths from the disease by 2030.Rabies, which has a fatality rate approaching 100 percent, is transmitted through saliva. Once the virus enters the body it creeps along the nerves into the central nervous system, producing fever, nausea, flu-like symptoms and finally coma and death.“By the time the patients come with symptoms you are at the point of no return,” said Lokesh Lingappa, a doctor who has treated the disease at Rainbow Children’s Hospital in Hyderabad’s Banjara Hills.He recalls the case of a 5-year-old boy whose parents brought him to the hospital with only a scratch. They had not even seen a dog bite the boy, Lingappa said, “but maybe there was a lick on some open cut.”A boy who got a dog bite cries as he receives treatment at the hospital. The child, who had not been vaccinated, soon developed aerophobia, an intense fear of puffs of fresh air and a symptom of rabies. The parents “wanted us to say this is not rabies,” Lingappa recalled; he had to tell them that it was. The boy died a week later.In Hyderabad, Maniteja’s relatives watch his bedside in shifts covering every hour of every day. The boy’s mother starts at 6 in the morning and does not finish until 11 at night. She prepares his liquid feedings ― rice water, carrot juice and vegetable soup.Maniteja’s father watches him from 11 at night until 3 in the morning, when an uncle takes over for the last three hours. Before the dog bite, the boy played with friends and rode his bicycle. Today, he receives 30-minute physical therapy sessions.To care for Maniteja at home, his family rents medical equipment at a cost of about $900 a month. The father’s job in technical support pays up to $800 a month, leaving money a constant worry. “What can we do?” the father said.The boy cannot recognize his mother and father at his bedside. Sometimes his father strokes his forehead calling, “Maniteja? Maniteja? Maniteja?” searching for some response. “My heart is breaking watching my child like this,” his father said.A hospital staff member looks at the queue of patients. Free-ranging dogs have long posed a challenge for India.“There is a dog right next to the place where we have our research camp in Delhi, and it has bitten 150 people, probably more in the last three years,” Kumar explained. “And you cannot remove the dog because that dog is protected by the people who love it.”In the summer, India’s Supreme Court ordered authorities in Delhi and its suburbs to round up all street dogs and put them in shelters, then modified the order after criticism. Strays must now be taken to shelters, immunized and sterilized, but then returned to the streets they live on.Kumar said the Indian concept of “community dogs” that live in a neighborhood is complex, and it varies according to economic means, where people live, and many other factors.In a research paper yet to be published, Kumar noted, “We are witnessing two parallel realities: visible acts of kindness masking invisible cycles of suffering.”Stemming vulture extinctionA few hours southwest of Bangalore, 25 to 30 breeding pairs of long-billed vultures, also known as Indian vultures, once nested in the cliffs at the Ramadevarabetta Vulture Sanctuary.“That was over 30 years ago, and now we are down to just one breeding pair,” said Chris Bowden, vulture conservation program manager for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. “We’re hoping those vultures will come back later this evening because they generally roost here.”On a hot day in early October, hours passed, and the pair was never spotted in the country’s only designated vulture sanctuary. It is uncertain whether long-billed vultures in the area will rebuild from the single pair.“We hope they will,” said Bowden, who advises the Saving Asia’s Vultures From Extinction consortium. But protecting them in “this spectacular rocky landscape is not enough to protect them from the main threats.”Green and others have carried out undercover surveys of Indian pharmacies to see how many still sell diclofenac for veterinary use. While more veterinarians are now using vulture-safe meloxicam, Green said, “the amount of toxic diclofenac in cattle didn’t go down to zero.” The problem, he said, has been a lack of awareness and enforcement.Conservationists have also taken steps to discourage deliberate poisonings, a practice in which farmers who have suffered livestock losses from other predators put out poison bait. Vultures die by consuming either the bait or the bodies of poisoned predators.Birds claim their stake to the remains of a dead animal at the Jorbeer dump site. Birds and dogs surround a landscape of carcasses of dead animals at the Jorbeer dump site. For 20 years, the Corbett Foundation has provided immediate compensation to farmers who lose livestock to predators. Gore, the director, estimates the group has paid out for about 20,000 livestock kills.Yet experts say it is unlikely the vulture will ever play the role it once did, a role the Madras High Court once as described as not a scavenger, but a “natural sanitary worker.”Some people now bury cattle carcasses, putting them out of the reach of vultures. When carcasses are left in the open at places like the Jorbeer dump, the competition can be fierce. Misher, the ecologist in western India, has watched dogs harass and chase vultures.Mallord at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said the vultures’ population crash is over, though “it’s too early to crack open the bottle of champagne.”It once seemed unthinkable that birds as common as India’s vultures could approach extinction. But the same was true of the passenger pigeon, Mallord said.“Nothing’s safe.”About this storyPhotography by Saumya Khandelwal. G.B.S.N.P. Varma contributed to this report. Design, development and illustrations by Hailey Haymond. Editing by Lynh Bui, Maya Valentine, Joe Moore and Juliet Eilperin. Copy editing by Dorine Bethea.

Extinction
Animals
Conservation

Eel Populations Are Falling, and New Protections Were Defeated. Japan and the US Opposed Them

Valuable eels are in decline all over the world, leading to a new push for restrictions on trade to try to help stave off extinction

SCARBOROUGH, Maine (AP) — Eels are the stuff of nightmares — slimy, snakelike creatures that lay millions of eggs before dying so their offspring can return home to rivers and streams. They've existed since the time of the dinosaurs, and some species are more poorly understood than those ancient animals.Yet they're also valuable seafood fish that are declining all over the world, leading to a new push for restrictions on trade to help stave off extinction.Freshwater eels are critically important for the worldwide sushi industry, and some species have declined by more than 90% since the 1980s. The eels have succumbed to a combination of river dams, hydroelectric turbines, pollution, habitat loss, climate change, illegal poaching and overfishing, according to scientists. Some environmental organizations have called for consumers to boycott eel at sushi restaurants.The loss of eels motivated the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, to consider new restrictions to protect the wriggling fish. The members of CITES, an international treaty, met in Uzbekistan this week to determine if the new rules on trade are needed. Member nations voted against the new protections on Thursday.Conservation groups said the protections were long overdue, but not everyone was on board. Some fishing groups, seafood industry members and regulatory agencies in the U.S., China and Japan — all countries where eel is economically important — have spoken out against restricting the trade.The push for more restrictions is the work of “an international body dominated by volunteer scientists and unelected bureaucrats," said Mitchell Feigenbaum, one of North America's largest eel dealers and an advocate for the industry. But several conservation groups countered that the protections were needed.“This measure is vital to strengthen trade monitoring, aid fisheries management, and ensure the species’ long-term survival," said Susan Lieberman, vice president of international policy for Wildlife Conservation Society. Why are eels so valuable? The eels in question are the eels of the anguilla genus, which spend their lives in freshwater but migrate to the ocean to spawn. They are distinct from the familiar, grinning moray eels, which are popular in aquariums and are mostly marine fish, and the electric eels, which live in South America.Anguilla eels, especially baby eels called elvers, are valuable because they are used as seed stock by Asian aquaculture companies that raise them to maturity for use as food. Freshwater eel is known as unagi in Japan, and it's a key ingredient in numerous sushi dishes. Eel is also culturally significant in Japan, where people have eaten the fish for thousands of years.The elvers have become more valuable in the U.S. over the last 15 years because of the steep decline of eels elsewhere in the world. While the population of American eels has fallen, the drop has not been as severe as Japanese and European eels. Attempts to list American eels under the Endangered Species Act in the U.S. have failed. Maine is the only U.S. state with a significant fishery for the elvers, and it is heavily regulated. Maine's baby eels were worth more than $1,200 per pound at the docks in 2024, and they were worth more than $2,000 per pound the year before that. New protections were on the table CITES, which is one of the world's largest multinational wildlife agreements, extended protections to European eels in 2009. The organization considered adding more than a dozen more eel species, including the American and Japanese eels, to its list of protected species.Adding the eels to the list would mean exporters would need a permit to ship them. Before the permit could be granted, a scientific authority in the home country would have to determine that the export would not be detrimental to the species' survival and that the eels weren’t taken illegally under national wildlife laws. That is significant because poaching of eels is a major threat, and rare species are often illegally passed off as more common ones, CITES documents state.Tightening trade rules “will encourage species-specific trade monitoring and controls and close loopholes that allow illegal trade to persist,” the documents state. US, Japan pushed back at protections Fishing groups are not the only organizations to resist expanding protections for eels, as regulatory groups in some countries have argued that national and regional laws are a better way to conserve eels.Japan and China have both told CITES that they don't support listing the eels. And in the U.S., the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which regulates the American eel fishery, submitted testimony to CITES opposing the listing.The U.S.'s own management of eels is sufficient to protect the species, said Toni Kerns, fisheries policy director with the commission.“We don't feel that the proposal provides enough information on how the black market would be curbed,” Kerns said. “We are very concerned about how it would potentially restrict trade in the United States."A coalition of industry groups in China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan also submitted a request that the protection be rejected, saying CITES' assertion that international trade is causing eel populations to decline is “not supported by sufficient evidence.” Conservationists say the time to act is now The strong demand for eels is a reason to protect the trade with new rules, said Nastya Timoshyna, office director for Europe with TRAFFIC, a U.K.-based nonprofit that fights wildlife trafficking.Illegal shipping is not the only reason the eels are in decline, but working with industry to cut down illegal trade will give the fish a better chance at survival, Timoshyna said.Eels might not be universally beloved, but they're important in part because they're an indicator species that helps scientists understand the health of the ecosystem around them, Timoshyna said.“It's not about banning it or stopping fishing practices,” Timoshyna said. “It's about industry being responsible, and there is massive power in industry.”Associated Press writer Michael Casey in Boston contributed to this report.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – Nov. 2025

Extinction
Animals
Conservation

The world’s lemurs are going extinct. This is the only way to save them.

On a cloudless morning in September, sunlight poured through the canopy of a banyan tree near the banks of the Onilahy River, which runs from southwest Madagascar to the Indian Ocean. The tree grew on the edge of a small karst cliff. Its roots spilled over the side like melting candle wax.  I scrambled up […]

A group of ring-tailed lemurs just waking up in a tree near the village of Ifanato in southwest Madagascar. On a cloudless morning in September, sunlight poured through the canopy of a banyan tree near the banks of the Onilahy River, which runs from southwest Madagascar to the Indian Ocean. The tree grew on the edge of a small karst cliff. Its roots spilled over the side like melting candle wax.  I scrambled up the cliff for a better view of the canopy, when I saw something staring back at me: a lemur. It had scruffy white fur, a black face with bug-eyes, and a tail that was at least the length of its body. This wasn’t just any lemur; it was a Verreaux’s sifaka: a critically endangered species that I’ve spent much of my life longing to see. This story is part of a series This fall, Vox is publishing a three-part series on conservation in Madagascar, supported by the BAND Foundation. This story is part 2.  Madagascar, an island nation east of continental Africa, is the only place on Earth where lemurs exist. There are more than 100 lemur species, and nearly all of them are at risk of extinction, including the sifaka. Their foe is deforestation; all lemurs depend on trees for food and shelter, and half or more of the country’s forests are now gone.  In Madagascar, unlike in many other forested nations, the bulk of deforestation isn’t caused by the industrial-scale farming and cattle ranching that often enriches big corporations. Forests here are primarily felled by individual families who cut trees to grow crops or collect cooking fuel. That’s how many people feed themselves and make money. They often have few other options; Madagascar ranks among the top five poorest countries in the world, and people here have few economic opportunities that don’t rely on exploitation.  Against this dim reality, the lemur before me represented something hopeful. The only reason it was here was that this tree was still standing. And this tree was still standing, because nearby villages have worked hard against tough odds to protect the forest they all share. Working alongside the World Wildlife Fund, one of the world’s largest environmental organizations, those villages created new economic opportunities for themselves that don’t destroy the forest. Together, they demonstrate a crucial element of what makes conservation work in the poorest parts of the world: first, meeting the needs of people, and then, stepping out of the way to let them take charge. The lemur I saw lives in the Onilahy River basin of southwest Madagascar, not far from the coast and the largest city in the region, called Toliara. It’s a strange landscape — a collision of desert and forest, where spiny shrubs grow nearby tall trees. The south of Madagascar is arid, yet there’s an abundance of water here that flows from the river and a series of natural springs. On a warm morning towards the end of winter in the Southern Hemisphere, I traveled from Toliara to a small village near the river called Maroamalo. The road was mostly dirt and spotted with crater-sized potholes, which — along with several goat-related traffic jams — turned a 15-mile trip into a three-hour, butt-bruising adventure.  Maroamalo is one of several communities helping protect the lemur-filled forests of the Onilahy River basin. Working alongside staff from WWF, they manage a protected area called Amoron’i Onilahy. The park is only around 250,000 acres — making it a little smaller than New York City — yet it envelops a wide variety of ecosystems, from wetlands to spiny thickets and a huge number of rare species, including eight kinds of primates. In some ways, Amoron’i Onilahy is Madagascar in miniature. The island nation is packed full of different habitat types, which is one reason why it has a higher proportion of endemic species than any other place on Earth.  Protected areas — which typically restrict certain activities that degrade ecosystems and endanger biodiversity — have a mixed record of success. This is especially true in Madagascar. Studies have found that people clear trees even within parts of the country that are formally protected, including those that are managed by communities.  One reason is that most of Madagascar’s parks lack the funds to monitor vast areas for illegal woodcutting. But a bigger challenge is that few protected areas confront the reason why people cut trees at all: their own survival. When the choice is between breaking the law and feeding your family, people choose survival. “Deforestation and illegal exploitation are still impacting nearly all protected areas despite 30 years of intensive conservation efforts,” as the authors of one study put it.  What just happened to Madagascar’s government? On September 25, the day I left Madagascar to return to the US, the capital city of Antananarivo erupted in protests, then led by Andry Rajoelina, against the government. Demonstrators — largely led by Gen Z — expressed outrage over water, electricity shortages, and a lack of economic opportunities. The protests continued for days, supercharged by broader grievances including corruption and poor governance. And on October 14, Rajoelina was impeached, and the military seized control of the country. Col. Michael Randrianirina is now in control of a transitional government that’s meant to organize elections within two years.  The government upheaval highlights the deep level of human need in Madagascar, which drives people to exploit free natural resources. Events like this also tend to fuel deforestation and make it even harder for conservation to work. Political crises weaken law enforcement, allowing more illegal logging, and hamper scientific research and tourism that support conservation.  Amoron’i Onilahy, however, appears to be an exception.  There are a few things you notice right away in Maroamalo: Many of its homes are made of mud, rock, and plant fiber; chickens, ducks, and goats seem to be wandering around everywhere; and just behind the village center, where the land slopes into the river valley, there are acres of verdant farmland, which pop against the surrounding brown Earth. It was as if a patchy green quilt had been laid across the valley.  Worldwide, agriculture is the number one threat to biodiversity. To meet the rising global demand for food, agrobusinesses often clear natural habitats for crops and livestock. But here in Maroamalo, farming is actually helping keep the forest intact. Only about one in three people in Madagascar have access to electricity, and even fewer people use natural gas. That’s why nearly everyone cooks with either simple firewood or, in more urban areas, charcoal — a carbon-rich fuel source produced from tree branches. Around cities like Toliara, making charcoal is how many people earn money to pay for food, school supplies, and medical bills. One 110-pound (50 kg) bag sells for $2 to $3. In Madagascar, that’s enough to buy a few meals. Charcoal production was once common among villages in the region like Maroamalo, said Nanie Ratsifandrihamanana, who leads WWF’s work in Madagascar. That’s one reason why the river basin has lost so many of its trees. Shifting cultivation, better known as slash-and-burn agriculture, further eroded the forests here. People would burn one plot of forest to clear the way for crops, and then, once the soil was exhausted and weeds took over, do the same thing in another. Across nearly all of Madagascar, and much of Africa, these are among the two largest forces that raze forests. WWF has long been aware of these problems. So, more than a decade ago, staff from the organization began talking with communities here about how they could earn money without cutting trees. This idea had appeal. Speaking with me under the shade of a large neem tree in Maroamalo, members of the village said they, too, had seen the problems that deforestation had caused. Without roots to hold the soil in place, the ground started to erode, making it harder to grow crops, they told me. Losing trees also made the landscape drier and more likely to flood.  Top: A fishing boat known as a pirogue transports bags of charcoal in a lagoon in southwest Madagascar. Bottom left: An aerial view of the village of Maroamalo. Top right: Green farmland in the background of Maroamalo. Garth Cripps for Vox. WWF later worked with villages along the river — which are now part of the protected area — to build out economies that don’t exploit the remaining tracts of forest. And in Maroamalo, that economy was vegetable farming, as counterintuitive as this approach may seem.  Instead of only growing staples like cassava and corn, the village would cultivate a wide variety of vegetables to sell in Toliara. WWF would provide seeds and training on how to farm the crops more efficiently and without burning and taking up more space in the forest. They’d also help connect farmers to buyers in the city, including hotels. The idea was that if people could earn more money from farming, they wouldn’t need to clear forests for charcoal.  And that’s exactly what’s happening. Top left: Many homes in Maroamalo are made of stone, mud, and plant fiber, like those shown here. Top right: A forest patroller in the village of Ifanato scans the trees for signs of lemurs. Bottom left: Maroamalo farmer Mme Lalao in her home. Bottom right: Residents of another village called Ambiky plant saplings like this one to restore the forest in the protected area. Garth Cripps for Vox. Later that morning, Mme Lalao, a resident of Maroamalo who oversees farming in the village, walked me through the vegetable fields. She showed me ten or so different crops — including eggplant, cabbage, and onions — all planted in neat rows, like what you might see in California.  Nearly everyone in Maroamalo now works in agriculture, she said, which has grown into the main economy here. One vegetable farmer can earn about $21 per month, according to Mercie Ramilanajoroharivelo, a WWF employee who works with the communities. That’s far more than people typically make from selling charcoal, Ramilanajoroharivelo told me.  “We didn’t have the agriculture skills before, so people would go into the forest for charcoal,” Lalao said that morning. “But now they are working here.” Creating new economies only goes so far in protecting the forests and lemurs of Amoron’i Onilahy. While villagers inside the park now seldom bake charcoal or burn the forest, people who migrate here from other areas are still cutting trees. This is a common problem in Madagascar. When deforestation, droughts, and floods make it hard to farm or find wood in one area, people move to another in search of a better life. And climate change is making those sorts of moves more common.  “If you’ve lost everything, you migrate to the places where you can get resources for free,” said Charlie Gardner, a researcher and writer who studied conservation in Madagascar. “That’s two places: the coast where you can do beach seining, or the forest where you can produce charcoal. Things like charcoal production are a livelihood of last resort.”  That means that to keep the trees in Amoron’i Onilahy standing, the local communities still need to monitor the forest for woodcutting.  Later that day, after spending the morning in Maroamalo, I traveled along the dirt road deeper into the protected area to a village called Mahaleotse. Here, the forest was more impressive. It had bigger trees, denser undergrowth, and lots of life. On a walk in the woods that night, I saw chameleons hiding in the trees; fruit bats flying overhead; and, of course, hissing cockroaches (which do, I confirmed, actually hiss).  The next morning, around sunrise, I met up with a group of men from Mahaleotse known as polisin’ala, or forest rangers. Villages in Amoron’i Onilahy that work with WWF have a team of paid patrollers. They walk the forest 10 times each month, receiving about $2 per patrol from WWF. If they spot illegal woodcutting, they’ll try to stop it and report the infraction back to their community and environmental authorities. In some cases, the perpetrator will have to pay a fine.   It’s a complicated job. Outsiders who come here to cut wood are often desperate for money, but local villagers don’t want to lose the surrounding forest and the benefits it provides. “It was their decision to destroy their own forest, so that doesn’t mean they get to destroy ours,” Renama Zatompo Mahinty, one of the patrollers in Mahaleotse, said of migrants from outside villages. “If I tear my own T-shirt, that doesn’t give me the right to take someone else’s.” While there was still a morning chill in the air, I followed the men on a patrol. A ranger named Ramilison Roland paused in front of a large fig tree a few minutes into the walk and pointed up. Through a tangle of twigs and leaves, I saw four ring-tailed lemurs snuggled together on a branch. They were wrapped in each other’s fluffy black-and-white tails and hardly moving, because, as Roland said, they had just woken up.  Ring-tailed lemurs are endangered, yet, in just an hour that morning, we saw two different troops of them — a sign that something here is working.  These rangers are paid, but they told me they’d still surveil the forest without financial support. The benefits of trees are too important to lose — building materials for homes and schools and a lower chance of droughts, flooding, and erosion. “It’s not really a matter of money,” Roland said that morning. “We have advantages of protecting the forest, not only for us, but for the future generation.”  Madagascar is among the most challenging places on Earth for wildlife conservation. Political unrest hampers the flow of foreign aid, weakens law enforcement, and disrupts tourism, which is a vehicle to fund environmental protection. Poor governance also deepens poverty. And poverty leaves people with little choice but to depend on activities that erode the forest. Those are some of the reasons why a lot of non-governmental organization (NGO) projects fail, as I wrote in October.  But I’m convinced this one is succeeding.  Villagers in Amoron’i Onilahy told me that, by most measures, the landscape here is improving; there’s more forest, more lemurs, and more water. Data from WWF is limited and more mixed. The group’s satellite analysis shows that deforestation fell dramatically within the park between 2015 and 2020, rose again between 2021 and 2023, and then dropped once more in 2024. Amoron’i Onilahyn hasn’t lost any forest cover this year through June, the most recent months of data, WWF says. (WWF has not measured natural forest recovery.)  The density of ring-tailed and sifaka lemurs, meanwhile, has improved since 2003, according to the group.  To be clear, a lot of this success would be hard to replicate elsewhere in Madagascar. Amoron’i Onilahy has benefited from decades of investment from WWF. That’s rare, said Gardner. Donors tend to be drawn to projects that sound new and exciting rather than funding the same activities for years and years, he said. Plus, the park sits atop an aquifer; in some places, freshwater literally gushes from the ground. That makes large-scale farming possible here. Elsewhere, it’s just too dry.  What’s also worth pointing out is that strategies to restrict charcoal production in Amoron’i Onilahy don’t quell demand for it nationwide. If people stop cutting trees in this forest, they might just do it elsewhere.  Yet, Amoron’i Onilahy does offer important lessons on how to help conservation succeed in other challenging parts of the world. Investing in non-exploitative economies is essential, even if building businesses doesn’t sound like “conservation.” Even more important is that local communities lead the work themselves and don’t forever rely on external organizations like WWF for help, said Ranaivo Rasolofoson, a researcher at the University of Toronto and an expert on forest conservation in Madagascar.  Large environmental NGOs don’t have a great track record of yielding control to people who live in the environments they’re trying to protect. WWF, for its part, has made some grave mistakes that put conservation at conflict with human rights. But here, the communities are choosing how they want to conserve the forest, and WWF is just there to provide support.  “They are responsible for what they do and what they decide,” Ratsifandrihamanana said of the local communities. “We really want them to be in charge, to take charge.” From Mahaleotse, we drove to another village, stopping along the way at a shrine to Saint Theresa. It consisted of a short statue of Theresa inside a rock cutout on the side of a cliff, just above a small spring-fed pool. Catholicism is the largest Christian denomination in Madagascar, and ardent observers, I was told, will sometimes make pilgrimages to this spot. It was here that I saw the sifaka, which was a spiritual experience in its own way.  I first encountered these animals in a BBC nature show more than two decades ago. They were mesmerizing, flying from tree to tree with incredible speed, like ping-pong balls bouncing between paddles. I still hear David Attenborough’s voice in my head when I think of them.  Back then, I imagined that wildlife in a place like this lived — as nature shows made it seem — within vast stretches of wilderness, far from human life. Yet, that’s not how these animals really exist, and it never has been.  I came face-to-face with this critically endangered lemur at a roadside shrine between two villages. Humans and animals share the landscape here, so it’s only logical that, for conservation to work, it must consider the needs of both.

Extinction
Agriculture
Business

Republicans Try to Weaken 50-Year-Old Law Protecting Whales, Seals and Polar Bears

One of the U.S.’s longest standing pieces of environmental legislation, credited with helping save rare whales from extinction, is the subject of an effort for cutbacks from Republican lawmakers who now feel they have the political will to do so

BOOTHBAY HARBOR, Maine (AP) — Republican lawmakers are targeting one of the U.S.'s longest standing pieces of environmental legislation, credited with helping save rare whales from extinction.Conservative leaders feel they now have the political will to remove key pieces of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, enacted in 1972 to protect whales, seals, polar bears and other sea animals. The law also places restrictions on commercial fishermen, shippers and other marine industries.A GOP-led bill in the works has support from fishermen in Maine who say the law makes lobster fishing more difficult, lobbyists for big-money species such as tuna in Hawaii and crab in Alaska, and marine manufacturers who see the law as antiquated.Conservation groups adamantly oppose the changes and say weakening the law will erase years of hard-won gains for jeopardized species such as the vanishing North Atlantic right whale, of which there are less than 400, and is vulnerable to entanglement in fishing gear.Here's what to know about the protection act and the proposed changes. Why does the 1970s law still matter “The Marine Mammal Protection Act is important because it’s one of our bedrock laws that help us to base conservation measures on the best available science,” said Kathleen Collins, senior marine campaign manager with International Fund for Animal Welfare. “Species on the brink of extinction have been brought back.”It was enacted the year before the Endangered Species Act, at a time when the movement to save whales from extinction was growing. Scientist Roger Payne had discovered that whales could sing in the late 1960s, and their voices soon appeared on record albums and throughout popular culture.The law protects all marine mammals, and prohibits capturing or killing them in U.S. waters or by U.S. citizens on the high seas. It allowed for preventative measures to stop commercial fishing ships and other businesses from accidentally harming animals such as whales and seals. The animals can be harmed by entanglement in fishing gear, collisions with ships and other hazards at sea.The law also prevents the hunting of marine mammals, including polar bears, with exceptions for Indigenous groups. Some of those animals can be legally hunted in other countries. Changes to oil and gas operations — and whale safety Republican Rep. Nick Begich of Alaska, a state with a large fishing industry, submitted a bill draft this summer that would roll back aspects of the law. The bill says the act has “unduly and unnecessarily constrained government, tribes and the regulated community” since its inception.The proposal states that it would make changes such as lowering population goals for marine mammals from “maximum productivity” to the level needed to “support continued survival.” It would also ease rules on what constitutes harm to marine mammals.For example, the law currently prevents harassment of sea mammals such as whales, and defines harassment as activities that have “the potential to injure a marine mammal.” The proposed changes would limit the definition to only activities that actually injure the animals. That change could have major implications for industries such as oil and gas exploration where rare whales live.That poses an existential threat to the Rice's whale, which numbers only in the dozens and lives in the Gulf of Mexico, conservationists said. And the proposal takes specific aim at the North Atlantic right whale protections with a clause that would delay rules designed to protect that declining whale population until 2035.Begich and his staff did not return calls for comment on the bill, and his staff declined to provide an update about where it stands in Congress. Begich has said he wants "a bill that protects marine mammals and also works for the people who live and work alongside them, especially in Alaska.” Fishing groups want restrictions loosened A coalition of fishing groups from both coasts has come out in support of the proposed changes. Some of the same groups lauded a previous effort by the Trump administration to reduce regulatory burdens on commercial fishing.The groups said in a July letter to House members that they feel Begich's changes reflect “a positive and necessary step" for American fisheries' success.Restrictions imposed on lobster fishermen of Maine are designed to protect the right whale, but they often provide little protection for the animals while limiting one of America's signature fisheries, Virginia Olsen, political director of the Maine Lobstering Union, said. The restrictions stipulate where lobstermen can fish and what kinds of gear they can use. The whales are vulnerable to lethal entanglement in heavy fishing rope.Gathering more accurate data about right whales while revising the original law would help protect the animals, Olsen said.“We do not want to see marine mammals harmed; we need a healthy, vibrant ocean and a plentiful marine habitat to continue Maine’s heritage fishery,” Olsen said.Some members of other maritime industries have also called on Congress to update the law. The National Marine Manufacturers Association said in a statement that the rules have not kept pace with advancements in the marine industry, making innovation in the business difficult. Environmentalists fight back Numerous environmental groups have vowed to fight to save the protection act. They characterized the proposed changes as part of the Trump administration's assault on environmental protections.The act was instrumental in protecting the humpback whale, one of the species most beloved by whale watchers, said Gib Brogan, senior campaign director with Oceana. Along with other sea mammals, humpbacks would be in jeopardy without it, he said.“The Marine Mammal Protection Act is flexible. It works. It's effective. We don't need to overhaul this law at this point,” Brogan said. What does this mean for seafood imports The original law makes it illegal to import marine mammal products without a permit, and allows the U.S. to impose import prohibitions on seafood products from foreign fisheries that don’t meet U.S. standards.The import embargoes are a major sticking point because they punish American businesses, said Gavin Gibbons, chief strategy officer of the National Fisheries Institute, a Virginia-based seafood industry trade group. It’s critical to source seafood globally to be able to meet American demand for seafood, he said.The National Fisheries Institute and a coalition of industry groups sued the federal government Thursday over what they described as unlawful implementation of the protection act. Gibbons said the groups don't oppose the act, but want to see it responsibly implemented.“Our fisheries are well regulated and appropriately fished to their maximum sustainable yield,” Gibbons said. “The men and women who work our waters are iconic and responsible. They can’t be expected to just fish more here to make up a deficit while jeopardizing the sustainability they’ve worked so hard to maintain.”Some environmental groups said the Republican lawmakers’ proposed changes could weaken American seafood competitiveness by allowing imports from poorly regulated foreign fisheries.This story was supported by funding from the Walton Family Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

Extinction
Animals
Conservation

Suggested Viewing

Wildlife in Our Backyard

It is often said that we must tolerate wildlife, but what happens if we learn to thrive with them instead? What can this mean for the wildlife? What can it mean for the people of Florida? And what can it mean for the endangered Florida panther? Wildlife in Our Backyard shows us some of the problems facing the wildlife as well as the hope of a brighter future as we learn to share the landscape with them.

Animals
Land Use
Extinction

Anxious

Noah is so worried about climate change he can't sleep at night. His wife Hali is confident it's all going to be just fine. Should they even have kids?! Should they sell their CA house and move to a colder Alaska? How does one plan for the end of the world...?

Culture
Crisis
Extinction

Ser Manguezal

Ser Manguezal, created by Eliseu Cavalcante, was inspired by Josué de Castro's book "Of Men and Crabs" from 1967. De Castro was a Brazilian geographer, physician, writer and activist against world hunger. In his book, Castro envisions men as crabs, learning to walk in the mangroves. This relationship between them seems to unify and blend all together making the human being part of that specific biome. This film is part of an ongoing project that examines those who depend on the mangrove ecosystem to survive, and the delicate relationship between humans and this particular ecosystem. It seeks to recognize the hard-working crab hunters of the mangroves and make their work more visible, and to bring awareness about the importance of mangroves to the environment. Worldwide, 3,400 square kilometers (1,300 square miles) of mangrove forests were lost between 2000 and 2016, or about 2% of the global mangrove area (NASA). About 62% of the losses were due to direct human causes such as agriculture and aquaculture. Mangrove degradation is greater than the average for tropical and subtropical forest loss.

Water
Conservation
Plants

The Windshield Effect

As a child, Julian and his mother, Sylvie, could spend hours out in nature admiring the soundtrack of the plentiful insects. One day, a grown Julian is out on a run in those same woods and when he takes off his ear buds, realizes he cannot hear anything at all. A trip to the audiologist assures him there is nothing wrong with his ears, but he is still left shaken. Back in the forest, he comes to the realization that the insects themselves have gone silent in a mass die off. Also known as the "Windshield Phenomenon" that documents how bugs no longer splatter on windshields as we drive as insect populations are down more than 45% over the last 4 decades.

Forests
Extinction
Nature

Giants of Big Sur: California Condor Stories Part 1: Return to the Wild

Go behind the scenes with Wilderness Documentarian Ross Thomas as he learns the amazing and inspiring stories of the critically endangered California condor. Ross meets the Ventana Wildlife Society experts who have been working since 1997 to restore these majestic giants to the wild Big Sur coast. Ross’s epic journey begins with a once-in-a-lifetime visit with Senior Wildlife Biologist and California Condor Recovery Program Manager, Joe Burnett, to a wild condor’s nest deep in the Big Sur wilderness. Ross witnesses the intimate interaction between a condor parent and its new chick in the crown of a giant redwood tree. Ross then travels with Joe to see the Condor’s Big Sur sanctuary, which was destroyed by the Dolan Fire in 2020.

Conservation
Extinction
Pollution

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