Amphibians in Brazil’s Pantanal, one of the world’s largest and most biodiverse wetlands, could lose huge swaths of their habitat as the region dries out from climate change, a new study has found. Researchers studied the Upper Paraguay River Basin (UPRB), which stretches into parts of Paraguay and Bolivia and fully contains the Pantanal.
New Future
In two separate but related incidents, Kenyan authorities have arrested four suspects for illegally possessing and attempting to smuggle some 5,300 ants valued at about 1.2 million Kenyan shillings ($9,250), destined for the exotic pet trade. The ants, which included the giant harvester ants (Messor cephalotes), were being trafficked to Asia and Europe.
Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. In a quiet corner of northern New York state, the white pines of the Adirondack Forest Preserve rise like sentinels, untouched for more than 125 years. Their silence speaks volumes.
Dionicio Colque, 42, has fond memories of growing up on the edge of Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. It’s the world’s largest salt flat, spanning about 10,500 square kilometers (4,050 square miles). His family farmed potatoes on the outskirts of Colcha K, a community of around 1,000 residents in Nor Lípez province.
If you thought only humans had unique musical tastes that differed drastically across geographies and generations, think again. Researchers have long suspected that migration and population dynamics shape the musical repertoire of songbirds. Now, they have empirical evidence to back up this hypothesis.
Over the past few decades, the harvesting of the Cortez oyster in western Mexico’s Marismas Nacionales — or the Marshes Biosphere Reserve — in Nayarit state has shifted from suffering from a fishing crisis to seeing a successful effort in its reintroduction and breeding in the ecosystem.
Marxist scholar Michael Löwy, responding to Samuel Farber’s “In Defense of Progress” from the new issue of Jacobin, defends philosopher Walter Benjamin and argues that “progress, ” as defined under capitalism, has come to threaten humanity’s very survival.
The end of the bloody, US-backed civil wars across Central America led to a brutal neoliberal economic restructuring near the turn of the century — which then helped produce the 21st-century authoritarianism of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele.