Editor’s note: Changing the face of a globalist, imperialist organization whose mandate is the equitable exploitation of “the common heritage of mankind” will not stop deep sea mining. We will need to stop the first attempt at enclosure and destruction of the sea floor, by any means necessary. Delegitimize, discredit and scuttle this operation. If you would like to help contact Deep Sea Defenders.
Brazilian oceanographer Leticia Carvalho will be the next secretary-general of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the U.N.-mandated organization that oversees deep-sea mining activities in international waters. She won the election with 79 votes, while her predecessor, 64-year-old Michael Lodge, who served as the ISA’s secretary-general for two terms, received only 34 votes. Lodge has previously been accused of siding with mining companies, which went against the duty of the ISA secretariat to remain neutral and may have influenced the direction of the prospective deep-sea mining industry.
Carvalho previously told Mongabay that she would work to make the ISA more transparent and rebuild trust within the organization.
Brazilian oceanographer Leticia Carvalho has been named the next secretary-general of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) after winning an election that could change the course of the deep-sea mining industry.
Carvalho, 50, who currently works as an international civil servant for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), was declared the winner of the race on Aug. 2, the last day of the twenty-ninth assembly meeting of the ISA. She won the election with 79 votes, while her predecessor, 64-year-old Michael Lodge, who served as the ISA’s secretary-general for two terms, received only 34 votes.
Carvalho will begin her term at the ISA, the U.N.-mandated organization that oversees deep-sea mining activities in international waters, in January 2025. She will be the first woman, the first oceanographer, and the first representative from Latin America to serve in this position.
Commercial-scale deep-sea mining has not yet begun anywhere in the world, but mining companies have been pushing for an imminent start of this activity — and Lodge has been accused of doing more than he should to help this process along.
During his time as secretary-general between 2016 and 2024, Lodge pushed for the finalization of a mining code, a set of rules that would allow deep-sea mining exploitation to begin. However, this code was not ultimately finished over his tenure. Lodge has also been accused of advocating for mining companies, which goes against the ISA secretariat’s duty of remaining neutral and keeping the ISA’s processes and procedures unnecessarily opaque. More recently, Lodge was also embroiled in allegations that he misused agency funds and that one of his supporters tried to bribe Carvalho to drop out of the election in exchange for another high-level position within the ISA. Lodge, however, has refuted all of these claims.
In a previous interview with Mongabay, Carvalho said that if elected, she would work to make the ISA more transparent and rebuild trust within the organization.
“For me, the mission of the ISA and the leadership of the ISA is to be a trustee — an honest broker that brings decision-makers together, offering space that belongs to the whole of humankind,” Carvalho told Mongabay in July. “It should offer transparency of its own procedures, on the decision-making processes, on the management of the budgets — all of this.”
One mining company, Canadian-based The Metals Company (TMC), has repeatedly expressed its intention to apply for an exploitation license later this year, even before the mining code is finished. However, Carvalho has said that she believes granting such a license before regulations are in place would be a “source of litigation.”
Advocates of deep-sea mining say seabed minerals are needed to fulfill metal shortages and provide materials for renewable energy technologies like electric car batteries. Yet critics say deep-sea minerals are unnecessary for such technologies and that deep-sea mining could irreparably damage the seabed and overall marine environment.
A Deep-sea Exploration by NOAA. The nodules seen here and strewn across the seafloor were deposited here millions of years ago and grow about 2 millimeters every million years. Image by NOAA.
A recent study in Nature found that polymetallic nodules, metal-rich rocks found on the seafloor, produced a kind of “dark oxygen,” which experts say gives valid reason for slowing down the race to commercially extract nodules from the deep ocean.
During the recent ISA meetings, Austria, Guatemala, Honduras, Malta and Tuvalu joined a group of nations calling for a moratorium or precautionary pause on deep-sea mining. There are now 32 countries calling for such measures.
Matt Gianni, co-founder of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, a group of NGOs that campaign against deep-sea mining, said he was surprised by the number of country delegates that came to this year’s ISA meeting or sent in their proxy votes for the election, and also that “such a large majority” voted for Carvalho.
“This is a historic moment for the ISA and we congratulate Leticia Carvalho and the government of Brazil [for] her election,” Gianni said in a statement. “The ISA has an opportunity to champion a new way forward for sound ocean governance that prioritizes the precautionary principle and secures the health of the deep sea and its benefits for future generations.”
Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a senior staff writer for Mongabay’s Ocean Desk. Follow her on Twitter @ECAlberts.
Editor’s note: Humans have lived in balance with nature for millions of years. It was only in the last ten thousand years, with the advent of civilization, that humans have become unbalanced. If we continue on this course, we will reach our destination in less than a hundred years.
Discoveries in the fields of human origins, paleoanthropology, cognitive science, and behavioral biology have accelerated in the past few decades. We occasionally bump into news reports that new findings have revolutionary implications for how humanity lives today—but the information for the most part is still packed obscurely in the worlds of science and academia.
Some experts have tried to make the work more accessible, but Deborah Barsky’s new book, Human Prehistory: Exploring the Past to Understand the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2022), is one of the most authoritative yet. The breadth and synthesis of the work are impressive, and Barsky’s highly original analysis on the subject—from the beginnings of culture to how humanity began to be alienated from the natural world—keeps the reader engaged throughout.
Long before Jane Goodall began telling the world we would do well to study our evolutionary origins and genetic cousins, it was a well-established philosophical creed that things go better for humanity the more we try to know ourselves.
Barsky, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution and associate professor at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain, who came to this field through her decades of studying ancient stone tool technologies, writes early in her book that lessons learned from the remote past could guide our species toward a brighter future, but “that so much of the information that is amassed by prehistoric archeologists remains inaccessible to many people” and “appears far removed from our daily lives.” I reached out to Barsky in the early stage of her book launch to learn more.
Jan Ritch-Frel: What would you suggest a person consider as they hold a 450,000-year-old handaxe for the first time?
Deborah Barsky: I think everyone feels a deep-seated reverence when touching or holding such an ancient tool. Handaxes in particular carry so many powerful implications, including on the symbolic level. You have to imagine that these tear-shaped tools—the ultimate symbol of the Acheulian—appeared in Africa some 1.75 million years ago and that our ancestors continued creating and re-creating this same shape from that point onwards for more than a million and a half years!
These tools are the first ones recognized as having been made in accordance with a planned mental image. And they have an aesthetic quality, in that they present both bilateral and bifacial symmetry. Some handaxes were made in precious or even visually pleasing rock matrices and were shaped with great care and dexterity according to techniques developed in the longest-enduring cultural norm known to humankind.
And yet, in spite of so many years of studying handaxes, we still understand little about what they were used for, how they were used, and, perhaps most importantly, whether or not they carry with them some kind of symbolic significance that escapes us. There is no doubt that the human capacity to communicate through symbolism has been hugely transformative for our species.
Today we live in a world totally dependent on shared symbolic thought processes, where such constructs as national identity, monetary value, religion, and tradition, for example, have become essential to our survival. Complex educational systems have been created to initiate our children into mastering these constructed realities, integrating them as fully as possible into this system to favor their survival within the masses of our globalized world. In the handaxe we can see the first manifestations of this adaptive choice: to invest in developing symbolic thought. That choice has led us into the digital revolution that contemporary society is now undergoing. Yet, where all of this will lead us remains uncertain.
JRF: Your book shows that it is more helpful to us if we consider the human story and evolution as less of a straight line and more so as one that branches in different ways across time and geography. How can we explain the past to ourselves in a clear and useful way to understand the present?
DB: One of the first things I tell my students is that in the field of human prehistory, one must grow accustomed to information that is in a constant state of flux, as it changes in pace with new discoveries that are being made on nearly a daily basis.
It is also important to recognize that the pieces composing the puzzle of the human story are fragmentary, so that information is constantly changing as we fill in the gaps and ameliorate our capacity to interpret it. Although we favor scientific interpretations in all cases, we cannot escape the fact that our ideas are shaped by our own historical context—a situation that has impeded correct explanations of the archeological record in the past.
One example of this is our knowledge of the human family that has grown exponentially in the last quarter of a century thanks to new discoveries being made throughout the world. Our own genus, Homo, for example, now includes at least five new species, discovered only in this interim.
Meanwhile, genetic studies are taking major steps in advancing the ways we study ancient humans, helping to establish reliable reconstructions of the (now very bushy) family tree, and concretizing the fact that over millions of years multiple hominin species shared the same territories. This situation continued up until the later Paleolithic, when our own species interacted and even reproduced together with other hominins, as in the case of our encounters with the Neandertals in Eurasia, for example.
While there is much conjecture about this situation, we actually know little about the nature of these encounters: whether they were peaceful or violent; whether different hominins transmitted their technological know-how, shared territorial resources together, or decimated one another, perhaps engendering the first warlike behaviors.
One thing is sure: Homo sapiens remains the last representative of this long line of hominin ancestors and now demonstrates unprecedented planetary domination. Is this a Darwinian success story? Or is it a one-way ticket to the sixth extinction event—the first to be caused by humans—as we move into the Anthropocene Epoch?
In my book, I try to communicate this knowledge to readers so that they can better understand how past events have shaped not only our physical beings but also our inner worlds and the symbolic worlds we share with each other. It is only if we can understand when and how these important events took place—actually identify the tendencies and put them into perspective for what they truly are—that we will finally be the masters of our own destiny. Then we will be able to make choices on the levels that really count—not only for ourselves but also for all life on the planet. Our technologies have undoubtedly alienated us from these realities, and it may be our destiny to continue to pursue life on digital and globalized levels. We can’t undo the present, but we can most certainly use this accumulated knowledge and technological capacity to create far more sustainable and “humane” lifeways.
JRF: How did you come to believe that stone toolmaking was the culprit for how we became alienated from the world we live in?
DB: My PhD research at Perpignan University in France was on the lithic assemblages from the Caune de l’Arago cave site in southern France, a site with numerous Acheulian habitation floors that have been dated to between 690,000 and 90,000 years ago. During the course of my doctoral research, I was given the exceptional opportunity to work on some older African and Eurasian sites. I began to actively collaborate in international and multidisciplinary teamwork (in the field and in the laboratory) and to study some of the oldest stone toolkits known to humankind in different areas of the world. This experience was an important turning point for me that subsequently shaped my career as I oriented my research more and more toward understanding these “first technologies.”
More recently, as a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA) in Tarragona, Spain, I continue to investigate the emergence of ancient human culture, in particular through the study of a number of major archeological sites attributed to the so-called “Oldowan” technocomplex (after the eponymous Olduvai Gorge Bed I sites in Tanzania). My teaching experience at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and Rovira i Virgili University (Tarragona) helped me to articulate my findings through discussions and to further my research with students and colleagues.
Such ancient tool kits, some of which date to more than 2 million years ago, were made by the hands of hominins who were very different from ourselves, in a world that was very distinct from our own. They provide a window of opportunity through which to observe some of the cognitive processes employed by the early humans who made and used them. As I expanded my research, I discovered the surprising complexity of ancient stone toolmaking, eventually concluding that it was at the root of a major behavioral bifurcation that would utterly alter the evolutionary pathways taken by humankind.
Early hominins recognizing the advantages provided by toolmaking made the unconscious choice to invest more heavily in it, even as they gained time for more inventiveness. Oldowan tool kits are poorly standardized and contain large pounding implements, alongside small sharp-edged flakes that were certainly useful, among other things, for obtaining viscera and meat resources from animals that were scavenged as hominins competed with other large carnivores present in the paleolandscapes in which they lived. As hominins began to expand their technological know-how, successful resourcing of such protein-rich food was ideal for feeding the developing and energy-expensive brain.
Meanwhile, increased leisure time fueled human inventiveness, and stone tool production—and its associated behaviors—grew ever more complex, eventually requiring relatively heavy investments into teaching these technologies to enable them to pass onwards into each successive generation. This, in turn, established the foundations for the highly beneficial process of cumulative learning that was later coupled with symbolic thought processes such as language that would ultimately favor our capacity for exponential development. This also had huge implications, for example, in terms of the first inklings of what we call “tradition”—ways to make and do things—that are indeed the very building blocks of culture. In addition, neuroscientific experiments undertaken to study the brain synapses involved during toolmaking processes show that at least some basic forms of language were likely needed in order to communicate the technologies required to manufacture the more complex tools of the Acheulian (for example, handaxes).
Moreover, researchers have demonstrated that the areas of the brain activated during toolmaking are the same as those employed during abstract thought processes, including language and volumetric planning. I think that it is clear from this that the Oldowan can be seen as the start of a process that would eventually lead to the massive technosocial database that humanity now embraces and that continues to expand ever further in each successive generation, in a spiral of exponential technological and social creativity.
JRF: Did something indicate to you at the outset of your career that archeology and the study of human origins have a vital message for humanity now? You describe a conceptual process in yourbook whereby through studying our past, humanity can learn to “build up more viable and durable structural entities and behaviors in harmony with the environment and innocuous to other life forms.”
DB: I think most people who pursue a career in archeology do so because they feel passionate about exploring the human story in a tangible, scientific way. The first step, described in the introductory chapters of my book, is choosing from an ever-widening array of disciplines that contribute to the field today. From the onset, I was fascinated by the emergence and subsequent transformation of early technologies into culture. The first 3 million years of the human archeological record are almost exclusively represented by stone tools. These stone artifacts are complemented by other kinds of tools—especially in the later periods of the Paleolithic when bone, antler, and ivory artifacts were common—alongside art and relatively clear habitational structures.
It is one thing to analyze a given set of stone tools made by long-extinct hominin cousins and quite another to ask what their transposed significance to contemporary society might be.
As I began to explore these questions more profoundly, numerous concrete applications did finally come to the fore, thus underpinning how data obtained from the prehistoric register is applicable when considering issues such as racism, climate change, and social inequality that plague the modern globalized world.
In my opinion, the invention and subsequent development of technology was the inflection point from which humanity was to diverge towards an alternative pathway from all other life forms on Earth. We now hold the responsibility to wield this power in ways that will be beneficial and sustainable to all life.
Editor’s note: The author asks if that is a good thing. The short answer is no. For the same reason, agriculture is bad for the land, aquaculture is bad for the ocean. It is because humans have overcaught wild fish and depleted their numbers that people have more and more gone to aquaculture. There are now just too many human mouths to feed and not enough fish in the oceans.
Both aquaculture and fisheries have environmental and climate impacts — and they overlap more than you’d think
A new report from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, has found that more fish were farmed worldwide in 2022 than harvested from the wild, an apparent first.
Last week, the FAO released its annual report on the state of aquaculture — which refers to the farming of both seafood and aquatic plants — and fisheries around the world. The organization found that global production from both aquaculture and fisheries reached a new high — 223.3 million metric tons of animals and plants — in 2022. Of that, 185.4 million metric tons were aquatic animals, and 37.8 million metric tons were algae. Aquaculture was responsible for 51 percent of aquatic animal production in 2022, or 94.4 metric tons.
The milestone was in many ways an expected one, given the world’s insatiable appetite for seafood. Since 1961, consumption of seafood has grown at twice the annual rate of the global population, according to the FAO. Because production levels from fisheries are not expected to change significantly in the future, meeting the growing global demand for seafood almost certainly necessitates an increase in aquaculture.
Though fishery production levels fluctuate from year to year, “it’s not like there’s new fisheries out there waiting to be discovered,” said Dave Martin, program director for Sustainable Fisheries Partnerships, an international organization that works to reduce the environmental impact of seafood supply chains. “So any growth in consumption of seafood is going to come from aquaculture.”
A worker removes a stack of oyster baskets during harvest. Bloomberg Creative / Getty Images via Grist
But the rise of aquaculture underscores the need to transform seafood systems to minimize their impact on the planet. Both aquaculture and fisheries — sometimes referred to as capture fisheries, as they involve the capture of wild seafood — come with significant environmental and climate considerations. What’s more, the two systems often depend on each other, making it difficult to isolate their climate impacts.
“There’s a lot of overlap between fisheries and aquaculture that the average consumer may not see,” said Dave Love, a research professor at the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University.
Studies have shown that the best diet for the planet is one free of animal protein. Still, seafood generally has much lower greenhouse gas emissions than other forms of protein from land-based animals. And given many people’s unwillingness or inability to go vegan, the FAO recommends transforming, adapting, and expanding sustainable seafood production to feed the world’s growing population and improve food security.
But “there’s a lot of ways to do aquaculture well, and there’s a lot of ways to do it poorly,” said Martin. Aquaculture can result in nitrogen and phosphorus being released into the natural environment, damaging aquatic ecosystems. Farmed fish can also spread disease to wild populations, or escape from their confines and breed with other species, resulting in genetic pollution that can disrupt the fitness of a wild population. Martin points to the diesel fuel used to power equipment on certain fish farms as a major source of aquaculture’s environmental impact. According to an analysis from the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown, swapping out fossil fuel-based generators on fish farms for renewable-powered hybrids would prevent 500 million to 780 million metric tons of carbon emissions by 2050.
Other areas for improvement will vary depending on the specific species being farmed. In 2012, a U.N. study found that mangrove forests — a major carbon sink — have suffered greatly due to the development of shrimp and fish farming. Today, industry stakeholders have been exploring how new approaches and techniques from shrimp farmers can help restore mangroves.
Meanwhile, wild fishing operations present their own environmental problems. For example, poorly managed fisheries can harvest fish more quickly than wild populations can breed, a phenomenon known as overfishing. Certain destructive wild fishing techniques also kill a lot of non-targeted species, known as bycatch, threatening marine biodiversity.
But the line between aquaculture and fish harvested from the wild isn’t as clear as it may seem. For example, pink salmon that are raised in hatcheries and then released into the wild to feed, mature, and ultimately be caught again are often marketed as “wild caught.” Lobsters, caught wild in Maine, are often fed bait by fisherman to help them put on weight. “It’s a wild fishery,” said Love — but the lobster fishermen’s practice of fattening up their catch shows how human intervention is present even in wild-caught operations.
On the flipside, in a majority of aquaculture systems, farmers provide their fish with feed. That feed sometimes includes fish meal, says Love, a powder that comes from two sources: seafood processing waste (think: fish guts and tails) and wild-caught fish.
All of this can result in a confusing landscape for climate- or environmentally-conscientious consumers who eat fish. But Love recommends a few ways in which consumers can navigate choice when shopping for seafood. Buying fresh fish locally helps shorten supply chains, which can lower the carbon impact of eating aquatic animals. “In our work, we’ve found that the big impact from transport is shipping fresh seafood internationally by air,” he said. Most farmed salmon, for example, sold in the U.S. is flown in.
From both a climate and a nutritional standpoint, smaller fish and sea vegetables are also both good options. “Mussels, clams, oysters, seaweed — they’re all loaded with macronutrients and minerals in different ways” compared to fin fish, said Love.
A new study concludes that chimpanzees displaying a range of ailments seek out plants with known medicinal properties to treat those ailments.
The finding is important because it’s a rare instance where a species is shown to consume a plant as medicine rather than as part of its general diet.
The study identified 13 plant species that the chimpanzees in Uganda’s Budongo Forest relied on, which can help inform conservation efforts for the great apes.
The finding could also hold potential for the development of new drugs for human use.
Wild chimpanzees actively seek out plants with medicinal properties to treat themselves for specific ailments,a new study has found.
While most animals consume foods with medicinal properties as part of their routine diet, few species have been shown to engage in self-medication in a way that suggests they have basic awareness of the healing properties of the plants they’re feeding on.
Until now, the challenge has been to distinguish between normal consumption of food that has medicinal value, on the one hand, and ingesting such foods for the purpose of treating a condition, on the other.
“Self-medication has been studied for years, but it has been historically difficult to push the field forward, as the burden of proof is very high when attempting to prove that a resource is used as a medicine,” Elodie Freymann, a scientist at the University of Oxford in the U.K. and lead author of the study, told Mongabay in an email.
To deal with the challenge, the study adopted a multidisciplinary approach, combining behavioral data, health monitoring, and pharmacological testing of a variety of plant materials chimpanzees feed on. It pooled together 13 researchers comprising primatologists, ethnopharmacologists, parasitologists, ecologists and botanists.
A chimpanzee in Uganda’s Budongo Forest, which is home to roughly 600-700 chimpanzees, including three groups habituated to humans. Image by Maciej via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
According to the study, pharmacological data interpreted on its own is important for establishing the presence of medicinal resources in chimpanzee diets. However, this study also relied on observational information and health monitoring to determine whether chimps were deliberately self-medicating.
Over a period of eight months, the scientists monitored the feeding behaviors of two communities of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) familiar with humans around them in Budongo Forest in Uganda.
They collected samples from plant parts associated with chimpanzee behaviors that previous research had flagged up as possibly linked to self-medication: consuming bark, dead wood and bitter pith.
The researchers collected samples from 13 plant species known to be consumed at least occasionally by the Budongo chimpanzees, testing the samples for their ability to suppress bacterial growth and inflammation (testing for antiparasitical properties was beyond the scope of the study).
The researchers also tracked the health of individual chimpanzees, analyzing fecal matter and urine and monitoring individuals with wounds, parasite infestations or other known ailments.
They observed that individuals with injuries or other ailments such as parasite infestations, respiratory symptoms, abnormal urinalysis or diarrhea ingested plants or parts of plants that laboratory testing found to have healing properties.
A Budongo chimpanzee feeding on the fruit of Ficus exasperata, one of the plants analyzed as part of the study. Image courtesy of Elodie Freymann (CC-BY 4.0).
“We describe cases where chimpanzees with possible bacterial infections or wounds selected bioactive plants,” Freymann said. “We also describe cases where wounded individuals selected rarely consumed plants with demonstrated anti-inflammatory properties — suggesting they could be ingesting plants to aid in wound-healing, a novel finding.”
In addition, unlike previous studies that focused on single plant resources, this one identified 13 species with medicinal potential.
“This greatly expands what we know about chimpanzee medicinal repertoires. This study also highlights the unique medicinal repertoires of two chimpanzee communities with no previous systematic research on their self-medication behaviors,” Freymann said.
According to Freymann, identifying plants that could have medicinal value for chimpanzees is important for the conservation of the species.
“If we know which plants chimpanzees need to stay healthy in the wild, we can better protect these resources to ensure chimpanzees have access to their wild medicine cabinets,” she said. “If these plants disappear, it could leave our primate cousins susceptible to pathogens they could previously defend against.”
This is also important, Freymann said, because “we could learn from the chimpanzees which plants may have medicinal value which could lead to the discovery of novel human drugs.”
The study adds to a growing body of research on primates using medicinal plants to treat sickness. In another recent report, a wild orangutan in Sumatra was observed treating a facial wound with a plant known for its healing properties. Erin Wessling, co-lead of the working group on chimpanzee cultures at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, said part of the reason for the recent attention to these types of medicative behaviors is because they’re relatively rare and can only be identified in species that have been closely monitored over long periods of time.
“It takes years to be able to watch apes in the wild to this level of detail, and even more years after that to be able to identify with any certainty what are core components of an ape’s diet versus the much more rare medicinal use cases,” she said.
Wessling, who was not part of the study, told Mongabay that while it’s been known that chimpanzees have these rare cases of medicinal use, scientists are finally getting to a level where they can point to self-medication as a widespread and diverse behavior used across medicinal contexts.
She said the Budongo study “points out really nicely that conservation is more than just a numbers game — that there’s real value in thinking about how organisms interact with the ecosystems they reside in, and that even the most uncommon components of those ecosystems can be critical for an organisms’ survival.
“Further, results such as these offer a nice insight into the intrinsic value of chimpanzees, demonstrating what we’ve suspected for a long time — that chimpanzees have the capability to recognize and treat an ailment with plants that have natural (and measurable) medicinal properties,” Wessling said.
“It shows we have a great deal left to learn about the natural world, not only our ape cousins, and provides even more reason to make sure there is a future for them.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a young documentary filmmaker began quietly joining a growing number of Facebook community groups run by traders of rare Indonesian birds.
Over the following two years, a reporting team from several news organizations uncovered a wide network of actors offering species for sale for as little as 250,000 rupiah ($15). These individuals included a serving naval officer.
One shop owner selling birds in Morowali, the epicenter of Indonesia’s nickel mining and smelting boom, said they began trading in birds in 2018, after ships began docking in the local port bringing oil and cement.
KENDARI, Indonesia — In 2021, as the world grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic, Irwan watched online as a flurry of new social media groups dedicated to parrots sprang up across Indonesia.
When Irwan, whose name Mongabay has changed to protect his identity, first began participating in these online marketplaces, he saw a rainbow of parrot species offered for as little as $15 a bird, but with little further information about the species.
Two years later, after careful research, Irwan helped uncover a diffuse network of operators quietly transporting rare birds from eastern Indonesia for sale. He set out to establish whether the birds were bred in captivity or plucked from protected forests around the industrial boomtown of Kendari, his home in Southeast Sulawesi province.
“This was never detailed,” Irwan told Mongabay Indonesia. “That’s what interested me about it.”
Illegal trade in wildlife around the world is worth up to $23 billion each year, with one out of four global bird and mammal species falling victim to the business, according to BirdLife International.
As in other criminal enterprises, researchers emphasize that the true extent of the illegal trade dwarfs the number of seizures by authorities.
Much of the trade is conducted on social media. In 2016, Facebook partnered with WWF and other environmental groups to form the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online, aiming to reduce wildlife trade on the platform by 80% within four years.
In 2019, Facebook banned all live animal trade on its platform, allowing only verified sellers with legitimate business reasons. By 2020, the partnership introduced an alert system that notified users about the illegality of trading wildlife products whenever relevant search terms were used.
Flight plan
Mongabay Indonesia worked with other news outlets including Garda Animalia, which reports exclusively on the wildlife trade in Indonesia, to track and document the illegal bird trade in Sulawesi, an important transit hub for wildlife in the archipelago.
Reporters saw protected species advertised openly on social media, including the yellow-crested cockatoo (Cacatua sulphurea), black-capped lory (Lorius lory) and Moluccan eclectus (Eclectus roratus).
One account was traced to an individual whom reporters dubbed by their initials, WL: a university student in Puwatu, a subdistrict of Kendari. Reporters found WL in a two-story house fenced in by concrete and iron walls, with a plastic sheet obscuring the view of a terrace. Parrots native to the island of New Guinea perched in an enclosure outside.
WL said he’d obtained the parrots from a contact known by the Facebook pseudonym “M Parrot.” He claimed the man held a breeding permit from the provincial conservation agency in Southeast Sulawesi, the BKSDA.
WL and M Parrot were members of the same Facebook groups, where they interacted. WL said he understood that M Parrot kept around 20 pairs of birds, and that they could be identified by rings on the birds’ talons used to show certification.
“If it turns out that it’s against the law … well, don’t blame me,” WL told our reporting team. “I’m just a buyer.”
The student said the trade in birds from New Guinea likely came from hunters based in the island, whose western half is part of Indonesia.
Meanwhile, parrots in Kendari are often sourced from Obi Island in North Maluku province, and sent to port in Morowali by weekly ship. From there, the cages are switched to an overland transfer to Kendari.
Bungku harbor serves the industrial heartland of Morowali, which is undergoing rapid development as part of Indonesia’s nickel mining boom. The port was undergoing renovations and there wasn’t a ship to be seen when reporters visited this year.
A port worker said he usually saw crates of birds endemic to Maluku and Papua unloaded every week as large ships docked in Morowali. From here, the bird trade fans out into this part of Sulawesi, the world’s 11th largest island.
We met a man on the roadside of the main highway north of Morowali selling various types of parrots, without any official documents.
“This is 650,000 rupiah [$40],” he said, offering us a cage. “It’s a Maluku parrot.”
The man said he obtained the birds from crew members of ships anchored in Morowali, and that he would occasionally purchase birds from a trader in South Bungku, a subdistrict of Morowali.
The main road was packed with thousands of motorcycles of workers from the vast Morowali nickel smelting complex, a key node in the global electric vehicle industry. Inside one small shop by the road we found two black-capped lories, the birds’ feet chained to a small perch. Three yellow-streaked lories (Chalcopsitta scintillata) idled in their cages above a thin base of sand.
The black-capped lories were each priced at 1.8 million rupiah ($110), while the asking price for a yellow-streaked lory was 800,000 rupiah ($50). A contact number was displayed in front of the shop.
The owner said he’d been trading in birds since 2018, after ships bringing oil and cement started docking more frequently in Morowali to feed the mining boom in the region.
Later, when asked to identify the source of the birds via a WhatsApp message, the shop owner didn’t respond.
Bird on a wire
In October 2023, our reporting team visited the Southeast Sulawesi office of Indonesia’s conservation agency, the BKSDA, to obtain information on breeding permits for birds in the province.
The agency held only one such permit on file. It had been authorized in March 2023 in the name of Asriaddin.
Erni Timang, forest ecosystem lead for the Southeast Sulawesi BKSDA, said that documentation held by the conservation agency showed the permit holder didn’t have a license to deal in the birds.
“He can only breed, he can’t trade yet,” Erni told Mongabay. “You need to have a distribution permit first.”
Ahmar, the BKSDA’s conservation lead for Kendari, said his office had on several occasions attempted to clarify the trading status of the permit holder. However, Ahmar said that on every occasion, Asriaddin was unavailable at his registered address because he was on duty at the Kendari naval base. A public relations officer at the base confirmed that Asriaddin was a serving naval officer.
Mongabay visited the registered address in late March. At the home we saw cages containing various colorful parrot species, exotic imports as well as eastern Indonesian endemics, including black-capped lories, yellow-crested cockatoos, and a black lory (Chalcopsitta atra).
“In the past there were many, but now there are fewer,” a resident at the address told reporters.
On May 25, reporters reached Asriaddin by phone and asked about his status as a trader of birds.
“That’s not correct, it’s just speculation,” Asriaddin said.
When asked whether he had failed to report any breeding activities to the government conservation agency, Asriaddin claimed to not properly understand the reporting requirements.
Singky Soewadji from the Indonesian Wildlife Lovers Alliance (Apecsi), a civil society organization, criticized the awarding of breeding permits by the BKSDA conservation agency, which is part of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry.
“The director-general of the BKSDA should carry out its control function,” Singky said, “not wait until there is a violation of the law.”
The critically endangered Devils Hole pupfish population has reached a 25-year high of 191 fish, offering hope for the species that lives in the smallest known habitat of any vertebrate.
Above water and SCUBA surveys conducted by scientists twice a year carefully monitor the pupfish population in Death Valley, Nevada, which has fluctuated dangerously in the past, dropping as low as 35 individuals in 2013.
A landmark 1976 Supreme Court decision, informed by environmental science, protected the pupfish by limiting groundwater pumping that threatened its habitat, setting a precedent for science-based conservation policy.
Despite recent success, the pupfish remains threatened by climate change impacts on the delicate desert ecosystem, as well as growing human demand for water resources in the region.
In a glimmer of hope for one of the world’s rarest fish, scientists have counted 191 Devils Hole pupfish this spring in their tiny desert habitat. This number marks the highest spring count for the critically endangered species in more than two decades.
The Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis) is found only in the upper reaches of a single deep limestone cave in the Mojave Desert in the western U.S. state of Nevada. The entire species lives on a shallow rock shelf measuring 3.3 by 4.8 meters (11 by 16 feet), making this the smallest known range of any vertebrate species on the planet.
Twice a year, biologists from the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Nevada Department of Wildlife peer from scaffolding above the pond and then enter the water with scuba gear to count pupfish in Devils Hole. They methodically comb the entire habitat, from the sunny shallows to depths of more than 30 m (100 ft), looking for the iridescent blue desert dwellers.
“It was really encouraging to see such a large number of young fish during these spring dives,” said Brandon Senger, supervising fisheries biologist for the Nevada Department of Wildlife, who has been conducting scuba counts at Devils Hole since 2014. “Conditions within Devils Hole looked healthy, so we have hopes of high recruitment over the coming months that will lead to a large population in the fall.”
Nearly the entire natural range of the species is visible in this photo. The equipment is used to monitor the water level. Photo courtesy of Pacific Southwest Region USFWS (CC BY 2.0).
The Devils Hole pupfish is a marvel of adaptation. It has evolved to withstand the harsh conditions of its desert habitat, including water temperatures that can reach 34° Celsius (93° Fahrenheit) and extremely low oxygen levels. The pupfish has a unique metabolic rate that allows it to survive on minimal food resources, primarily feeding on the algae that grow on the shallow rock shelf. Its small size and rapid life cycle of just 12 to 14 months enable the species to maintain a population in the confines of its tiny habitat.
Despite these remarkable adaptations, the pupfish has faced numerous threats over the years. The history of conservation efforts for the Devils Hole pupfish is a case study in the interplay between environmental science and policy. In 1952, then-president Harry Truman added Devils Hole to Death Valley National Monument. In the late 1960s, the pupfish faced its first major threat when groundwater pumping by local farms began to lower the water level in Devils Hole, exposing the critical shallow shelf.
In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had a right to protect the water level in Devils Hole, limiting groundwater pumping in the region. The ruling was based on the scientific understanding that the pupfish depended on a stable water level to survive. This case set a precedent for using environmental science to guide policy and legal decisions.
Despite this victory, the pupfish population continued to fluctuate dangerously. In 2013, scientists counted just 35 pupfish, leading to fears that the species could wink out of existence. Careful conservation efforts, including supplemental feedings with special food pellets, have helped bolster their numbers.
A natural disaster may have also contributed to the recent population rebound. Last summer, the remnants of Hurricane Hilary inundated Death Valley National Park, damaging roads and infrastructure. But the silt and clay swept into Devil’s Hole by the floodwaters benefited the pupfish by providing nutrients for algae growth.
“It’s exciting to see an increasing trend, especially in this highly variable population,” said Michael Schwemm, senior fish biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
However, the future of the Devils Hole pupfish remains uncertain. Climate change is disrupting the delicate desert ecosystem with increasing temperatures and erratic weather events. In recent years, Death Valley has experienced record-breaking heat waves and intense flash flooding.
“As the climate changes, as world temperatures get hotter, Death Valley will get hotter,” Nichole Andler, chief of interpretation for Death Valley National Park, said in an interview. She pointed out that seven of the park’s hottest summers have occurred in the last decade.
Increasing urbanization, recreational use and industrial activities like mining also place greater demands on the aquifer that feeds Devils Hole. Even minor changes in water level can expose critical habitat, imperiling the fish.
Further complicating conservation efforts, the Devil’s Hole pupfish population is highly inbred due to its isolation and small population size, which has led to reduced genetic diversity. Low genetic variation can make the species more vulnerable to disease, environmental changes and developmental abnormalities, posing significant challenges for the pupfish’s long-term survival and recovery.
To safeguard the species, captive-breeding programs are underway to establish a backup population in case of a catastrophic event in the wild. But ultimately, the fate of the Devils Hole pupfish is tied to the health of its unique desert habitat.
“The pupfish is an indicator of the health of the larger ecosystem,” Kevin Wilson, an ecologist with the National Park Service, said in an interview. “By protecting this tiny fish, we’re protecting the aquifer and the entire web of life that depends on it.”
Banner image A group of critically endangered Devils Hole pupfish(Cyprinodon diabolis) photographed in the Devil’s Hole, Nevada. Photo courtesy of Olin Feuerbacher/ USFWS (CC BY 2.0)
Liz Kimbrough is a staff writer for Mongabay and holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Tulane University, where she studied the microbiomes of trees.
Citation:
Langhammer, P. F., Bull, J. W., Bicknell, J. E., Oakley, J. L., Brown, M. H., Bruford, M. W., … & Brooks, T. M. (2024). The positive impact of conservation action. Science, 384(6694), 453-458. doi:10.1126/science.adj6598
