Every year, Amazonian rivers spill over their banks and flood the forests around them for months. These wetlands cover around 30% of the Brazilian Amazon and are often home to riverine families, who live in adapted homes built on stilts. They fish and plant crops with the natural ebb and flow of the rivers. But a new study has found that more than 6% of the total area of Amazon floodplain forests and other wetland areas has been cleared over the last 40 years. Nearly a third of that destruction occurred between 2015 and 2024. “When we think about 6%, we may get the impression that it’s small, but the converted area is basically the size of Belgium,” lead author Guilherme Lobo, a researcher at the State University of Campinas in Brazil, told Mongabay by phone. Researchers compared wetland clearing across 13 types of land designations and found huge differences. Public land not yet assigned by the government to any specific use had the largest share of human-converted wetland: a median of nearly 14% had been deforested. According to Lobo, people burn these lands to show they’re in use, hoping to claim a land title later. According to a 2026 study by Imazon, a Brazil-based research institute, federal and state land laws create incentives for such land-grabbing practices, locally called grilagem. Undesignated public land is routinely granted to the people who clear it, with deforestation used as proof of the productive use of the land to justify the land title…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Fishers have caught at least 440 invasive lionfish off the coast of Porto Seguro in northeastern Brazil in recent weeks. The local government paid fishers to harvest the fish in an attempt to curb the rapid spread of a species that can decimate native fish stocks, Mariana Martins writes for Mongabay Brasil. Lionfish (Pterois volitans), which are native to the Indo-Pacific and Red Sea, have no natural predators along Brazil’s coastline and are preying upon the young of local species. The fish have already damaged coral reef ecosystems in the North Atlantic, including the Caribbean. Now they have also reportedly reached the Abrolhos reefs, the largest and richest reef system in the South Atlantic. “By preying on juveniles of commercially exploited species, there is a depletion of fish populations,” Carlos Hackradt, biologist and coordinator of the Marine Ecology and Conservation Laboratory at the Federal University of Southern Bahia, told Martins. “This brings serious consequences for the ecosystem, affects the fishing economy and harms tourism on degraded reefs.” Abrolhos is home to mushroom-shaped coral structures, locally known as chapeirões, and supports at least 90 coral and 266 fish species, including the goliath grouper (Epinephelus itajara) and blue parrotfish (Scarus coeruleus), which are nationally listed as critically endangered and endangered, respectively. Abrolhos is also the main breeding and nursing ground for humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) in the Western South Atlantic. While the presence of lionfish there has been confirmed, their extent has not yet been measured. “It has only just happened,” Hackradt…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Seven of Brazil’s nine Amazonian states are set to be governed by politicians aligned with far-right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, Karla Mendes and Lucas Berti reported for Mongabay Brasil. On Oct. 25, Brazil will have an electoral face-off between the top two candidates for several races that were not able to secure more than 50% of the vote in the first round of the elections. The second round election includes the decision for president, where incumbent leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is up against Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro who is barred from public office after being convicted of planning a coup d’état in 2022. The second vote will also define many of the state governments in the Brazilian Amazon. In the first round on Oct. 4, five candidates won a clear majority and have already been elected. Mato Grosso, an agricultural state in the southwest of the Brazilian Amazon, elected agribusinessman Otaviano Pivetta, aligned with the right-wing party Republicanos. Pará elected Daniel Santos, known as Dr. Daniel, with the Podemos party. He has promised to designate Vinícius Borba to lead the environment department. Borba is a lawyer who gained notoriety for representing farmers illegally raising cattle on Indigenous land. In Roraima, Brazil’s northernmost state that borders Venezuela and Guyana, nearly 70% of voters elected Arthur Henrique, affiliated with Flávio Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party. He previously served as the popular mayor of the state’s capital city, Boa Vista. He supports legalizing mining in Indigenous territories.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

The Iranian spider-tailed horned viper, a rare snake endemic to western Iran, hunts by holding its body completely still while twitching its tail. Its body camouflages among the rocks of its semi-arid Zagros Mountains habitat, but its bulbous tail with accompanying leg-like scales looks remarkably like a large chunky spider. The snake, Pseudocerastes urarachnoides, uses its spider tail to lure unsuspecting mammals and birds to their last meal. Scans of a specimen collected in 1968 and kept in the Field Museum of Natural History in Illinois, United States, now reveal what the lure is made of. “The tip actually consists of enlarged, elongated and modified scales, which are unique among all living reptiles,” lead author Georgios Georgalis, an associate professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals in Kraków, Poland, told Mongabay by email. The scanned P. urarachnoides specimen. Image © Georgalis et al. (2026). Vipers have attracted the interest of researchers for centuries, Georgalis said, but knowledge of the group’s morphology is still limited. Scientists described P. urarachnoides for science in 2006, but only this year did they publish a high-resolution 3D scan to see the mechanism inside the snake’s tail as part of a scientific study. The tail filaments, the authors said, loosely resemble those found on some ornithodiran archosaurs and other forms from the Triassic and Jurassic periods. This doesn’t mean that they are related, it’s more likely a case of convergent evolution: similar environmental demands pushing the evolutionary development of similar characteristics.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Oil slicks from vessels and offshore oil operations repeatedly drifted into marine protected areas around the world between 2022 and 2025, a new analysis has found. The report raises concerns for important habitats for a variety of marine life, including whales, dolphins, and sea turtles. Researchers from SkyTruth, a U.S.-based nonprofit that tracks oil pollution using satellite imagery, detected dozens of slicks covering hundreds of square kilometers in protected waters globally. “We’re seeing persistent, repeated, chronic oil pollution in many parts of the ocean from shipping and offshore oil and gas operations,” SkyTruth CEO John Amos told Mongabay by phone. “Wind and current blow them around out in the ocean, so even if the pollution event that occurs is outside a marine protected area, that pollution could drift into the protected area.” Map by Emilie Languedoc/Mongabay. The worst oil pollution in an MPA was recorded along the Atlantic coast of the Republic of Congo’s Conkouati-Douli National Park. SkyTruth recorded 27 oil slicks covering 880 square kilometers (340 square miles) of the park’s waters. The slicks likely came from three offshore oil platforms located outside the marine park, according to the report. The area is home to sharks, rays, dolphins, whales, and manatees. Leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea) and olive ridley (Lepidochelys olivacea) sea turtles also nest there. In the Mediterranean Sea, roughly 417 km2 (161 mi2) of oil slicks covered sections of two important marine protected areas. Spain’s Mediterranean Cetacean Migration Corridor registered 45 slicks, all from vessels, the report notes. The…This article was originally published on Mongabay